Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

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Radio 4. The My cast away this week is the animator and director Terry Gilliam.

It's more than 30 years since he first made a foot-shaped impression on our cultural landscape.

Then the enormous animated foot, which squashed everything beneath it, became one of the

defining images of Monty Python's Flying Circus. In the years since his films have included

Brazil, the Adventures of Baron Munchausen and 12 monkeys. They've given free reign

to his extraordinary imagination and brought him stacks of awards and nominations.

But there have been difficulties too, arguments over funding and distribution of course.

And after his leading man, Heath Ledger died in the middle of filming one of his movies,

he was tempted to throw in the towel.

As a teenager, a circus sparked his imagination.

He wound up helping to run an old-fashioned freak show. It triggered his interest

in the odd and unusual and in people who fell outside mainstream society. Now, aged 70, he says, it gets harder as you get older, as you get more

normal or more tired. How close to normal are you right now, Terry Gilliam?

Oh God, I always thought I was normal and then I

discovered I wasn't and now I'm just weary I think is the word it's creeping in

weariness. Is that being ground down by the studios, by the whole machine that makes movies, is that what it is?

Or is it just being 70?

No, I think it's nature.

Yeah, nature has come in and taking its toll as it always does and the business

...