The Imaginarium of Terry Gilliam
Posted December 23, 2009 3:14 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Terry Gilliam is considered a master filmmaker. From his early work like Time Bandits and Brazil to the more recent Twelve Monkeys and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas he has made some of the most memorable films of the last thirty years. Not to mention his work on Monty Python where he wrote, animated, and acted in many segments for The Flying Circus and also co-wrote and co-directed the feature films Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Meaning of Life. His latest film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is about an extraordinary travelling theatre that nobody pays attention to. When he sat down to write it he had no ideas and a blank page in front of him.
“It was more of an adventure of discovery,” he says about the writing process. “You start with the theatre [element] and then add characters…little by little it all comes together. It’s a strange process because it’s like it’s there and you have to carve away all the bits confusing its advancement and then it moves along.”
Heath Ledger was filming Dr. Parnassus when he passed away in January of 2008. Before his death Gilliam says the production was going at a very fast and frenzied pace.
“We had a month in London to get through all the exterior work and it was rocketing along. We were shooting in December…it was cold and miserable but it was going really well and we were having a wonderful time. Heath was on fire! I’d never seen him so excited,” he remembers. “We finished on a Saturday night and I went to Vancouver to prepare the stuff we were shooting there. Heath went to New York and that was the end.”
The news of Ledger’s death was rough on him and he says he didn’t want to finish the film because his heart wasn’t in it anymore. With the encouragement of his daughter and friends he decided he wouldn’t let Ledger’s last work disappear. He rounded up Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell and came up with a unique way to film the rest of Ledger’s part. The production moved forward and they all agreed they were doing it for Ledger.
“Is it going to be good enough for it to be his last movie? That was the weight we were carrying which made it difficult to know if we were doing the right thing or not,” he admits.
Getting Dr. Parnassus made wasn’t easy from the start even though Ledger was about to become the biggest star on the planet thanks to his portrayal of The Joker in the Batman sequel The Dark Knight.
“You go into these meetings and hear, ‘We’re big fans Terry. Love your films, blah, blah, blah’ and you sit there waiting for the other shoe to drop and the other shoe goes, ‘This new project just doesn’t seem right and won’t work for us’,” he explains. “We were only asking for a small amount of money and we couldn’t get anybody to rise to the occasion,” he adds.
Gilliam says it’s always been hard for him to get films made but it’s worse now because the people running Hollywood don’t understand film or even like watching films.
“You’re dealing with middle management bureaucrats who are terribly afraid of losing their highly paid jobs. New things really bother them,” he claims. “I have a project sitting on the shelf and a friend suggested I turn it into a comic book first so I can finally get it through the Hollywood system.”
While on the topic of comic books I asked him what he thought about Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Watchmen, which Gilliam called unfilmable when he attempted it years ago.
“I think I was right,” he says. “[Snyder] did an extraordinary job and it looks exactly right but it suffers from what I was always worried about. To get the full affect of Watchmen you need a lot of time to tell all those stories, to detail those characters. When you condense it down as we had done in our script I just think you lose what so much of it is about. He did some of the stuff perfect but the whole film ultimately didn’t make it for me.”
Gilliam is currently working on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a film he attempted to shoot in 2000 with Jean Rochefort in the title role and Johnny Depp as the “Man Who Killed”. When Rochefort became ill (and flooding affected the set) the plug was pulled on the production after only five days of shooting. His new Don Quixote is played by Robert Duvall but Depp will not be returning.
“He’s just too big a star for me to work with anymore,” he jokes about Depp. “Johnny’s dance card is full for the next couple of years and I can’t wait. I’m getting too old…I’m going to die soon,” he says.
As for Dr. Parnassus he hopes it inspires people and makes them think.
“I’d like if everyone came out of the theatre with their own version of the film,” he says.
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus opens in theatres on Christmas Day.
brian.mckechnie@citynews.rogers.com
Top image: A scene from The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. Courtesy E1 Entertainment.
