The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

The Baron.

I just watched The Adventures of Baron Munchausen the other night.

Oh, does it still hold up? I think so.

I think so.

And that's something where you can see his focus on aesthetics and not seeing forested trees.

does kind of hinder things and we see that reaches points like all sort of battles like obviously Brazil definitely everything that happened with Baron Munchausen how disastrously that production went

well I mean and even and I feel like it kind of culminates in in the documentary Lost in La Mancha which

you

Yeah, and it's one where you can see, like, that kind of thing with other Gilliam films.

Again, I'm not sure it's obvious, but also, like, how other conflicts with other people or with his films.

Like, I remember reading stories about Baron Munchausen, how when things were going wrong on that, and to the point where the studio considered removing Gilliam as director.

And after a particularly bad meeting, going out into the car park, nearly taking a rock to one of the cars in the car park, before he ended up taking a breath and calming down, until he realised that he nearly put a rock through his own car window, because of how angry he was.

85, he did Brazil.

And then The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen in 88.

Okay.

That was Graham Chapman's last movie.

The myth was out there.

The fictional Baron Munchausen completely eclipsed the real flesh and blood man, and took on a remarkable, unstoppable life of his own.

The cultural immortality of this character is wild.

He became a foundational pillar for entire genres.

The character also transitioned seamlessly into new visual mediums.

The legendary cinema pioneer George Méliès, a man who essentially invented special effects, made a silent film about the baron in the early 20th century.

And of course, there is the beautiful, chaotic 1988 film, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, directed by Terry Gilliam and starring John Neville.

The character has been honored in the physical world too.

He produced, like, Open Range.

He did The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Driving Miss Daisy.

He produced The Name of the Rose.

This guy, so you have two good producers who, "Yes, we've done The Killing Fields.

We, [laughs] we produced The Adventures of Baron Munchausen for Terry Gilliam.

Like, we have pretty big names."

That, that, that energy makes more sense.

But yeah, no, it's, um-

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen? Well, I guess the king of the moon isn't really a ghost.

But I do think it's kind of funny that, like, whenever it gets separated from the body, somehow it seems to be considered to have a mind of its own as well.

Well, it's a body.

He directed Stage Fright before this movie.

He worked on The Adventures of Baron Munchausen with Terry Gilliam.

You can see a lot of that in certain points of this movie.

The church, I think, was his big movie, right? The church and then the sect.