Terry Gilliam has a very particular style. His films often include a completely unique and frenetic blend of reality, satire, and magical realism. He imbues the everyday with a quirky sense of the fantastic and the grotesque in order to create an aesthetic all his own. Another special element of Gilliam's style is his use of absurdism to deal with the subject of sorrow and trauma, a combination that makes his films both hilarious and heartbreaking.
Gilliam composes shots with a masterful touch. He fills it in such a way that every inch of it has meaning. He takes a comprehensive approach to his role as a director in order to ensure the visual, technical, and dramatic elements of the story unfold in a very specific way. The set, costumes, and lighting are all made compatible with the performances of the actors, creating a holistic, though eccentric, vision. We see Gilliam’s touch in his camera work with the off-kilter and unusual angle at which Jack wakes up in Parry’s basement. This gives the viewer the sense of being dislocated or removed from the ordinary, and invites the viewer into Parry's world. An instance in which Gilliam fills his frames with action and ingenious design is the moment when Jack enters the homeless community for the first time. We see fires and large stone walls filled with shadows. The homeless men are dressed in singular styles, somewhere between drifter and medieval peasant, and this ambiguous aesthetic makes the film all the more fantastical. Gilliam turns a community normally associated with filth into a magical coven in a single shot.
Gilliam's singular visual style adds to the emotional timbre of the film, and the magic makes way for greater depth and psychological complexity. With The Fisher King, Gilliam took screenwriter Richard LaGravenese's first screenplay and transformed it into a crowd favorite. Gilliam said of the film in an interview, "Having been in Monty Python and all the writers being first, you just appreciate what writing is about. I know how the system really doesn’t respect writers: at least Hollywood doesn’t. Directors tend to be egomaniacs who are trying to make their film, so everything in me was rebelling against who I was supposed to be. It was a nice way of working because I felt it was a true collaboration."
