HOLLYWOOD — Nearly all Terry Gilliam’s movies since Monty Python and the Holy Grail have survived more than the usual load of stress and strain wrought by busted budgets, distributor hassles, arguments over cinematographers and fights over final cut — not to mention floods, heart attacks and a broken back.

But all those obstacles pale next to the tragedy Gilliam (pictured) faced in January 2008, when his star actor Heath Ledger died halfway through production on The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus , the director’s latest cinematic flight of fancy.

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The PG-13 movie, which expands Friday into wide release, showcases Gilliam’s extravagant visual imagination in a story infused with the sort of richly detailed fairy tale accoutrements common to many of the filmmaker’s previous efforts.

Characteristically, Imaginarium errs at time on the side of excess, yet it’s a small miracle that the movie got completed at all.

In the film, a mystical traveling troupe takes its audiences through a magic mirror into a dreamscape reflecting each individual’s deepest desires and darkest anxieties. Ledger, who played a slippery trickster named Tony, died after filming the “naturalistic” portion of the movie. Persuaded to move forward with the project, Gilliam replaced Ledger with three actors — Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell — who took turns playing Tony on the other side of the mirror.

During a visit to Los Angeles from his London home, Gilliam, 69, displayed the sly, contrarian wit that has helped him weather a career filled with sporadically brilliant work, highlighted by the twisted sci-fi of Twelve Monkeys , the bureaucracy-gone-wild future hell of Brazil and the wonderfully warped adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s LSD-riddled travelogue Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas , along with cult fantasy epics including The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Time Bandits .

Dressed in cargo pants, a Hawaiin shirt and orange running shoes, Gilliam talked to Wired.com about his collaboration with Ledger, his stream-of-consciousness approach to storytelling, the upside of adversity (including a brief stint panhandling on the streets of New York) and his perception, expressed by Doctor Parnassus, that “the world is full of wonder for those with eyes to see.”

Wired.com: You first worked with Heath Ledger in 2005 when he co-starred with Matt Damon in The Brothers Grimm . When I interviewed him at that time, Ledger said: “Terry injects you with this energy. We were almost imitating this certain kind of eccentric quality that’s always been expressed in Terry’s comedy through his entire career.” What was it like working with Ledger the first time?

Terry Gilliam: I loved Heath on Grimm . He was so funny, all the time, and on Parnassus even more so because he had evolved as the Joker. Heath was giggling every day about what he was getting away with on that one.

LISTEN: Heath Ledger on Craft of Acting

Wired.com: So, raring to go on the Imaginarium set?

Gilliam: He kept everybody fired up. He’d arrive on set in the morning [Gilliam claps his hand and flashes a broad smile]: “Let’s go!”

Wired.com: You’ve said that Heath seemed “liberated” by playing the Joker. Did he bring some of that manic energy to his role of Tony in Imaginarium ?

Gilliam: Heath was ad-libbing a lot. He was so fast, and so good at it. For me, it was a joy to watch him come up with fresh lines and different takes. And everything he was doing [was] believable. That was the key. No matter how silly he was behaving, it was solid stuff.

Wired.com: And you encouraged that sense of freedom?

Gilliam: Always, totally. To me, that’s what you do as a director: You get good actors, spend time in rehearsal preparation, then give them the space to explore and play and see what happens. On Parnassus , Heath was setting up the foundation for what he was going to do on the other side of the mirror. His accent is shifting from Aussie to Cockney to posh — he was becoming everything, anything he wanted. The one thing I would have given anything for would have been to see what Heath was going to do on the other side, but he never got there.

Wired.com: You considered shutting down production after Ledger died, but instead, you came up with a work-around by bringing on Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell to take over the role. [See video, embedded right.]

Gilliam: Because of what Heath had done in creating this guy who’s very liquid and light, it allowed Johnny, Colin and Jude to move in and be different faces and do different things. With Tony, wherever he needs to go, to do whatever he needs to do — he can do it.

Wired.com: Heath Ledger was so restrained in Brokeback Mountain and then he does a complete 180 with the Joker. In Imaginarium , he seemed to play Tony slightly over-the-top.

Gilliam: With my stuff, you have to go a little over-the-top because you’re fighting the sets [laughs] and the costumes. My films do tend to be theatrical. They’re hyper-realistic and some people hate that, but for me, it works, because in a sense I’m saying, “This is artifice.” As filmmakers, what we do is artifice. What we’re doing is holding a mirror up to reality, and hopefully it’s an interesting mirror.





Fractured fairy tales

Wired.com: Many of your films have a fablelike quality. In Brothers Grimm, you adapted someone else’s fairy tales. With Imaginarium, you and your Brazil co-writer Charles McKeown made up your own. How did you come up with the Doctor Parnassus story?

Gilliam: I can barely remember how we wrote it. Honestly, it was just, “We’ve got to start somewhere.” Ancient wagon rides into a modern city and nobody pays attention to this outrageous little show going on. We started there and slowly built this thing.

