FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
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| FILM Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas "After a while," wrote Hunter S. Thompson during a lull in his drug- addled state while reporting on the Mint 400 motorcycle race in Las Vegas, "you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing." That was 1971, "The Foul Year of Our Lord." Written as a novel inhabited by Hunter's alter ego, sportswriter Raoul Duke, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is an autobiographical romp mixed with crushingly accurate socio-political commentary. Duke (Johnny Depp) and his corpulent lawyer, Oscar Zeta Acosta (Benicio Del Toro), pile into "The Red Shark" and go screaming across the desert on a savage journey into the heart of the American dream. To do it, they are packing enough psychotropic drugs to alter their reality and change the course of journalistic history. At this point in time, Thompson was in full throttle mode. He transformed accepted journalism into "gonzo" journalism, the neo-realist brand of writing that not only puts the first person back into reporting, but allows the reporter to filter objective reality through whatever drug-induced dementia he needs in order to assimilate into the environment - and the early '70s demanded pharmaceutical assistance. Twenty-five years and almost 20 failed attempts later, Fear and Loathing is now a movie, but it took the vision of director Terry Gilliam - whose work (Time Bandits, Brazil, 12 Monkeys) can easily be called gonzo cinema - to make it happen. So parallel are Thompson and Gilliam that the story goes the journalist was kept off the movie set except for the one day he appeared in a flashback scene. Too much energy, possibly even too similar an energy. "Hunter is a distraction that I wanted to keep away from me," Gilliam says. "When Hunter is around, you have to deal with him. After all, it's his movie and it's his book." But what kind of man can translate Thompson from words to screen? Sitting in Los Angeles, Gilliam, at 57 and with long, graying hair pulled back into a half Samurai ponytail, is a far cry from his childhood in Minneapolis. Back then, he adored all things medieval and animated. The two elements came to surface when he became the virtually silent American component of the BBC's Monty Python's Flying Circus in 1970 and later in the Python movies. What began as bizarre tidbits of animated comedy (lopped off heads somersaulting across the screen, giant stomping feet) were the beginnings of what later evolved into live action psychosis. From there it influenced all his films, whether they were period pieces (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen) or set in modern day (The Fisher King). The strange juxtapositions, which are front and center in earlier films, are again loud and clear in Fear and Loathing. It's a purge film, an excess film, "A cinematic enema," he explains. But that which is Gilliam is best seen on film or experienced in the speed of his repartee: You've achieved a new brand of seething ugliness in this movie. You mean, I've hit new depths. Yes, and it's wonderful. I was accused of this in Jabberwocky. People felt like they actually had to take a bath afterwards, which I thought was a great success. With other films it was more like Breugal-ville. Yes, but this is not a historical piece. This is contemporary with people that we know. But how did you conceive of it? I just photograph reality, don't I? I'm a documentary filmmaker (laughter of knowledge). Are you a linear thinker? Obviously not. I try to be, I work very hard to be organized. Fear and Loathing is not random. I planned it out and then I look at the finished product and think, "Why doesn't everybody else see the linearity of this whole thing?" I use these very wide-angle lenses and shoot in a way most people don't. I'm never specific. I don't think the process through. I merely absorb the stuff. I react and my brain takes things that shouldn't go together and somehow does a good job of sticking them together. I think that's the basis of any form of surrealism. The human brain has this need to make sense of nonsense. It's a joy to play with those things. They make me laugh and I'll do anything to entertain myself. |
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