Since first emerging from the Monty Python ranks as a visual auteur with a flair for hallucinogenic satire, Terry Gilliam has carved out a reputation as a cinematic outsider who revels in adversity. Known as much for his creative brilliance as he is for being plagued with production nightmares, his latest film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus got derailed half way through shooting by the sudden death of its leading man Heath Ledger. A bitter reminder of ten years previous when The Man Who Killed Don Quixote set collapsed in its first week due to a series of natural disasters, Gilliam managed to rescue Ledger’s cinematic swan song by tweaking the screenplay and casting Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law to fill in for their late friend. With Lily Cole, Andrew Garfield, Tom Waits and Christopher Plummer rounding out the cast, Gilliam’s latest celluloid phantasm is not only one of his best films, it’s a fitting epitaph for one of our generation’s finest actors.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is about the dying art of story-telling and the lengths that some people go to preserve it. Is that a metaphor for your career?

 

Terry Gilliam: In a way. I want to break up the normal rhythms of films, I want people to be genuinely surprised. So far, most people who have seen Doctor Parnassus are. Sometimes people are critical because my films don’t go in the same beats and rhythms that most films do now. With most modern films I know what’s going to happen, there’s the big action moment, a massive explosion and then it ends. It’s almost musical, it’s like a pop video.

 

 

I don’t know. Do people really want to watch interesting stories or do they just want to watch something like Transformers, which is huge and unbelievable. The majority of people go and see that thing. And it’s not good – it’s just bang, crash, whallop. There’s no thought in it, there’s no ideas in it. It’s just sheer energy, violence, destruction and basically I find that very negative. Technically they’re phenomenal, but where are the ideas, where are the things that make you think, that wake you up, that keep you going?

 

So, has modern life lost its sense of romance?

 

People don’t read, and television is just numbing. I’ve always thought that the role of television, or whatever form of art, is to constantly surprise and wake people up. It’s here to make you look at the world with fresh eyes, but people are running too fast, they’re not paying attention, they’re not slowing down, they’re not reading enough, they’re watching Big Brother… don’t you have your own life? I mean why are you watching somebody else’s fake life?! It makes me crazy.

 

The way you portray London in Doctor Parnassus is very Dickensian, is this in a way slightly because you didn’t get to make A Tale of Two Cities?

 

(Laughs) No, I just choose the bits that interest me – it’s as simple as that. I think the Tourist Board should be giving us some money because there are some lovely shots of Tower Bridge, Battersea Power Station in there. I suppose it’s the London that I still love. When I came here, I was totally Dickensian in my approach to London. I just found all the interesting places and used to hang out there all the time because I’d grown up with those books. Now, London for me is a different place – I’m not sure what it is, I don’t know it very well. I just look at people getting pissed and going to discos and not paying attention to the wonders that are in this city. I have a real love/ hate relationship with this place.

 

One thing that has remained in your work since your Monty Python days is your appropriation of Victorian art. Why do you like messing with that antiquated view of the world?

 

I’ve always thought that the past was more interesting than the present – that may or not be so but I just accept what’s out there. I think life can be really tedious. I was always looking for an escape. I think it’s more interesting to escape into a Dickensian book full of characters in another world. I think that’s what happened when I first hitchhiked around Europe –it wasn’t Disneyland, it was real.

 

 

No! That’s the joke!

 

Really?!

 

I know! I said at the end of making Fear and Loathing that I was going to take acid, because I’d never taken it. I was always frightened of taking it because all my friends were taking it and half the things they were talking about were things that I already saw. If I had taken anything I would have flown out my bedroom windows and died horribly. When we were doing Python, they always used to write about us as a bunch of druggies – we weren’t.

 

 

No, a minor amount of pot was smoked – but very minor and there was probably a couple of snorts of cocaine along the way. I mean very quickly…the cocaine hangover was just not worth the speed I got when I snorted it. I just looked at the downside of all of them and they weren’t as good as the upside. So, I thought, ‘okay, enough of that, I’ll get on without it’. I think one of the funniest things people said when they were coming out of this film, was ‘oh my god, we’re still tripping!’ I thought, well, that’s pretty good for a film to have that effect on people, that’s great.

 

Some of your critics say that your mis-en-scene is the star of the show and that actors fill in the gaps. What do you make of that kind of observation?

