At Comic-Con last month, Motion/Captured’s Drew McWeeny was fortunate enough to sit down with director Terry Gilliam for a solid 60 minutes, allowing the conversation to drift from actors like Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt to the Criterion Collection to Gilliam’s latest, the still domestic distributor-less “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” and everything in between.
The piece is broke up into two parts. Part one is interesting enough, especially for the mid-interview interruption by some idiot who should have known better, but I think the meat of the piece is in part two, where Gilliam starts to talk the philosophy of cinema and “Parnassus” in particular.
Gillaim talks at length about the film’s state of disarray after Heath Ledger’s untimely passing in January of 2008, leaving an entire performance to be completed and no easy answers. He called Johnny Depp first, completely sapped with no idea how to go forward. Ultimately Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law filled in for Ledger for the character of Tony’s three transformations in the film, but even completing the script at hand was difficult for some on the production.
Says Gilliam:
…there’s one line that Chris Plummer says in the monastery which was done after Heath died, which is “It doesn’t matter what we’re telling you about… it’s a story somewhere. Comedy, romance, a tale of unforeseen death.” And Chris didn’t want to say it, and I said, “Chris, you have to say it. That was the script that Heath and I were making. You say that…that’s the movie Heath and I wanted to make, and we’re going to make that fucking movie whoever’s in it.
The director also mentions a galvanizing moment for him as a cinema die-hard, seeing Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory” for the first time:
This is probably my thing about film… trying to be honest because it’s so powerful. I mean, it defined me…I can tell you the films that made me at a certain level…”Paths of Glory,” when I saw it…I was 14, I think, and it was at a Saturday matinee in Panorama City in the San Fernando Valley. And all the parents were doing were just dumping their kids in there to get rid of them for the afternoon. And I’m in there, and we’re watching “Paths of Glory”. Ten year old kids running up and down the aisles. I’m like, “Fuck me.” Because they die. The guys go and die and it’s completely wrong. And that was, like… I thought, “Fuck, so that’s what the world can be like.” It’s an absolutely defining moment there.
It’s a great interview and a real coup for Drew and the HitFix team. Check it all out at Motion/Captured.