The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a flight of fancy that was very nearly grounded in mid production. The untimely death of star Heath Ledger in January 2008 almost put the brakes on the film until Terry Gilliam had an idea: Why not continue filming with three of the late actor’s friends taking his place?
“I just started calling friends of Heath,” Gilliam said. “It’s as simple as that. Johnny (Depp), Colin (Farrell) and Jude (Law) turned up. It was important that they were friends, because I wanted to keep it in the family. I wanted people who were close to him because, as Colin said when he was doing his part, he was channelling Heath part of the time, so Heath was very much still alive in some sense.
“I didn’t know whether this would work until I got back to London. We were working on autopilot. Working because that’s what we decided to do and we got back to London and I showed the first cut to the post-sound guy, who hadn’t been involved in the process, and he just assumed it was written that way. I thought, ‘It works.’”
Co-star Christopher Plummer says he thinks it works better than the original script.
“The audience needs to be rejuvenated at the eleventh hour and they are by the presence of the three guys,” he said. “I think Heath would have thoroughly approved of that and probably have been relieved not to go, ‘OK fellas, it’s time I had a break.’”
One of Heath’s co-stars, however, had a harder time accepting the loss and the replacements. Lily Cole says she cried on the first day of shooting without Ledger, but soon realized that by stepping in Depp, Farrell and Law were doing a “brave and lovely thing” to honor the late actor.
Gilliam agrees, viewing the finished film as homage to Ledger. A credit where the director’s name usually sits is a tribute to the late actor and the respect he earned.
“Contractually, it was supposed to be a Terry Gilliam Film,” he said. “That’s what the lawyers said, but I said, ‘No way it’s going to be that. It’s going to be a film from Heath Ledger and friends.’ The cast sat around one night and that idea came up and I said, ‘This is it. Perfect. That’s how we do it.’”
The TIFF film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is destined to become best known as Heath Ledger’s last movie.
The young actor passed away midway through production, but rather than scrap the film, director Terry Gilliam pressed on, replacing the Aussie actor with three famous faces.
“I just started calling friends of Heath,” Gilliam said. “It’s as simple as that. Johnny (Depp), Colin (Farrell) and Jude (Law) turned up. It was important that they were friends, because I wanted to keep it in the family. I wanted people who were close to him because, as Colin said when he was doing his part, he was channelling Heath part of the time, so Heath was very much still alive in some sense.
“I didn’t know whether this would work until I got back to London. We were working on autopilot. Working because that’s what we decided to do and we got back to London and I showed the first cut to the post-sound guy, who hadn’t been involved in the process, and he just assumed it was written that way. I thought, ‘It works.’”
It works not because Gilliam changed the script, but because of a quirk of the original story — a mirror that acts as an entry to a magical world of imagination.
“Nothing was changed from the original script after Heath died,” he said. “It was that lucky element of a magic mirror. Once you decide that faces could change as you go through the mirror, we were free. I’m simplifying it, but that’s effectively what happened. There was some kind of movie god, and the problem with gods is that they’re both evil and wondrous. There was one that got it made and one that punished us.”
Gilliam sees the finished film as a tribute to Heath, both as an actor and a man with many friends who stepped in to complete the film. A credit where the director’s name usually sits is a tribute to the late actor and the respect he earned.
“Contractually, it was supposed to be a Terry Gilliam Film,” he said. “That’s what the lawyers said, but I said, ‘No way it’s going to be that. It’s going to be a film from Heath Ledger and friends.’ The cast sat around one night and that idea came up and I said, ‘This is it. Perfect. That’s how we do it.’”
Terry Gilliam, the only American member of the legendary Monty Python comedy troupe, likes to create new worlds—places in which the real and the unreal co-exist comfortably. Rent Brazil, 12 Monkeys or The Fisher King and you’ll find fact and fantasy bashing heads, each struggling to stake their territory in the story’s plot. In his first film in seven years, The Brothers Grimm, he walks the same path.
Played by Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, Will and Jake Grimm are 18th century Ghostbusters, a pair of charlatans who bilk simple country folk out of their money by conducting phony exorcisms of ghosts and demons. Their days as con men come to an abrupt end when they are captured by Napoleon’s Army and sentenced to death. Instead of facing a gruesome execution they agree to rid the forest in a nearby town of its evil spirits. Faced with real supernatural forces their brand of ghostbusting is put to the test.
The script is a mix-and-match pastiche of classic fables such as Jack and the Bean Stalk, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Rapunzel, and while it doesn’t always work—Matt Damon’s accent comes and goes with the frequency of a shuttle bus and why hire someone as beautiful as Monica Bellucci and then cover her with zombie makeup for most of the film—but Gilliam’s sense of wonder and playfulness seeps through and makes The Brothers Grimm a welcome change from the bland remakes and sequels that have cluttered up the multi-plexes this summer.
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a flight of fancy that was very nearly grounded in mid production. The untimely death of star Heath Ledger in January 2008 almost put the brakes on the film until Terry Gilliam had an idea: Why not continue filming with three of the late actor’s friends taking his place?
