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different religious sects, the earnest followers, Roman provincial politics,
and especially the idea of “Messiah fever in Judaea at the time . . . that
gave us the theme, so we could create this character who wasn’t Jesus, but
led an almost parallel life, was almost his next door neighbor” (Palin,
quoted in Cleese et al., 279). Thus the story of Brian of Nazareth, someone
who is mistaken for the Messiah, was conceived and the Pythons finally
settled on the title Monty Python’s Life of Brian. With a wealth of experience
in button-pushing and needling authority, the Pythons knew they
were dealing with an obviously sensitive area; so they informally sought
the advice of clergy, who reassured them that the script was not intentionally
blasphemous, though the film might still prove offensive to some
conservative Jews and Christians (Cleese et al., 286–7). After an intensive
two-week writing session in Barbados, the script was completed early in
1978, with Jones set to direct, Gilliam to design the look of the film, and
all the Pythons to play a total of almost forty different roles.
The Pythons secured the financial backing of British-based EMI, the
company that had distributed (though not financed) The Holy Grail in the
United Kingdom, with a budget of £2 million (about $4 million). Production
began in spring 1978 on location in Tunisia, a Moslem country,
where they thought they would attract less problematic attention than in
Roman Catholic Spain or Italy, or in often-volatile Palestine. Another
benefit of the location was that director Franco Zeffirelli had left behind
a number of sets built for the television epic Jesus of Nazareth (1977)
(Hewison, 64). But back in London, the chief executive of EMI abruptly
decided to withdraw the deal on the basis of what he thought were
“blasphemous” – and therefore criminally liable – aspects of the script.
The law in Britain, which has an established church, admits the charge of
blasphemous libel as a criminal offense, where the object of published
derision is not an individual but the Christian religion as a whole; such an
act of libel is considered conducive to the incitement of violence, and thus
is punishable by a prison sentence. The British libel law is so framed that
the intention of the artist or publisher is not relevant, it is enough just to
publish the offending material (Hewison, 61–2). This is in contrast to the
law in the United States, which recognizes no legal category of blasphemy.
The Pythons’ reaction to this corporate intimidation was characteristically
erudite: “The Life of Brian isn’t blasphemous, it’s heretical. It’s not blasphemous
because it takes the Bible story as gospel; you have to believe in
the Bible, you have to understand and know the Bible story to understand
it for the film really. It’s heretical because it’s making fun of the way the
church interprets it” (Jones, quoted in Cleese et al., 281).
184 MONTY PYTHON’S LIFE OF BRIAN (1979)