John Cleese Is Serious About Laughter

John Cleese has re-edited Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Not all of it, just the stretch after the Bridge of Death that he has never thought was funny. In his cut, the last five or six minutes now run about 70 seconds. "Most audiences think it's better than the original," he says.

He's not promising to show the film for its 50th anniversary when he hits the stage in Montreal twice on October 7 and 8 at L'Olympia—even if that room that opened in 1925 as a cinema— and then spend the back half of the evening taking questions from the floor.

Cleese’s arrival in the city isn’t overdue, but it has been a while since anything Monty Python-related came to town: The last time the troupe played Montreal was June 1973, at Place des Arts, for its first-ever North American tour. It was around then that Cleese told the others he was done with the television series. What came out of that decision, two years later, was Holy Grail—a film made for £280,000 by six men who, by his account, had no idea how to make a film.

He is 86. He turns 87 nineteen days after the second Montreal show. He remains extremely easy to talk to and entirely uninterested in being treated as a monument. Here’s our conversation.

This is a big deal for me. I'm a huge fan.

Oh, shut up.

I'm being honest.

You don't have to be. I'm just a perfectly ordinary guy who makes people laugh. Don't be impressed. I realized the other day that people are much more impressed by me than I am.

Alright, alright. Let’s get going: Python played Place des Arts in 1973, on your first North American tour. Around that time you told the group you weren't doing a fourth series. What do you remember from that time in Montreal?

My memories of Montreal are quite muddled, because I've been there a lot—I hosted Just For Laughs twice and spent a fair bit of time in the city. But I don't have any particular memories of that.

I remember that some of the Pythons were perfectly happy for me to go off. Eric was fine about it, Michael was fine about it. Terry Jones called me a traitor, or something like that. Graham was quite upset. Those two, Jones and Graham, were at that time more dependent on Monty Python than I was. Michael and Eric weren't, so they were okay about my going.

There was a short period of difficulty, but nothing unpleasant. Nobody punched anybody.

And then you immediately went and made a film together.

Because what I said to them wasn't that I don't want to work with you anymore. It was that I don't want to do any more television. It felt like a sausage machine—39 programmes. After a while the newness goes away and you just feel, “I've got another programme to do.”

So we did Holy Grail, which is the one we're talking about now. The funny thing is, we had no idea what we were doing. We were good at sketches, but we didn't know anything about making a movie. And given that, we made a movie that 50 years later everybody still wants to see, and that's ranked by international film critics as the 13th funniest ever made. It's a miracle.

It's better than 14.

What cracked it open?

Michael was the inspiration. We didn't know what we were doing and we were all writing things that didn't fit together at all. Then Michael Palin wrote the sketch about the coconuts. Once we heard him read that out, we thought, that is what the movie's about. So we threw away about 94% of the script and started writing everything in medieval times.

A lot of it is very funny. I don't think the ending is very good.

I'd defend the ending. It somehow makes sense.

You see, the ending is where I think Gilliam took over. And Gilliam, I think, was trying to impress Hollywood with what a wonderful filmmaker he was. In the last 15 minutes there aren't many laughs. I think the laughs pretty much stop after the Bridge of Death, when they all fall off.

They get on a mysterious boat, they go to the castle, the taunters throw a lot of shit at them, and they have to leave—at which point they walk back. Which makes you think, why did they need a boat to get there if they can walk back? Then an army appears over the hill, which has come from nowhere at all, and there are lots of dramatic shots of people holding pikes. And then they charge, and the police car comes in.

I have actually re-edited the film.

You've what?

The last five or six minutes take about 70 seconds. Most audiences think it's better than the original.

I need to see that.

Come along, my dear friend, and we'll have a gossip.

Moving on! Fifty years later, what do you actually cherish from the shoot?

I don't think I cherished any of it, really. It was Scotland in April. It was cold and damp. The budget was so tiny—we had £280,000 to make a movie. We were getting £4,000 each for writing and starring in a major film, and before we went up to Scotland they said, we can only afford to pay you two. You'll get the other two at the end, if there's any money left over. It was like a student film in a funny kind of way.

It was always raining and we had enough money for about four umbrellas. So you'd see one umbrella with about five people under it. And the moment the assistant director said "it's a wrap," there was a rush to get in the cars back to the hotel, because there was only enough hot water for about half the people staying there. It was miserable.

The best thing that came out of it for me is that I was so damp and tired that I used to get in a taxi and go to Perth, five or six miles away. I found a restaurant there with a French chef and a Scottish wife. Great food. And they introduced me to white Burgundy. I'd never drunk it before.