Author Topic: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus  (Read 264318 times)

Offline Meryl

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Re: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
« Reply #150 on: August 18, 2009, 01:49:46 pm »
'Parnassus' finds Stateside buyer
Sony in advanced talks to pick up Ledger film
By SHARON SWART
 
'The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus'

Heath Ledger’s final film has finally found a Stateside buyer.
Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group is in advanced talks to pick up "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus," with plans for it to go out theatrically, likely this year, via Sony Pictures Classics.

Pic is expected to be a lucrative homevideo title due to the Ledger angle and the other star power. Terry Gilliam’s adventure also features Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell, who replaced Ledger in various fantasy scenes after the thesp died during the film’s production in January 2008.

"Parnassus" was officially unveiled at Cannes this year in an out-of-competition slot toward the end of the festival. Several buyers screened the film just before Cannes, but a deal didn’t immediately emerge.

Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions Group has been a key player in a number of pic deals lately, including for "The Young Victoria." That film will go out theatrically via Bob Berney and Bill Pohlad’s new Apparition label, and SPWAG will handle all ancillaries as part of a three-way deal on the pic.

SPWAG has a homevid deal with Apparition.

The "Parnassus" deal with Sony has long been in the works and could be made official this week.

Reps on the deal, including sales agent John Sloss, remained mum.

The film goes out in the fourth quarter through various distributors in European territories including the U.K., France, Germany and Italy, plus Australia and New Zealand.

http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118007231.html?categoryid=13&cs=1


I had been worried for awhile that I wouldn't be able to see this in the theaters. A straight to DVD in the US would have been horrible. >:( >:( >:(
Now I just hope it comes out sooner than later. Preferably Christmas time, when I'm out of school and have time to scout out the theaters showing it, as it's likely to have a limited release. Plus, I plan on seeing it multiple times. ;)

That's great news!  It really does look like the kind of film that would lose considerably by being seen on a small screen.  Something to look forward to.  8)
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Offline Monika

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Re: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
« Reply #151 on: August 22, 2009, 11:26:16 am »
Doesn´t look like it´s gonna open at all in Sweden :P

Might be worth taking a little trip to see it as this is the last chance to see Heath on the big screen.

Offline Penthesilea

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Re: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
« Reply #152 on: August 22, 2009, 12:19:50 pm »
Doesn´t look like it´s gonna open at all in Sweden :P

Might be worth taking a little trip to see it as this is the last chance to see Heath on the big screen.

I hope for you that it will be shown in Sweden. Or maybe not, since you wouldn't mind a little trip. Who knows what possbilities will come from a little trip?

Here are the release dates from IMDB:

France  22 May 2009 (Cannes Film Festival)
Germany  26 June 2009 (Munich International Film Festival)
Italy  16 October 2009 
UK  16 October 2009 
Australia  29 October 2009 
New Zealand  29 October 2009 
Argentina  5 November 2009 
Belgium  11 November 2009 
France  11 November 2009 
Germany  3 December 2009 
Netherlands  3 December 2009 
USA  25 December 2009



This year already? I somehow expected the movie to come out in 2010. I don't want it to be over. I want to have a new Heath movie to look forward to a little while longer. :-\
 :'(

Offline loneleeb3

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Re: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
« Reply #153 on: August 22, 2009, 01:28:13 pm »
Quote
This year already? I somehow expected the movie to come out in 2010. I don't want it to be over. I want to have a new Heath movie to look forward to a little while longer
You can wait till Christmas and come see it with me!!! ;D :-*
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Offline Penthesilea

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Re: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
« Reply #154 on: August 23, 2009, 06:53:41 am »
You can wait till Christmas and come see it with me!!! ;D :-*
Boy Howdy talk about pawin the white outta the moon!!!


Aw, shucks. Pawin the white outta the moon with you is definitively on my must-do-list!
If only the US weren't so far away ...
 :-*

Offline Monika

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Re: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
« Reply #155 on: August 28, 2009, 03:46:00 am »
*happy face*

TIoDP *will* open in Sweden after all.  The exact date isn´t set yet but it will be in November/December. I´ve read about it in several newspapers now.
There is quite some buzz about the movie here in Sweden after the trailer came out. Many Terry Gilliam fans here, seems like.
Yay!


