Terry Gilliam Interview, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

The announcement of a new Terry Gilliam film tends to evoke a lively mixture of excitement, curiosity and not a little apprehension. The visionary director has the reputation of a singularly creative maverick, but the transition of his creative projects from the page to the screen has not always been easy.

MoviesOnline sat down recently with Gilliam to talk about his new film, “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.” The modern-day fantasy adventure about a traveling theatre troupe stars Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Christopher Plummer, Verne Troyer, Andrew Garfield, Tom Waits and Lily Cole.

The tragic loss of actor Heath Ledger during the production threatened closedown, but Gilliam fought to reconfigure the story without losing the fine performance which his star had already committed to film. Thanks to Depp and Law who generously agreed to help finish the role that Ledger had started, the film was able to be completed.

Terry Gilliam talked to us about where his inspiration comes from and what it is like to make a film that celebrates the imagination:

Q: Terry, there is no way of watching your movie without thinking about the way imagination is being cut off from the work because everybody now is so addicted to the internet and computers and then you go the opposite way and show that the mind is still a brilliant place to be. Having said that, where does this inspiration come from? Is it contrary to this world that we are living in technologically?

TG: Well I think…the biggest thing I find is we are so overwhelmed by information now and the media pours in, the internet pours in. I don’t know how people maintain their own individual identity anymore and how you imagine your own world because it’s that. I don’t know. I was lucky. I grew up living in the country with only radio so I’d imagine a lot of things and that’s, I think, where it comes from.

It’s like with my son. We’ve got a house in Italy and there’s no television, there’s no telephone, and when he was younger, we’d go there and he’d be bored for the first couple days. “No PlayStation – Where’s the stuff?!” It’s doing all the work for him. And I said, “Wait for him.” My wife says, “Oh we’ve got to entertain him.” I said, “No, don’t do anything.” About two days into it he starts making things with a stick and then there’s a little bit of this and suddenly he’s come alive and he’s inventing a world and he’s playing. That’s fantastic. He’s having a great time because he’s in his own head now. And then, we go back home and the first thing he does is turn on the television and he’s dead again.

I’m really trying to get people to just kind of switch. We used to be able to say “I want people to switch off.” And my biggest thing now is everything is about networking and connections and blah, blah, blah. Mine is about aloneless. I’m trying to get people to learn to be alone. Turn it all off. Just be with yourself and see what’s there, see if there’s anybody home or whether you’re just a neuron or a synaptic gap is what you may be.

Q: So then what is a movie with all of the energies you share with us?

TG: Well I throw a lot of shit in there in front of you and hopefully it might spark off a few things. My attitude is, I just do that. I throw you around and you may come out and say, “Oh, well I saw that” or “I didn’t see that.” I don’t know. What I’m trying not to do is give answers and hopefully ask some questions, offer possibilities, but get out before I waste too much of your time.

Q: The film celebrates imagination and at the same time domesticity is the ultimate goal.

TG: Only for one person, only for Parnassus’s daughter. The irony of that was too great for me not to. I love the idea of here’s this girl, she’s an extraordinary child with an extraordinary little world to be in, traveling. That’s kind of my dream to be in the Imaginarium traveling around the world. And yet, Parnassus’s daughter wants IKEA and a 3-piece suite and bourgeois domesticity. Well, each to his own, that’s all I’m saying. For Parnassus, I think in the end, I love the fact that he comes to terms with it. If that’s her dream, so be it.

Q: Can you recall when you heard the news that Heath Ledger had died and what was going on in your head at that moment?

TG: What you need to do is read the Vanity Fair article. I’m actually bored describing the moment when I found that Heath was dead.

Q: How did you come up with the idea to finish the film?

TG: Once you decide to carry on, which is the hard part? You say “Alright, he goes through the mirror three times. Three actors.” On just a totally pragmatic level, there was no way to get one actor to replace Heath. I didn’t want to do that anyway. And there’s no way to get a great actor to turn up at the last moment. We’re making a movie. People have schedules. They’re all busy working. The fact we were able to squeeze Johnny, Colin and Jude’s schedule into our schedule in some way was kind of a miracle and so you needed a chance. You’ve got three possibilities out there and it was actually just more interesting as well.