 

Well it’s one person’s reading. It’s not my attitude to it. I mean the characters are what it’s about, ultimately. Whatever I’m doing, whatever world we’re putting the film in, it’s a character driven piece. Now, what I don’t do is spend a lot of time wallowing in mediocre bullshit – we’re telling a story in a very, as far as I’m concerned, traditional way. Fairy Tales don’t spend hours looking at somebody smoking a cigarette, watching the ashes fall and the person shifting in their seat. I don’t need to know exactly what Heath’s character was like ten years before. There are films that have almost no story and it’s almost all character-driven and there are films that look visually amazing. I’m trying to do both things at the same time. They all think it’s about visuals and it’s not.

 

Your films are fascinated with characters that have a lot of internal struggles. Why are you drawn to these figures?

 

I don’t know why, but in my films I tend to punish the main character – they all have to suffer. I think that’s what’s interesting about life –the internal struggle. I’m intrigued with the people that are close to madness. They’re people that don’t have a very structured view of what reality is. Most people just accept reality but they can create their own reality if they choose to, it’s just that most people don’t do it. So I like people that are questing, that are trying to understand and some of them go crazy, some die – all sorts of things happen. But at least they’re not cattle just happily being moved around by various media and marketing operations.

 

Do you sometimes feel imprisoned in your own imaginarium?

 

No, not really, my imagination is the thing that frees me. All the mundane things in life do that, like dusting your house. That’s the trap. I hope everybody tries to create their own worlds. My problem is that most people are happy to accept the worlds that are created for them. That’s what, I suppose, I’m fighting against.

 

You find yourself fighting against adversity quite a lot. It seems that with the majority of your films something goes wrong along the way. Do you feel blessed or cursed?

 

I feel blessed actually because I’ve been able to make less bad films than other people (laughs). If more films had been able to get off the ground, there probably would have been more turkeys along the way. But as I get older and older, it gets really boring. It’s like, ‘C’mon, cut this shit out, I’ve made some rather good films, why can’t I get the money with a little bit more ease?!’ My problem is, I don’t work the system. I don’t hang out at the right places. I don’t meet the right people. I just can’t be bothered. Whereas other people work it better and I don’t. When the film’s finished, I just walk away from this world and get on with whatever else is happening and then I come back into it. It’s time it’s like I’m coming back as a novice. That’s what it feels like.

 

So you still see yourself as an outsider?

 

I want to sell out but I’ve made it very difficult for myself to do so.

 

You like doing that! After all, the first time the audience see Heath’s character he’s hanging from a noose. After his death did you have any doubts about introducing him like that?

 

No. That’s the film Heath and I set out to make and that’s the film that’s going to be made. I know it’s going to shock people. The first time I saw it, it was like, fuck! You can’t help but gasp. But I said, I’m not going to change this film. He wouldn’t have wanted it otherwise. That’s what was great about him, that’s why I loved being around Heath because he was fearless. I’ve always been pretty fearless and that’s what we shared in common. I wasn’t about to betray that.

 

 

It was difficult to stay awake. I just wanted to go to sleep and hope it never happened. No, it was very difficult. We just had to go to work every day. We didn’t know if any of it was going to work. That fact with Johnny, Colin and Jude coming in, there was no time to rehearse. They just turned up and did it. I think it was unbelievably brave for them as actors to come in to step into that role. They could have just fallen on their face, but that’s why I chose people who were friends with Heath. His posthumous influence was incredible, it was like he was always there. I used to say, ‘fuck you man, you’ve ruined my film!’, but he created a situation where we had to make all these adjustments, which at the time I didn’t think were even going to be possible, but in fact it all worked out for the better. He forced me into things and I thought, ‘fuck he’s co-directing this thing posthumously!’ Heath’s spirit was, and still is, powerful – what anybody who was ever close to him reverberates. This was a truly special human being.

 

Do you find talking about him while publicizing your movie uncomfortable?

 

Yeah, it’s hard. When someone asks the question ‘what did you feel like the day you found out he was dead?’ Well, I’ve said it enough times, I’m not going to say it again. It really is tiresome but at the same time it’s not difficult talking about Heath, it’s very easy talking about him, it’s just that I’ve never experienced a kind of loss like that. He was family and my family are all alive.

 

Finally, on your Dr Parnassus Twitter it says, “Immortality is not as difficult as people think”. Are you constantly striving for immortality? 

 

Oh no, I’m not striving for it. I think when I was younger I thought if I could just get my name carved in something that could last I would have succeeded. I don’t think about that now really.

© TIM NOAKES 2009

www.terrygilliam.com