Ms. Gokturk
Trends in Literature
Twelve
Monkeys Fact Sheet
Screenwriters
David and Janet Peoples drew their inspiration for 12 MONKEYS from French
filmmaker Chris Marker's haunting and provocative 1962 short film, La Jetee
(The Runaway).
"The human race was doomed. It was cut off from space.
Its only hope for survival was time...emissaries in time
to summon the past and the future to the aid of the present.
One man was chosen for his obsession with an image from the past,
but he is never sure whether he invents or dreams." ... from La Jetee
(1962)
Undergoing something of a revival,
through its inspiration of Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys, this is a
strangely wonderful film with many memorable images. In fact La Jetee is
almost totally composed of individual frozen pictures, since it is a
photo-montage with sparse narration. Set in the near future, the Earth has
barely survived an all encompassing nuclear holocaust, which has driven the
remnants of humanity underground. The division between victor and vanquished is
rather meaningless under these circumstances, yet there are those who subjugate
others. With minimal resources, scientists entombed beneath the ruins of
Experiments are performed in a quest to perfect their
technique but the results are unencouraging, either resulting in the darkness
of insanity or death for the patient. Compelled to persevere the scientists
discover that they are failing because the subjects are unable to grip the
past; they have nothing on which to anchor themselves. With this information a
new "volunteer" is selected, through a careful analysis of his
dreams. He seems to be fixated upon a single instant from the past; as a small
boy he witnessed the shooting of a man, at an airport, and found himself gazing
into the entrancing face of a young woman. It is this single moment that will,
the technicians hope, provide a connection for their time-traveller.
Weeks pass by, in a haze of pain and disorientation.
Gradually the visitor glimpses more and more of the past, forgotten vistas of
parks, children, birds and everything taken for granted before World War III.
The lady of his imagination is found, she seems to accept his intrusions and
disappearances with equanimity. The method of temporal projection improves,
allowing accurate placement within any desired moment of the past. However, the
past is a dead end as far as saving the present is concerned. Only the future
can save these few subterranean survivors. Of course, if they find no one
inhabiting the future than this can hardly bode well.
Although the technical style of La Jetee provides a
large fraction of its charm, the essential story is projected in surprising
detail for such a short piece. In part this effect is achieved through the
choice of superlative black & white photographs; these are grainy enough
and shot in such a way that the immediate impression is of wartime
photojournalism whilst the events captured suggest far more than they illustrate.
By altering the time for which each shot is held (at times a quick succession
of similar images approximates to film) a tight grasp of pace and a certain
level of suspense is achieved. Interestingly, perhaps the most significant
result of La Jetee is that the basic structures utilized in cinema are
stripped bare and revealed unadorned.
There is, however, one drawback inherent in a film where
the details of the static frame are paramount. The subtitles, few though they
are, both distract at a low-level and obscure sections of the perfectly shaped
whole.-- Cannon, Damien. “La Jetee.” <http://www.film.u-net.com/Movies/Reviews/Jetee.html>
Terry
Gillam, Director, On 12 Monkeys
I think Time Travel allows you to, if
you go into the future, to look at ourselves. I think that it becomes a mirror
in a strange way - you go to another time and you look at yourself in that time.
Either the character goes and we see how foolish he is or how intelligent he
is, or we see how we've messed it up, if we're going to the future. I think
that's what it's about - it's a mirror...
12 Monkeys when it began, was very clear
with David and Jan Peoples who wrote it, that it wasn't going to be a remake of
La Jetee - it was going to be inspired by it. La Jetee is the Acorn, in a
sense, and 12 Monkeys is the Oak, and they are both finite things and one did
become the other.
La Jetee is such an extraordinarily
simple, pure, poetic film and it's extraordinary because it's all stills -
nothing moves except for one brief moment, and yet, it tells this tale in a
post-apocalyptic world, of somebody who's being sent back in time, trying to
uncover the secret for humanity to continue, basically.
David and Jan, after seeing La Jetee just
went off and started inventing more and more things. They're dealing with
madness, they're dealing with crazy people, they're dealing with this
incredibly complex technical world, but it is a technological world that has
been created out of the rubble of our world: a bit of here, a bit of there, a
wire from here, a fan from there, and it was always about nostalgia - I think
both films are about nostalgia. It's about remembering and using the past to
try and save the future.
The thing that hooked me when I first read
it, I was intrigued by it. I mean, when you get a script that is as complex as
that, and it's been handed to you from an executive in a Hollywood studio, you
think this is madness, how do they expect to make this thing?! I mean, I know
how to make it and I like the idea of trying to make it, but are they really
going to go through with this thing?
And, that was part of the joy of making
this film. To put out something as intelligent and complex as that, out into
the mainstream and see who's out there. To me, making films like that is
important because we send out these flares. We're on this ocean at night, all
of us floating around. "Is anybody else out there?" And occasionally,
to me, I use a movie as a flare. You send it up in the air and POOM! you realize
that there's other people out there and they get it - they see the flare as
well.
I also found it very funny. The script I
found the character that Brad Pitt plays, and when I first found those
speeches, they were wonderful. They were kind of saying everything I wanted to
say about the madness of our world, in a very funny way. There was that balance
between humor, drama, suspense and romance - it was all in there plus something
that would make you think. It'd be a conundrum, it'd be a puzzle that would be
interesting to try and work out. It wouldn't be the kind of puzzle where I know
the answer, and you're never going to find out - it's all there for anybody to
find out.
I thought that it'd be a film that would
get people talking. Talking about "was that really that?", "was
that that?" or "what really happened?" And ultimately, at the
time, viruses were really frightening us. Not only was AIDS out there, but the
Ebola virus. Strangely enough, 12 Monkeys started at the same time there were
several other virus films about to start. It was very much in the air. That was
the dangerous part, it was very much in the air and 5 billion people died.
One of the things I like about 12 Monkeys,
is that it is circular - it keeps going around. I don't know if anything
changes in the process.
It's Oriental, basically. It's Eastern in this wheel of life that just keeps
turning and rolling on and our characters will never get off. And they'll roll
around, and they'll be born and live their life and die and they'll fall in
love, in the mean time, and they'll discover things, and then they'll go around
again and again and again.