I thought you needed three A-list actors to replace Heath. He was that good. That was my attitude. But once you make the decision that people’s faces can change on the other side of the mirror, that was basically simple. I didn’t rewrite much. There’s a lot of little things that I’ve done but nothing of any substance. Everything you hear – the dialogue was all written before. That speech that Johnny gives about the young dying, some people think there’s a eulogy to Heath. No. That was written. This film was about mortality. That’s the great irony of the whole thing -- mortality being a central part of the story and look what happens. I supposed one’s got to be careful of what one writes at times.

Q: You’ve been considering Good Omens as a project. That falls into a game of one-upmanship between the Devil and God or the forces of God. Did this grow out of this interest you had in that sort of conflict?

TG: Well it’s always been there. I went to Occidental College on a Presbyterian scholarship. I mean, the Devil has always been there in that kind of good and evil, right and wrong, the right choice, the wrong choice, all of those things has always obsessed me all of my life. That’s why I was interested in Good Omens and that’s why we wrote this. The same obsessions have been pursuing me all my life and sometimes I get them out.

Q: Do you think you may yet do Good Omens one day or did you sort of exorcise that yearning with this film?

TG: No, no. It’s still sitting out there. It needs a lot of money though. I mean it’s a very different story. Admittedly, okay, there’s an angel and the Devil but it’s very different and it’s whether I can find somebody who wants to take charge of that project. One of the things is that and another project sort of got mired in costs of things and now it’s very hard to get those films moving because they’ve got a price tag on them before you even begin now. So, one day, if somebody gets interested, it’s waiting.

Q: Being a very artistic director, can you tell the difference between when you started drawing and the draw that we have nowadays? It looks like the type of art that you’re used to doing kind of lost its place and now it’s all 3-D. How do you relate to that? It seems only in your movie is there space for your kind of art. Do you agree with that?

TG: Yeah, but it’s just because I’m running the show. I make space for my art. I think what’s happening with so much CG work, especially in the live action films, is trying to be naturalistic. The world might be fantastical. It might be extraordinary, but it’s naturalistic and that doesn’t interest me. I thought what we can do here is to do more of a painterly world. I suppose it’s live action with Pixar backgrounds. It’s a bit more like that. I just want that freedom.

What we’re doing in Parnassus was being very pragmatic, knowing we don’t have the kind of money to compete with an $80/90/100 million film. So we have got the mirror. You go through for a brief moment and get out before we spend too much money and that’s how we’re able to do it. But also, the other thing about the big films is after 10 or 15 minutes you accept that world as normal and then you’ve got another couple hours to keep spending a lot of money to make this normal world. So, to me, it was more interesting to be able to get in and out and each time you changed the world on the other side of the mirror so it’s a constant surprise. It’s kind of a constant delight. What next?

Q: The way you draw always seems to be very realistic, kind of like a fairytale but grounded in the real world. Is that how you would describe it?

TG: Yeah, I think that’s probably true. I don’t analyze what I do. I just kind of do it. You’re probably a better judge of what I do than what I think. It is a fairy tale quality. To me, when I look at my films – I was watching this one the other day silently and it actually works as a silent film, surprisingly. You can actually follow the story. You don’t need to know all the words. You get the basics – it’s the bad guy, it’s the good guy. I was really quite amazed because I was happily watching these images and it was like a child watching a storybook with beautiful drawings in it. It’s like – I don’t know – I haven’t seen The Wild Thing (Where the Wild Things Are) but that Maurice Sendak book, each image you could spend hours in there looking at it and I kind of want to do that on my films. Freeze a frame and spend regular time watching it and looking at it.

Q: When they go into the mirror, did you ever consider, aside from Heath, changing the other actors as well so that you’d have more of a through line. Like the red-headed girl, did you ever think of changing her when she went through the mirror to a different actress?