Offline MilAn

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Re: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
« Reply #156 on: August 30, 2009, 07:19:21 am »
Lily Cole talks about Heath in new interview:

Quote
She is disconcertingly doll-faced. Pale bow lips that look like they’re drawn on. Cornflower-blue eyes like giant orbs. Red Crystal Tipps cartoon hair. It’s a round face that manages to look wise and gormless at the same time. It’s the face of a Marks & Spencer model who appeared controversially on the cover of French Playboy, hair in bunches, cuddling a teddy, naked except for little white socks. In the flesh, the look is more minx than exploited girlie.

It was the same extraordinary face, both sweet and uncompromising, that catapulted Lily Cole to fame after she was discovered by Storm model agency while shopping with friends in London. How could she look so babyish and so sophisticated? How could she earn so much when she was so young? (The Sunday Times Rich List estimates that she is worth at least £4m.) How could she miss so much school and earn a place at Cambridge, gaining a first this summer in her first-year exams.

It was perhaps inevitable that, after a short period of catwalk adulation, Cole would turn to acting. She had a small part in the 2007 remake of St Trinian’s, but now she is poised for a meatier role as the female lead in a film that has become memorable before it has even opened. It was an experience both wonderful and blighted, because her co-star died in the middle of filming.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus has had a troubled genesis. Prior to production, its iconoclastic director, Terry Gilliam, faced a series of obstacles: the dithering of backers, the usual wrangling over money.

Gilliam took a risk on Cole, then just 19, who had never performed such a huge and integral role. There was considerable stress over how exactly she had to raise her game, but there was absolute devastation when her co-star Heath Ledger was found dead by his housekeeper in his New York loft in January 2008. Most of her scenes were with him. She worked with him perhaps more than any other member of the cast. She got to know his generous spirit. “He definitely helped me. From the beginning he understood that I would be overwhelmed and scared by the size of this project. He encouraged me and said he was really proud of me, constantly fed me support.”

Ledger’s death has been talked about so much — was it self-destruction or an accident with sleeping pills? He had chronic insomnia. He was in turmoil that he might lose his daughter, Matilda, then two, from his broken-down relationship with Michelle Williams, who he met on the rebound from Naomi Watts on the set of Brokeback Mountain. When I met Ledger I found him spiritual, wise beyond his years, a huge force of life, never someone who would have taken his own. The conundrum of his death has become an intellectual exercise.

When I saw the film I wasn’t prepared for the impact of seeing Ledger suddenly alive, real, vibrant, filling the screen, spiky with charisma. “I felt exactly the same,” says Cole. She has talked about this at length in private but never in public, until now. All those I spoke to who are connected to the film seem keen not to appear to be using the tragedy of Ledger as a marketing tool for the film. Yet still the ghouls will swell the box office.

Cole plays Valentina, Parnassus’s 16-year-old daughter. Her father, played by Christopher Plummer, has made a deal with the devil to seal her fate on her 16th birthday. She pouts when she says she is “sweet 16”, as if to say there is nothing sweet about her. She is never a victim. In the film she falls for Ledger’s rakish character. Their chemistry was real and they became very close. How hard was it to carry on without him? “It was incredibly hard. He became the driving force.” In death as in life, she means.

During the shoot, Ledger, along with many other cast members, including Lily, got the flu. After his death it was even said he had been suffering from pneumonia. He had certainly stopped drinking, and Cole recalls a consummate professional who worked meticulously. Perhaps he wanted to expunge the pain through his work. “He never told me he had pneumonia; there was no whimpering, no ‘Can I take a break?’ ”

When news of Ledger’s death broke, the cast were completely undone. They were deprived of a much-loved colleague and feared the film was unlikely to be finished. Thanks to Gilliam’s own determination and guile, it was salvaged. “Terry is the kind of person who has balls if he believes in something,” Cole says.

Ironically, the replacements that Gilliam lined up for Ledger — Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law — were arguably bigger names than Ledger himself. “People who were close to Heath wanted to do it for Heath,” Cole says. It’s as if, through them, he lived on. Her voice trails off; there is more than a note of sadness. “Johnny slipped seamlessly into the role, but that didn’t stop it being bizarre. I’m playing the same character; they are playing a character that is familiar to me but not the same actor. But when you look at the script, it could have been written that way. There are so many references to death.”

