And the scripts I'd read, none really quite didthe job. One was aboutthe end of 1989, and I thought, 'Wow, it would be really good to usherin the '90s with a film based on that book.' But I got involved in FISHER KING at that time. Gilliam: Yes,I'd had two occasions before where a script was sent to me. Had you been approached before about working on it? And the writingis so funny, outrageous.Ī film version had been in development for years. When you first read the book that isn't necessarilywhat comes through, but it is what it's all about. I think we shared the same kind of disillusionment thatunderlies the book. I was living in England by then I had left the States in 1967 but I knew exactly what Thompson was talking about. I don't know when or where, but I just know when it came out I read it, and it immediately touched all sorts of nerve ends. Morgan: When was your first encounter with the book?

It succeeds moreso than any other motion picture at showing a drug haze from the inside. With a startlingly fiendish performance by Johnny Depp and a crazed appearance by Benicio del Toro (THE USUAL SUSPECTS), FEAR AND LOATHING recreates the manic whims of the book while translating its most fervid notions of fear, paranoia and hopelessness to the screen pretty much intact. But the Monty Python graduate and director of suchwild cinematic rides as TIME BANDITS, BRAZIL and TWELVE MONKEYSis probably the only one who could have done the book justice, by creatinga film as raucous, disorienting and funny as its source. Terry Gilliam was not the first director to attempt a film version (others who have tried and given up include Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone and Alex Cox, who wasfired by this film's producers shortly before Gilliam was brought on boardin the Spring of 1997). Their serendipitous, drug-crazed antics reveal not only the thin veneer of civilization upheld by the United States during the height of the Vietnam War they also showthe depths of man's ability to debase and even destroy himself in his questfor the ultimate thrill. Gonzo, along with a car trunk-full of marijuana, mescaline, acid, cocaine, uppers, downers, ether, tequila, beer and rum. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a scathingly funny account of a wild and horrifying journey into 'the heart of the American darkness.' Revered sinceits publication in 1971, Thompson's quasi-true novel tells of freelancejournalist Raoul Duke, sent by Rolling Stone magazine to cover amotorcycle race in Las Vegas, Nevada.Īccompanying him on his trip are his attorney, Dr.

If any classic book were considered 'unfilmable,' it would have been Hunter S. THE TERRY GILLIAM FILES // 'FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS' (1998)

Cast of fear and loathing in las vegas