Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life by Eric Idle

Author:Eric Idle [Idle, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781984822581
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2018-07-19T14:27:55+00:00

moored not far away— we should just go and sail it off. He’s not going

to tell anyone that Monty Python has taken his yacht. He’ll look like a

total prat. We’ll thank him for lending it to us and let him know that as

soon as he pays us our money he can have his boat back.”

To my surprise, everyone thought this was a great idea. They all

voted in favor of it, except John.

“No,” he said. “We can’t.”

“Why not?”

“It’s piracy,” he said.

That’s the trouble with being trained as a lawyer. They know these

minor little details about theft and piracy. I’m proud to say Monty Py-

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A L W A Y S L O O K O N T H E B R I G H T S I D E O F L I F E 137

thon voted five out of six to become pirates, but the Python veto rule

held. Everyone had the right to veto a vote. A surprisingly effective and

fair rule, which meant that no one could be forced into doing what they

didn’t want to do. But for that, Denis O’Brien would have sold off our

TV series, for which we would still be paying him 20 percent. I dragged

my heels. When we all came back a few months later, everyone had

changed their minds. No wonder he hated me.

We returned to London with a theme and a title but no plot. I

thought the screenplay still needed work, but John was reluctant to

have any more writing meetings. I’ve always felt that was a pity, as it

seems to me it could have used one more draft. It was really only a

sketch film tenuously held together by a concept. It occurred to me later

that we could easily have made it as The Seven Ages of Man, about the

same central character growing from birth to death but darting back-

wards and forwards in time, so that his birth is in one era, his child-

hood in another and so on, but not in any historical order. I still think

this might have been a good idea, but then hindsight is always perfect.

I may have come up with this thought when I was working with John

Du Prez to adapt it as a Broadway musical. The trouble was it already

was a musical, but as an idea for the stage it was disastrous, as it had no

common characters and no plot. It’s a revue.

The Meaning of Life was shot in 1982 at Elstree Studios and in Scot-

land, where the Zulu warriors went on strike. Despite that, it was a

fairly happy experience. Because we needed ten million dollars, we had

sold the movie to Thom Mount at Universal. We refused to let him see

the screenplay and simply gave him a budget and a short poem I wrote.

There’s everything in this movie

Everything that fits

From the meaning of life in the Universe

To girls with great big tits.

We’ve got movie stars and foreign cars

Explosions and the lot

Filmed as only we know how

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138 E R I C I D L E

On the budget that we’ve got.

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