Telling the truth in Hollywood

In this video director Terry Gilliam is amazingly open and direct with his opinion of Steven Spielberg movies. Hearing what he had to say reminded me of a surprising situation that developed during the shooting of interviews for These Amazing Shadows.

The first interviews for our documentary were in Washington DC. One of the standard questions we asked was, "What is your favorite movie and why?" Though it is a rather predictable softball type question most people took delight in answering.

We then moved on to interviews in Los Angeles and we asked our film industry interview subjects the same question, "What is your favorite movie and why?" To our surprise hardly anyone would answer. Most were afraid by answering they would offend someone they knew or worked with because they didn't pick their film. This seemingly simple question turned out to be a very politically loaded question in the film capitol of the world. At first we were really shocked, but then began to understand.

We did not interview director Terry Gilliam, but given his candor in the above video we wished we had. In a world where we are all hungry for openness and honesty Terry is a rare bird indeed.