The director and screenwriters of '12 Monkeys' look back on the film 25 years later

Director Terry Gilliam and screenwriters David and Janet Peoples look back on the Sci-Fi film 12 Monkeys 25 years after the release.

Video Transcript

- Very few of us here are actually mentally ill. I'm not saying you're not mentally ill. All-- for all I know, you're crazy as a loon.

KEVIN POLOWY: Let's talk some "12 Monkeys." The move turns 25. What can you tell us about how you first got involved and went about forming the earliest versions of your script?

DAVID PEOPLES: That script was so dense and confusing. We knew we had a problem script, and we naively thought well, in the first place-- visionary directors, rarely do those directors who have a vision, rarely are they storytellers.

In this script was a mess for a storytelling thing. It was so dense and so weird. And we naively at that time thought maybe there were three or four directors who could do it. But of course, we told Terry we're going to send it to him. And Terry expressed interest.

KEVIN POLOWY: Terry, tell us what your immediate reaction to the material was.

TERRY GILLIAM: I thought this is incredible, because nobody's going to make this film. And it just didn't fit into what Hollywood was known for doing. And I was blown away by it, because I thought this is a challenge. If anything's a challenge, this is one.

And it touched on so many elements that appealed to me. Time travel, the idea of somebody wipes out half of humanity, if not more. I've always been a great fan of the idea of a big cull of the human species.

And so this fell into my lap. And I thought, we are the most dangerous creature on the planet. We're going to [BLEEP] it up.

DAVID PEOPLES: We realized that Terry was the only person who could have made that movie. Nobody else could have got that narrative along with all that visionary things. And Terry had us make some changes in the script. And unusually, in the motion picture business, they were improvements rather than [INAUDIBLE].

The things he put in, that angel rising up--

JANET PEOPLES: In the department store.

DAVID PEOPLES: That was not in the script, and that was just awesome.

KEVIN POLOWY: It's kind of shocking to hear you guys talk about the script being messy, because it turned into such a fantastic, classic film. But how would you say that the script changed or evolved most dramatically throughout the writing process from your earliest drafts to what we see on the screen?

DAVID PEOPLES: The 12 monkeys were the ones who sent out a virus.

JANET PEOPLES: It was very, and it was sort of like--

DAVID PEOPLES: And Janet suddenly pointed out they can't send out the virus, that's absurd. It's somebody else. That's just a big Macguffin. And from there on, we had a story that was working.

But we didn't have Cole come back the final time, somehow. I forget what we did. But it was not good. And the producer said, that's not good. He's got to come back again. Well, producers always say these things, right?

Why was he coming back again? How does he come back? What on Earth is going on? We said we can't have him come back again because the scientists would never let him. And why would he go back? It's not going to work. And he said it's got to. It's got to.

JANET PEOPLES: He said, you can do it.

DAVID PEOPLES: You can do it. That's what he always does. You know, we didn't want to do the film in the first place, and he said you can do it. So now we're here, and we go-- we spent six weeks.

And in the course of it we suddenly realized that Cole was going to catch on that that he was crazy. But now he had to fool these people who were in his mind and con them.

TERRY GILLIAM: The end of the film ended, in my mind, not on the boy in the parking lot getting into the car with his father. When we shot the whole thing, and I looked at it, I was happy to leave the film ending on the plane with David Morse, who lets the virus go, meeting the scientists from the future. That was enough for me.

And the producer said no, you've got to end it with a boy. And I said not going to do it and he kept going on. So I said, all right, here's the deal. We're tight on the budget, and I invented a shot that would involve a crane on top of another crane, an incredibly expensive shot.

And I knew he would say no. And he said go ahead. And so I have this huge crane on top of another crane that comes down and finds the boy's face as he's getting into the car. Perfect.

DAVID PEOPLES: And it's very obvious to everyone what Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt do. I mean, they're awesome. But Madeleine Stowe held that film together with the credibility of her performance. Very quietly, she made the film work, in many ways. Don't you agree with that, Terry?

TERRY GILLIAM: Madeleine Stowe is the movie of "12 Monkeys." She is totally credible. She's believable, because she believes in this real, we believe. And to me, she actually got me through the movie.

I think Madeleine is extraordinary. She's incredibly intelligent, very beautiful. I think she's a witch, actually. And it was-- you know, there's Brad and Bruce. But Madeleine was the calming influence in the whole operation. But there's-- the one thing I really liked was Madeleine Stowe had dark hair.

And when we had to disguise towards the end when they're trying to make their escape, or try to stop David Morse from losing the virus, we put a blonde wig on her. And suddenly we had Kim Novak, the "Vertigo" connection.

