The difficulties of writing the offensive things Terry Gilliam told me

How should journalists write up conversations with people whose views they vehemently reject, asks Alexandra Pollard

The director said he was ‘tired, as a white male, of being blamed for everything wrong with the world’ (Getty)

It was around five minutes into my interview with Terry Gilliam that I realised I had a challenge on my hands. He had just voluntarily brought up the #MeToo movement and compared it to a witch-hunt, and was about to facetiously claim to be a black lesbian in transition. Things would only get worse from there.

There have been plenty of times when I’ve interviewed someone frustratingly reticent, who’s unwilling to give any opinions, and brings every conversation back to the safe confines of their current project. “I’m talking about this film, and that’s it,” Mads Mikkelsen once told me.

But what do you do when it’s the opposite? When not only do they express an active desire NOT to talk about their film – even though, in this instance, the former Monty Python member had been trying to get The Man Who Killed Don Quixote made for 20 years – but voluntarily wade into deeply offensive territory?