At the 2002 Telluride Film Festival I was asked if I’d take part in a public conversation with Terry Gilliam. I have known Terry a little bit for a long time and admired his work much more than a little bit for an even longer time; so I agreed delightedly to the festival organizers’ request. This was in the aftermath of the catastrophic collapse of Gilliam’s long-cherished The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, scuppered by bad weather and the ill health of the leading actor, Jean Rochefort. Lost in La Mancha, a remarkable fly-on-the-wall documentary detailing the calamity, was screened at the Telluride Festival. What struck me when I saw the documentary was the extraordinary openness and honesty with which Gilliam had allowed the filmmakers free access, enabling them to chronicle what must have been a dreadful time for him.

I loved movies as a kid. I grew up in a movie town: Bombay, which makes more movies each year than Hollywood. It makes cheap Terry Gilliam movies. Very cheap. You grow up with a kind of fantasy of cinema all around you if you grow up in a town like Bombay. The movies are on every street corner. And people in my family were in the movies, and so on. Also, our generation was a movie generation. When I was growing up in India, there was no television. There simply was not a TV service. So we read books and went to the pictures. And then I came to England and boarding school and went to university, and it was totally impossible to watch television. Movies educated me, and so I feel I’m a creature of the cinema and grateful to the great filmmakers of our time who taught me as much as any novelist did. And so we get to Terry who certainly is, I think, one of the few really spectacular, original talents in the cinema nowadays.

—S.R.

SALMAN RUSHDIE: Years ago I wrote an essay about Brazil. It was called “The Location of Brazil”—and what it suggested was that clearly Brazil was not in South America. The Brazil in the movie is more obviously located in a song, you know, than in a place. It’s in song-Brazil rather than anywhere else. And so this got me thinking. What is the relationship of the imagined world to the real world? How do you get there from here? What is the road to Wonderland? Where is the Yellow Brick Road? How do you get to Brazil—and back again? So I thought I might just start, Terry, by asking you that. When you were making a film...