When former Monty Python animator, actor, screenwriter and movie director Terry Gilliam was told he was being awarded a Fellowship at this month’s Bradford International Film Festival, he replied: “To be honoured by such an important festival pre-posthumously will force my family to treat me with some respect while I’m still alive.”

The former American citizen has won more than a score of international awards for his films. Pre-posthumously, he has an Oscar for The Fisher King, 13 Oscar nominations, three Baftas, three Silver Ribbons, the Venice Film Festival Silver Lion and a Bafta Fellowship in 2009.

His films, in spite of some box office flops, have reportedly grossed an average of $26 million each, so he’s more in the black than the red.

And which other person honoured by Bradford can claim to have an asteroid named after them? In his case, 9619 Terrygilliam.

During his years with the Python team, Terry was a frequent visitor to Bradford, but he hasn’t been back for a long time.

“It will be exciting to see how it’s changed. I have never seen the film museum,” he said, wondering what the city had made of its UNESCO City of Film status.

“I just found out there are 8,000 film festivals in the world,” he said. “You could succumb to that as you get older, doing the rounds.

“They invent awards and invite you. It’s very pleasant to be invited, as if you’ve made a difference. I try to keep it down to two or three a year, max.”

He accepted the invitation to Bradford because of the retrospective of some of his big films. He doesn’t often think about them, preferring to concentrate on the next project.

His next project breaks completely new ground for him. He is directing a production of Hector Berlioz’s opera The Damnation Of Faust for English National Opera, with the opening night scheduled for May 6. Rehearsals started this week.

“It’s terrifying. I have never done opera before. I have seen half-a-dozen. I have never done theatre before. It’s a completely new thing and it’s horrible.

“People have been at me for 20 years to succumb. It’s getting harder to get the films I want to make off the ground,” he said, by way of explanation as to how he got himself into this fine mess.

You might assume, as I did, that for the man who introduced cartoon animation into prime time British television, the current age of IMAX, 3-D and animation movie-making would be marvellous. You’d be wrong, as I was.

“I think it’s a Rococo age of film-making, all flash and filigree. Ideas seem to be in short supply. Films are technologically brilliant, but short on ideas. It’s very safe. I came out of the Sixties and Seventies, out of European films of the late Fifties, full of great ideas and characters,” he said.

Asked to name a couple of recent films that had impressed him, he mentioned a 2009 Chinese film called City Of Life And Death, directed by Lu Chuan, about the rape of Nanking by Japanese troops in 1937, and the Oscar-winning The Lives Of Others – “a really fine piece of work” – directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck in 2006.

Is the dearth of great ideas and characters, in his opinion, merely cyclical?

“I hope it is. People seem to be transfixed by new technology. The iPad, the iPhone – everything is ‘i’, ‘i’. People don’t seem to be concerned about big ideas in the West,” said Terry.

During an interview with Salman Rushdie, in which he described America as a police state in the late 1960s when he was a student, he complained that the idea of the world had been too narrowly defined by the media. It could instead, he declared, be a million different things, a view he still holds.

He said: “There is no 24-hour news, so it has to be repeated and fabricated. It’s all about marketing.

“The chance of being aware of the few good films that are being made out there is limited because you are fighting against a vast amount of money in Hollywood.

“Black Swan – the budget for that was pared down, but $60 million was spent promoting it.”

He was hoping to bring a short film to the Bradford International Film Festival, financed by a pasta company. The only criteria were that it had to be about Naples and nobody died in it.

But judging by the muffled conversation at the other end of the phone before this interview, the film was unlikely to be ready in time.

The Terry Gilliam retrospective includes Jabberwocky, The Fisher King, Brazil and The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus. He received his Fellowship on Saturday, March 19. For more information and tickets, ring 0844 8563797.