Wired.com: It was interesting to see how you worked in all these storytelling archetypes. Were those conscious references or …

Gilliam: You’ve got the Rumpelstiltskin thing, where the daughter’s going to be taken, you’ve got Faust in there, you’ve got Prospero from The Tempest , you’ve got King Lear — it just goes on and on and on. There’s a great collection of knowledge floating around in there [Gilliam points to his head], and it just started pouring out in its own way.

Wired.com: With the fantasy sequences filmed in Vancouver, which take place on the other side of the mirror, you brought a compelling kind of dream logic to the way the scenes play out. How do you come up with this stuff?

Gilliam: I just let it flow and one thing goes to the next. It’s exactly the way I used to do the Python animation.

Wired.com: Fans of that show loved the way you created a chain of events that somehow connected point A to point B.

Gilliam: I had a starting point and a finishing point between the two sketches, and I just let my brain take me where it wanted to go. There is physics at work, always, there’s gravity — all these basic things that are very important that you can’t just get away from because they all really exist.

Wired.com: In Imaginarium , for example, a river flowing toward a pyramid turns into a giant snake with Tom Waits’ head on the end of it.

Gilliam: You’ve got this bridge with a river going toward this giant pyramid, it’s a black river, so it becomes this king cobra, because it’s Egyptian, rising out of there. I don’t know why that stuff comes so easily to me but it does, and I’ve never tried to explain it. I’ve never gone to a psychiatrist to have it talked away. It’s how my brain functions. I think a child’s brain is like that. Once you start playing, you start with that, then you’ve got this, and it leads possibly to some other thing.

Thriving on chaos

Wired.com: In IFC’s Monty Python documentary, somebody said that you do your best when you feel like you’re “up against it.” Does that observation ring true to you?

Gilliam: Every film I’ve done has benefited from me coming up against lack of time, money or whatever is thrown my way, because it suddenly brings out the best, most creative moments for me. When you’ve got resistance, it focuses you on what’s important. Everything is equal to me until somebody says “no.” “What do you mean, ‘No’? Why?” And now we’ve got something to concentrate this energy on and you solve the problem one way or the other.

Wired.com: In the case of Imaginarium , after Ledger died, you reshot an early scene with a second actor to play the same minor character in order to establish the idea that people change appearance after they go through the magic mirror.

Gilliam: It’s all in my head, the kind of movie I’m making, so once I’ve got that happening, when I come up with a solution it’s always within the realm of the world that I’ve been working in. It’s just another way of looking at the world, Parnassus is doing that all the time, trying to encourage people to look at the world in a slightly different way.

[To illustrate, Gilliam points to the hotel room TV set.]

“That’s not a television. That’s a black hole in the wall. What happens if you fall into that black hole?” I’m very quick to do that and, frankly, it makes life bearable to me — the fact that I can keep on morphing the world into other things.

Wired.com: During the making of this film, you broke your back, right?

Gilliam: Yeah. I didn’t do it on my own. A bus backed into me.

Wired.com: Ouch.

Gilliam: Vertebrae was cracked, muscles were ripped to shreds — it’s taken me a year to get over it, but, what it did was, I was going to work on a bus….

Wired.com: No car?

Gilliam: No drivers for this film. We’d run out of money. And suddenly we had free transport. I didn’t sue the company, I hate that sort of thing, so they gave me physical therapy and all that stuff plus they gave me free transport, which was very useful to finish the film up.

Wired.com: In Imaginarium, Doctor Parnassus, the master storyteller, is reduced to begging on the streets of London. You actually did something similar in New York City four years ago, right [clip embedded above]?

Gilliam: For Tideland , the week before the film opened, I didn’t see a single poster, not a single ad. My daughter Amy wanted me to wear a sandwich board, but I got a poster mounted on a piece of shitty cardboard, wrote, “Studio-less film director, family to support, will direct for food.” I made 25 bucks and the movie played for two weekends, which was great. [See video of Gilliam’s eccentric Tideland push, embedded right.]

The big picture

Wired.com: There’s a line in Imaginarium that sort of sums up Doctor Parnassus’ world view, something about the power of enchantment.

Gilliam: “The world is full of wonder for those with eyes to see.”

Wired.com: That sentiment seems to find its way into most of your movies.

Gilliam: There’s got to be more good in the world than bad, otherwise we would have wiped ourselves out by now. And nature is wonderful, so full of surprises. The pavement cracks, there’s grass growing up. It’s a miracle!

Wired.com: Yet also this dark quality.

Gilliam: I get very angry about most things going on in the world. Most of my time is spent in anger. But when I look around at the big picture, nature’s always looked out after itself rather well. There’s a whole world out there — fuck people [laughs]! There’s ants, there’s bugs, there’s birds. I try to maintain a certain, I wouldn’t say optimism, but a certain positive attitude towards the world, and one day I’ll be eaten by worms. I hope I’m a decent meal.

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