SOURCE: “Chemical Warfare,” in Sight and Sound, Vol. 8, No. 6, June, 1998, pp. 6–8.

In the following interview, Gilliam discusses adapting Hunter S. Thompson's novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for the screen.

In 1967—amid the turbulence generated by the escalation of the war in Vietnam, the build-up to the San Francisco summer of love and the explosive Los Angeles race riots—Terry Gilliam left his home country of America for England. Thirty years later he went back to take “a savage journey to the heart of the American Dream” by bringing Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to the screen. Thompson’s 1971 book began as a magazine article for Rolling Stone, which itself sprang from an assignment to cover the Mint 400 motor race on the outskirts of America’s gambling capital. Armed with enough drugs to kill a weighty bovine. Thompson went to the edge...