Time Bandits: Behind Taika & Jemaine’s remake of Monty Python cult classic
Kevin's magical adventures still hold up 40 years later. Photo / Supplied
The original Time Bandits movie had its roots in Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the 1970s British series that changed comedy forever. But the 1981 fantasy adventure about young Kevin and a band of light-fingered dwarfs bouncing through history wasn’t really a Python film, even if it was directed by the group’s American animator-turned-film-maker Terry Gilliam and written by Gilliam and Michael Palin. Palin also starred in it, as did John Cleese in a brief role as a hilariously haughty Robin Hood.
Gilliam had come up with the film as a make-work family movie project while trying to get his next feature, Brazil, off the ground. But with its visual imagination, its black humour, its cuteness-free, Python-for-kids sensibilities, its band of merry little men and one major star, Sean Connery, it became a hit. That made it a rarity in the Gilliam film canon – one that made a profit.
The adventures of young suburban Kevin launched into a magical world still holds up today. The character suggests him as a sort of proto-Harry Potter – JK Rowling had reportedly originally wanted Gilliam as her first choice to direct the Potter films.
If you were a pre-teen kid when the film came out or the VHS tape arrived, it’s the sort of movie that might stick with you, especially its curiously bleak ending.
It did for Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, who, with English comedy writer Iain Morris, have turned Time Bandits into a 10-part television series, which, after filming in Wellington in late 2022, finally arrives on Apple TV+ this month.
“When I saw the film as a child, it was just what you wanted to happen – for someone to take you somewhere exciting,” Clement says in the production notes to the show. “It also takes inspiration from the fact that even with all the technology we have today, kids are still interested in history, in Ancient Egyptians, Vikings, and dinosaurs. My son is now around the same age as Kevin, the central character, and he loves history in the same way. The idea that you could go and see those things is really enticing.”
Waititi roped in Clement and Morris after he was offered the production by a conglomeration of US studios that had the remake rights.
If the original Time Bandits had its roots in Python, the new one has its own in the long Waititi-Clement creative partnership, from which sprang their 2014 vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, its American television version, and its local spin-off, Wellington Paranormal.
There are many Paranormal connections behind and in front of the camera. Actors Mike Minogue, Karen O’Leary and Maaka Pohatu have small roles and Jackie van Beek and Tim van Dammen, who directed on that show, are also directing Bandits episodes alongside Waititi and Clement, among others. The writers and story editors include Melanie Bracewell, who was a script mainstay on Paranormal.
Among other familiar Kiwi faces popping up in the series are Rachel House, unrecognisable as demon Fianna, as well as Ginette McDonald, Pax Assadi, and Josh Thomson in a scene that echoes a classic moment from the film.