"There was a perverse side of me, with things like Van Helsing coming out. I didn't want to go down that route"
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Gilliam is confessing to a familiar creative itch: the urge to lean into the lurid, the obvious, the crowd-pleasing monster-movie lane. “Perverse” here isn’t about scandal so much as temptation - the impish part of an artist that wants to yank the steering wheel toward caricature. Van Helsing, pop culture’s professional vampire-killer, isn’t named because he’s profound; he’s named because he’s instantly legible. He’s a shortcut. Drop him into a story and you inherit a ready-made grammar of stakes, capes, and righteous certainty.
Gilliam’s recoil - “I didn’t want to go down that route” - is a mission statement in miniature. His best films thrive on uncertainty, bureaucratic absurdity, and dream logic. Van Helsing represents the opposite: narrative cleanup, moral clarity, the promise that a singular competent man can put the supernatural (or the messy) back in its box. Gilliam’s cinema mistrusts that kind of order. Even when he flirts with fantasy, he prefers the uncanny to the codified.
The line also carries the bruised self-awareness of a director who has spent decades fighting budgets, studios, and audience expectations. “Coming out” makes the temptation sound involuntary, like a reflex produced by genre pressure: when you’re making something with Gothic or mythic elements, the culture keeps handing you familiar tools. Gilliam’s intent is to signal resistance - not just to cliché, but to the comforting lie that stories should resolve into neat heroics.
Gilliam’s recoil - “I didn’t want to go down that route” - is a mission statement in miniature. His best films thrive on uncertainty, bureaucratic absurdity, and dream logic. Van Helsing represents the opposite: narrative cleanup, moral clarity, the promise that a singular competent man can put the supernatural (or the messy) back in its box. Gilliam’s cinema mistrusts that kind of order. Even when he flirts with fantasy, he prefers the uncanny to the codified.
The line also carries the bruised self-awareness of a director who has spent decades fighting budgets, studios, and audience expectations. “Coming out” makes the temptation sound involuntary, like a reflex produced by genre pressure: when you’re making something with Gothic or mythic elements, the culture keeps handing you familiar tools. Gilliam’s intent is to signal resistance - not just to cliché, but to the comforting lie that stories should resolve into neat heroics.
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| Topic | Movie |
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