Why did Terry Gilliam include Jeffrey as a character in Twelve Monkeys?
The movie La jetée has already the story of 12 Monkeys, including also key-settings like the airport and the mall. But there is one big difference in 12 Monkeys to the older movie: Terry Gilliams included Jeffrey Goines, who plays an important role in his movie. Why did he include Jeffrey?
Best Answer
Interestingly Gilliam did not write the screenplay for 12 Monkeys, it is a rare example of a Gilliam movie that he did not start but was brought on-board after the rights had been picked up by the studio and a screenplay had been written by David and Janet Peoples.
That said, La jetée is 28 minutes long. I imagine that the writers could not sustain the story for 90+ minutes with just the main characters of the Narrator and The Woman, so introduced the both the disease as the cause of the 'end of the world' rather than a nuclear war, and Jeffrey as a character for Cole to interact with and start to obsess about stopping him.
I also imagine that when they came to rewrite the story, that a plot of a disease being deliberately released by eco-terrorists plays into the fears of people in the 90's more than people in the 60's when the original was made with a nuclear war story. This alternative back-story also makes it plausible for Cole to attempt to stop the apocalypse from happening as a driver for a lot of the action.
Really 12 Monkeys is not a remake of La jetée, as it says in the credits, it was inspired by the original. In La jetée the narrator is also sent into the future where he brings back technology to help his broken society and is not killed by present-day cops at the Airport.
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What was the point of 12 Monkeys?
The film is about a future (the year 2035) where a deadly virus has killed most living things on the planet, with the last of humanity being buried underground. The main plotline of the film follows a group of scientists that are trying to make a vaccine, for which they must find the virus in its purest form.Is 12 Monkeys a true story?
12 Monkeys is inspired by the French short film La Jet\xe9e (1962); as in La Jet\xe9e, characters are haunted by the images of their own deaths. Like La Jet\xe9e, 12 Monkeys contains references to Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958).How did Brad Pitt prepare for 12 Monkeys?
6 Brad Pitt Was Deprived Of Cigarettes To Get In Character Gilliam sent Pitt to work with a speech coach to prepare for the speech in question. But in the end, Gilliam simply took away Pitt's cigarettes as a means of getting him in the proper headspace to deliver the speech as written.Is there a sequel to 12 Monkeys?
Syfy's \u201c12 Monkeys\u201d is neither a sequel nor a prequel; it's a reimagining that begins with the same premise but diverges quickly. In 2043, only remnants of the human race survive as a result of a plague that quickly killed billions 27 years earlier.Terry Gilliam Talks 'Twelve Monkeys,' 'Brazil,' And 'Harry Potter' | Entertainment Weekly
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