TG: No, because what’s going on there, you get two things happening. You go through the mirror – let’s do the Johnny scene for a moment. Here’s my logic, my reasoning for what we do. So, you go through and you’re actually in the imagination of the woman, the Louis Vuitton woman as we call her -- shoes, the temple of shoes, giant shoes with a Buddha for shoe enlightenment ultimately. Enlightenment through shopping is what we’re offering there. And suddenly this guy turns up, “That’s the guy. I dreamed you would look like that.” That’s a line that I added. I added that line to explain. She has dreamed he looks like that so now he can be that. Now, okay, he looks like her dream boy but when he’s dancing around, suddenly Lily is back in there, because he still fancies Valentina and she’s wise. So now we’re in his imagination with Valentina floating in the air. It’s this idea that we’ve got two imaginations at work. First, it’s hers and she transforms Tony into that, into Johnny, and then he’s dancing around saying “Whoa! Here’s this babe floating in the air” and it’s Valentina and she’s looking really nice. That’s the idea of what’s happening there.

Q: With the three actors, how much did you want them to emulate Heath because they were playing his role? Or did you want them to do something more?

TG: No. I just – what we did is I gave them all – number one, I chose people who were close friends of Heath’s so they know Heath. So that’s to start. And then we gave them all DVDs of what we’d been able to assemble of what Heath had done so they can see what he was doing, how he was moving and how he was talking and everything. And then, they arrived. No time to rehearse. Do it. I know, it’s really brave of them. It’s extraordinarily brave because they could have just fallen flat on their faces. I thought out maybe this was the way we could pull this thing off. I wasn’t certain. And they just came in and got to work. Johnny, we had one day and 3-1/2 hours – that’s all – to do everything he did. I watched it the other day and said “How the fuck did we do that?” But it’s that kind of – because he came, he was totally on the ball, we just started shooting. That’s what’s wonderful because I think as actors they all got to escape from their own egos. They suddenly were doing something for Heath outside themselves and they just breathed Heath in and spewed him out.

Q: Having such a great body of work, I was just curious if you could talk about how things have changed for you as a filmmaker over the years?

TG: Oh I wish they had changed. It feels exactly the same as when I started. Every one is the first film I’ve ever made. Every one is hard to get off the ground. For instance, with this film, when I come out to Hollywood to try to beg for money, and I go into the offices and they say, “Oh Terry! We’ve loved every film you’ve done. Oh God, we’re huge fans. But this one I’m not sure about.” I’ve heard that for 25 years. The list gets longer of films they’ve loved but the word after “but” is always the same. It doesn’t change. I mean, Nietzsche was wrong. What doesn’t kill you doesn’t make you stronger. It just makes you more tired. That’s my problem.

Q: How involved were you in the editing process of this film? How different was it from your previous films?

TG: Well it’s exactly the same. I’m there every day. That’s what I do. That’s why I make films. My fingers are on every bit of it whether it’s costumes or sets or anything and editing is there. What was interesting in this case was there was a very interesting way of dealing with one’s grief because we’re dealing with Heath every day. He’s alive. What the fuck are you doing now, mate? I’m sitting and I’m talking to him the whole time and it was an interesting thing but it was the same process. I would say “Oh, that’s a great moment. That’s not so good. What do we do?” The fact that it worked, it wasn’t until we actually got the whole film cut together that I suddenly began to believe that what we had set out to do worked. I remember showing it to the post-production sound man who hadn’t been party to all that was going on and obviously didn’t read the trades or even newspapers because he said he just felt the film was meant to be like that. And that was the moment I realized it works.

Q: Do you see yourself working with Johnny Depp in the future?

TG: Anytime he’s available I’m ready to work with him. He’s a very busy boy though. His dance card is full. He’s got a swash and buckle for another couple years.

Q: You’re always the guy that surprises us. What surprises you?

TG: Oh, actors surprise me. I’m always begging for surprises. Well Heath did the big one. That was the kind of surprise I don’t need, but he surprised me.

“The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus” opens in theaters on December 25^th.