Terry Gilliam Says Satire Was “Basically Dead,” But Trump “Destroyed” It

Terry Gilliam has been making the interview rounds for the 40th anniversary of his classic Brazil, and he’s used the opportunity to give an update on his next project — particularly how the second Donald Trump presidency has impacted its development. In speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, Gilliam suggested that Trump’s re-election may make people “less frightened to laugh,” but has also “destroyed satire.”

In a real “two things can be true” moment, Gilliam addressed the many ways Trump has “turned the world upside down.” On the one hand, the filmmaker echoed the tired idea that “woke” identity politics negatively impacted comedy over the last few years. “There have been woke activists with a very narrow, self-righteous point of view. That’s frightened so many people, and so many people have been very timid about telling jokes, making fun of things,” he said, “because if you tell a joke, these people say you’re punching down at somebody. No, you’re finding humor in humanity! So, irony, satire were basically dead.”

But while this new age may have made it okay to joke again, Gilliam suggested that the second Trump administration has gone too far the other way: “I think Trump has destroyed satire. I mean, how can you be satirical about what’s going on in the way he’s doing the world?”

All of this is related to a project Gilliam has been trying to fund for a few years, The Carnival at the End of Days, which is/was set to star Jeff Bridges as God and Johnny Depp as Satan. The concept centers on God deciding to end humanity for “ruining his beautiful garden,” and the Devil, an eternal being whose whole job is to mess with humanity, trying to stop him. Trump’s return apparently threw a wrench in the script, as it “was a satire about the last several years when things were going as they were. He’s turned it upside down. So he’s killed my movie.”

“… The other day I was thinking I was going to put a little preamble on it saying that what you’re about to see takes place during the period historians refer to as the Trump lost years from 2020 to 2024,” Gilliam added.

Still, the end of “wokeism” isn’t the only part of Trump’s return that messed up Carnival. Speaking with Deadline, Gilliam reiterated that the story “is out of date because it was a satire of the world two years ago,” but continued, “and Donald Trump has come along, and he is the carnival.”

So, it seems Gilliam’s apocalyptic comedy is stuck between not being able to satirize a “woke” world that no longer exists, and not being able to satirize the current world where a carnival barker is actually running the show. Poor Gilliam, I guess?

Gilliam, who renounced his American citizenship in 2006 during the second George W. Bush presidency, is equally two-minded about Trump’s politics in general. “Yes, I haven’t been back to [live in] America since whenever it was, and I don’t intend to,” he told Deadline. “I think America is in a very difficult position now because Trump and company are quite extraordinary. On the other hand, he may actually succeed where other people didn’t, in a strange way. It’s like Richard Nixon, you know, brought about the rapprochement with China.”