And this was not planned out it just was a result of her being a dark haired actress. And suddenly, these layers as we were making it, for me, was kind of discovering what we were doing, and how it related in different ways.

KEVIN POLOWY: Secret MVP. I didn't actually read a recent comment on that film that said everybody thinks Terry Gilliam is a visionary. He's not a visionary. He's a time traveler, I'm convinced. That's one theory that's now out there.

DAVID PEOPLES: I want to quibble with the term time travel, because what we tried to make it-- and I think Terry would probably agree with me, is Jan and I thought it was mind travel.

It was not a sci-fi picture about magic traveling from one time to another. It was about what would happen if you could travel for-- and what would it do to your mind, and what's going on?

And what is the future? And could anybody-- if you had a dream that you were in the future, would you really have been there? How would you know you hadn't been there, and so on.

And that was the dilemma of poor Cole, that didn't he just have a bad dream, and now he's stuck trying to warn everybody about something?

TERRY GILLIAM: What's interesting about mind travel is what you think-- how you perceive the world, and your importance, or unimportance in it. Because there are a lot of people when the film came out, they were convinced JC, James Cole, was Jesus with the 12 monkeys, disciples.

The whole thing. It was a very long piece I read. It's a great religious statement, the whole thing, and him trying to save the world.

KEVIN POLOWY: I want to talk about casting for a bit. You know we talked about Madeleine Stowe. Every film has its stories of who was almost in it, alternate universe casting, so to speak. Terry, what can you say about the other actors you initially had in mind for the project?

TERRY GILLIAM: The producer was throwing all these names, these big names at me. And I said no, no. I'm very good at saying no. And then Bruce Willis's name, turned up and I had actually met Bruce very briefly on one day of shooting "Fisher King," he had dropped by the set.

And I talked to him, and I said Bruce, there's one thing you did in "Die Hard," I'm not sure it was the first the second, where he's got his feet full of glass shards from all of his leaping around, being shot at. And he's in the toilet.

And he gets his wife on the phone. And he's talking to her, and he starts weeping. And I thought God, that's good. A big guy playing this butch, can do anything guy, weeping. And I talk to him about it, and that's stuck in my head.

So when his name came up on the list for this one, I said this could be interesting. This could really be interesting. Having Bruce, we're off and running. And then a young guy came called Brad Pitt was coming to London. He wanted to have dinner with me.

And he had-- somehow the script and got to him. And he was very keen to be in it. I said, this is great, because we had a good dinner, because Brad wanted to be an architect once. And the only problem was he wanted to play the part that Bruce already had. So I had to talk Brad out of the James Cole part and get him to be Goines.

- James, they vegetatize you. Oh! See, that.

TERRY GILLIAM: And of course, he arrives on the set the first day, and that's the first scene Brad appears in the movie. His first day's work is when we first meet Jeffrey Goines, and he exploded. He was just unbelievable.

All the twitches, everything going. Bing, bang, bomb. He was funny. He was fast. His lines were perfect. Absolutely breathtaking. The next day, he was completely exhausted.

KEVIN POLOWY: Well Terry, it's been well documented that you've had some challenging shoots over the years. How team was "12 Monkeys," by comparison.

TERRY GILLIAM: Well, nobody died.

[LAUGHTER]

KEVIN POLOWY: Thankfully.

TERRY GILLIAM: All right. It was-- it was actually-- it was pretty rough. I mean, it was like before we started shooting, Brad and I could walk around Philadelphia and nobody would bother us. And then "Legends Of The Fall" came out just before we started shooting. And when Brad arrived, he was surrounded by so much security it was madness.

The town of Philadelphia, girls were threatening to throw themselves out of windows. Everything changed. It was really hard, terrible pressure on him.

- First we had to focus on more immediate goals.

TERRY GILLIAM: We had to make a decision, too, because he was at the autumn of the year, as we were-- I think, was it November by then? Or late October. And we had to make a decision whether it was going to be snowing or not during the film.

And then I said well, whatever the weather was like the weekend before he start shooting on the Monday, we'll go with that. It snowed. We had snow everywhere. Things like that were difficult.

KEVIN POLOWY: I know there was a recent TV series, but did you guys ever or the idea of doing a film sequel. Did Universal ever try to push that on you?

JANET PEOPLES: We didn't have anything to do with that series, TV series.

KEVIN POLOWY: Yeah.

TERRY GILLIAM: I didn't even know about it until it was announced in the press. And I haven't watched any of it. I just thought, the only thing I heard was they turned Goines into a woman.

That's a major leap forward. I think that was the problem with the film, from the beginning. Goines was a man.

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