Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Director Terry Gilliam and actor Johnny Depp
The only hope now, I felt, was the possibility that we'd gone to such excess, with our gig, that nobody in a position to bring the hammer down on us could possibly believe it.
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
"I don't make films just as films, I mean, they're there to hopefully stir things up, to try to get people to think again and then react," says director Terry Gilliam, who's pushed audience buttons with unconventional films like Time Bandits (1981), The Fisher King (1991) and 12 Monkeys (1995).
"You put them through an experience and they come out," he continues, "and something's changed there, or they've been made to think about something, or get angry, I don't care. Just react. Don't just sit there and have all the work done for you by the guys that made the movie."
Terry Gilliam's visceral approach to filmmaking makes him ideal to tackle Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a counter-culture classic and lament for the failed ambitions of the 1960s. Ostensibly, Fear and Loathing was to be a chronicle of journalist Thompson's 1971 visit to Las Vegas (accompanied by his friend attorney Oscar Acosta) to cover the Mint 500, a desert motorcycle race, and later the National Conference of District Attorneys on narcotics and dangerous drugs.
What Thompson eventually published in Rolling Stone is a fictionalized, surreal and wickedly funny examination of two disillusioned thirtysomethings who ingest massive quantities of illegal substances (including such mind-bending exotica as ether and adrenochrome) and fall into a neon-lit rabbit hole in their search for the elusive American dream. Gilliam, once a member of the comedy troupe Monty Python's Flying Circus (he provided the animation for their British television show), is no stranger to the potent mix of high/low humor and social commentary Thompson employs so effectively in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
After getting his filmmaking start co-directing the Python feature films, Gilliam made his idiosyncratic solo directing debut with Jabberwocky (1977). Audience reactions to that film helped cement his personal philosophy about filmmaking.
"People felt like they wanted to take a bath after they'd seen the film," Gilliam says with a satisfied smile. "There's something about trying to break through this celluloid barrier and get people right in the thick of the stuff, and I keep pushing as far as I can."
The biggest compliment that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) has received, in Gilliam's view, is that it makes the viewer feel like they're actually on a drug trip.
You'd better take care of me, Lord...because if you don't you're going to have me on your hands.
Johnny Depp, who embodies Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by portraying his thinly-disguised alter-ego Raoul Duke, describes his first encounter in 1995 with the notoriously manic writer at a bar near his home base, a fortified compound near Aspen, Colorado.
"The door burst open, and there was this huge, hulking figure — because Hunter's a pretty big guy — lumbering across the room," Depp describes, "with a Taser gun in one hand and a three foot cattle prod, fully electrified, in his other hand, waving them around and people were scattering, kind of clamoring to get out of the way. And just I thought, 'Oh my God, there he is.' He came over and plopped down and we had a drink, and I didn't stop laughing from the time he sat down until the time we left. We went to his house, and within forty-five minutes, I ended up in his kitchen and we were building a bomb. We took it outside to his backyard and I shot it with a 12 gauge. It was this eighty foot fireball. That all happened within the course of three hours."
Their quick bonding (based on shared sensibilities and the fact that both are Kentucky natives) didn't lessen Depp's apprehension when he was offered the role in Fear and Loathing, and he didn't accept it until he got Thompson's whole-hearted approval.
"I even told him when he gave me his blessing," he explains, "I said, 'You know, if I do anywhere near a good job, you'll probably hate me for the rest of your life'."
The 34-year-old Johnny Depp, who first read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when he was 17, spent an intense four months with Thompson, "just trying to steal everything I could, basically. He has such a specific pattern, rhythm, thought process, body language, and so I just spent a lot of time with him and watched him like a hawk."
Although the waifish Depp (Dead Man, Ed Wood) couldn't be further from Thompson physically, he captures the writer's larger than life qualities.
"The toughest thing in terms of this character, this guy, you know what it is?" Depp asks. "It's the thought process, because Hunter's incredibly quick and he's sharp as a razor and he has this incredible gift of accuracy. I mean he can pinpoint, he can look around a room, and he can know what your weaknesses are."
Thompson, Depp explains, is not a man to be underestimated: "I think it could be easy for people to sort of just look on the surface and say, 'Well, this guy's completely, obviously, totally, utterly out of his mind. There's no sort of rational thinking, there's nothing left, he's burned himself out.' I've witnessed where people have sort of approached Hunter in that way, and he slices them up so fast that they're left sort of holding their own tongue, watching their tongue throb in their hand. They've been eviscerated."
Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it off to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.
Director Terry Gilliam is a survivor of one of the most lunatic and over-the-top film shoots in recent history. His epic fantasy film, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989), is now notorious for its massive budget over-runs and, as Andrew Yule writes in Losing the Light: Terry Gilliam and the Munchausen Saga, for the psychological toll it took on the filmmaker. Yule captured the details, admits the 58-year-old director, but not the sheer, relentless insanity of the long, drawn-out shoot, with its clashing egos and cultures.
"This one, the pain was short and sharp," Gilliam says of Fear and Loathing, which would echo the grab-bag nature of Thompson's own journey.
"We had our roadmap, we knew where our destination was," he explains, "but very quickly we got lost in the forest. It's scary, but it's also exhilarating at the same time."
A brief shooting schedule and small budget (by Hollywood standards) necessitated that they keep moving, even when weather conspired against them. Fear and Loathing was filmed in Las Vegas — where 1971 is ancient history and parts of exteriors had to be computer generated — and Los Angeles during a chaotic 50 days.
"It was also a chance to see if I could work like that again," Gilliam says, "because as you go on, you get more successful, you get bigger budgets and all that, you have more time to get it wrong, basically. I didn't have enough time to get it really wrong this time."
In a Hollywood twist of fate, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is being distributed by Universal Pictures, the same company that refused to release Terry Gilliam's glorious nightmare, Brazil, in 1985. Gilliam began a very public campaign against the studio, and the public relations imbroglio was dubbed The Battle of Brazil by Jack Mathews, whose book provided a detailed account of the cinematic cause célèbre.
The real-life David versus Goliath match-up eerily mirrored the reel life of Brazil's hapless hero, who found himself at odds with the banal brutality of a totalitarian regime. Unlike his onscreen compatriot, the "pig-headed and difficult to deal with" Gilliam triumphed over the corporate giant who didn't want his dark vision to see the light of day.
I felt like a monster reincarnation of Horatio Alger...a Man on the Move, and just sick enough to be totally confident.
"What those characters in [Fear and Loathing] are, these are people reacting to the world around them and they're angry and they're trying to deal with it," Terry Gilliam explains when asked what his film about 1971 has to say to audiences 27 years later.
"I think we've got to break through the caution of the last few years," he continues, "people have just gone very numb and stopped questioning, stopped making noise, stopped behaving badly in a sense."
"I think Hunter really was kind of a war correspondent when he was in Vegas," adds Johnny Depp. "It was a war against the mundane."
© 1998, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.
POSTSCRIPT: Hunter S. Thompson died at the age of 67 of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on February 20, 2005. Six months later, in a private ceremony near his home in Woody Creek, Colorado, his ashes were shot out of a cannon atop a tower Thompson designed. In attendance was Johnny Depp, who reportedly foot the bill for the memorial service, along with other friends and admirers, including Bill Murray, who portrayed Thompson in the 1980 film Where the Buffalo Roam.