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.