The Terry Gilliam movie that blew Edgar Wright’s mind: “It hit me like a truck”

Posted On July 4, 2025July 4, 2025

It’s about to be another big year for British director Edgar Wright as his reimagining of the 1980s blockbuster The Running Man starring Glen Powell hits screens and he works on an adaptation of the 2020 hit novel The Chain with a script by Kingsman writer Jane Goldman.

There are also some very exciting rumours that Wright could team up with his old buddy Simon Pegg for a fourth comedy film, although it wouldn’t be another instalment of the Cornetto trilogy, because then it wouldn’t be a trilogy, obviously. After the two met up to discuss “a basic premise” for the movie, Pegg laughed, saying, “When Edgar and I do our next movie, we’ll probably disappoint everyone. There’s something always in the works with Edgar and I. It’s not a matter of if, just when”.

Best friend and constant co-star Nick Frost added to the noise, saying, “I think me, and Simon and Edgar will definitely do something else at some point. Even if we’re 60, it’s like, so how are these 60-year-old friends now? What’s their relationship like? And our audience will be 60 as well. We’ve all grown up together.”

Wright, for his part, has been fairly quiet over the last decade, certainly in terms of directing. Since 2017’s bank heist caper Baby Driver, he has only helmed one movie, the back-and-forth murder mystery Last Night in Soho, although he has directed a music video for Beck in that time and produced the film of a live gig by Sparks.

Even prior to Baby Driver, it had been four years since finishing off the trilogy with Pegg, and another three years since the cartoonish mayhem of Scott Pilgrim vs the World. Prolific is not a term you could use to describe the director.

Still, quality over quantity and all that, and Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz still stand up as two of the greatest comedies in film history, so he’s not doing badly at all. Perhaps Wright’s frugality when it comes to filmmaking could be found in some of his influences, for one, in the Monty Python member Terry Gilliam, writer and director of the 1985 dystopian sci-fi flick Brazil.

It was one of only five films directed by Gilliam over a 17-year period; others included Twelve Monkeys, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Robin Williams’ The Fisher King. But it was Brazil that really made an impression on a young Wright, who noted, “When I first saw Brazil in the late ’80s, it hit me like a truck. It was such a powerful, bold vision, so joyous in its escapism and so crushing in its ultimate nihilism, that it left my teenage mind in tatters. I wasn’t quite sure what I’d watched, but knew it was unlike anything I’d seen before.”

Brazil is one of Robert De Niro’s lesser-known roles, starring alongside Jonathan Pryce in a story that echoes Orwell’s work and plunges viewers into a technology-led nightmare world of ultra-surveillance and late-stage capitalism, all translated through one lonely man’s dreams as he tries to find love.

It was nominated for two Academy Awards and regularly features on lists of the greatest British films of all time, and Wright feels, even 40 years on, it remains unmatched in its creativity. He gushes, “The impressive fact is that, decades later, I still haven’t seen anything quite like Brazil. It escaped from Terry Gilliam’s brain with such velocity that its power even today is undeniable. I showed it at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles in January of this year, and it still confounded me.”

After quite some time away from making films, 84-year-old Gilliam recently announced a new project starring Johnny Depp and Adam Driver called Carnival: At the End of Days. Although filming was due to start in April of this year, Gilliam is struggling to get funding for the comedy movie, which tells the tale of God deciding to bring humanity to an end, only to be talked out of it by Satan. Maybe Wright could help with the campaigning?

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