Sometimes Cole doesn’t say anything. Sometimes she gives a strange, all-knowing, echoey laugh. “In the film, everyone was part of one unit. That’s what helped us carry on. On top of that, everyone loved Heath… For everyone who knew him, it was devastating. The practicalities of continuing the production were difficult, but it seemed irrelevant. If you lose somebody you love, whether it’s at the beginning of shooting or at the end — it didn’t really matter. We were creatively challenged, yes. It was a bizarre experience. Heath was such a lovable human being. I thought I was in at the deep end at the beginning, and then look what happened.” I’m not sure if she realises what the film will do for her. It shows her as feisty and strong, with a poise and a face that could carry a film.

We’re talking after a photoshoot in LA, where she spends a lot of time. She’s wearing denim cut-offs, sandals with a big white flower between the toes, a rose-gold ring that matches her hair, and a black sweater. She’s tall, very tall, around 6ft. She’s got big breasts and there’s nothing about her that looks waif-like, frail or modellish. But maybe she has redefined what is modellish. She seems super-confident in her own skin. I say her performance as Valentina seems natural and feisty, and she giggles: “That works!” I ask if Gilliam might have been inspired by her naughty schoolgirl role in St Trinian’s. “No,” she says. “He hadn’t seen it. It came about after I’d been asked to do Rage with Sally Potter.”

Rage is a behind-the-scenes look at the modelling industry: mini-monologues, documentary-style but scripted by Potter. It features Jude Law’s alarming portrayal of a transvestite (I didn’t realise it was him until I read the credits) and Cole playing a model called Lettuce Leaf. Her delivery is drily perfect, full of irony. I recognise her special ironic laugh as one from her performance as Lettuce Leaf.

I wondered if she’d improvised a lot around the original script of Rage. “Everyone asks that, but the script didn’t change that much from when I first read it.” In Rage, she didn’t work with any of the other actors. Each performance is made up of monologues, so she too was shocked when she saw Jude Law take on a role as a transvestite. “Lots of people couldn’t believe it was him.”

Her performance as Lettuce Leaf is freshly observed, measured and shows an ability to send herself up — or at least her model self. Discussing another model becoming undone by anorexia, Lettuce Leaf says: “The way to be big is to be little.” Does that still sum up modelling? Was she ever asked to be smaller? “There’s definitely still a fascination with being thin and skinny in the modelling world. I also think there’s a celebration of curves. I have breasts. I love my breasts. There are models now who have more curves, and that’s seen as a good thing. I’ve never studied the correlation between the decades of plenty and the size of models, but it’s interesting, for sure. I was never asked to lose weight. I’m assuming people who are less successful are the ones who are told they need to be teeny to be so.”

One imagines that Cole was always instilled with confidence and cleverness. At the same time she is fresh, funny and doesn’t take herself seriously. In 2003, Steven Meisel photographed her for Italian Vogue. By 2004 she was British model of the year, and by 2007 she was making tabloid headlines — “Model Risks Career for Learning” — after deciding to start at King’s College, Cambridge. She is bemused that people find it strange that you can be gorgeous and clever. She isn’t at Cambridge to have her intelligence validated, nor does she think it will lead to a specific career.

“People change direction all the time; there’s a lot of value in that. I fell into modelling. It wasn’t a choice; not that I was forced into it. I just got asked one day to do it, and I believe in taking opportunities.”

When she arrived at Cambridge there was already a sense of her separateness. She had deferred her place for two years, and had done Gilliam’s film. Cambridge was not a means to an end; she just wanted to learn things. She doesn’t yet know where she will live next term, maybe in a flat, maybe a hall. As much as she can, she pursues a normal student life. Does she find it hard to make friends? She must be far richer and more accomplished than most girls her age. Doesn’t she find girls spiteful and jealous?

“I know what you mean about girls being like that, having gone to a girls’ school, but I wouldn’t want to attract those kind of people as friends and they wouldn’t attract me. I’ve been blessed with friends who are just happy for me.”

Is she expected to buy all the rounds of drinks? “No, a lot of my friends are working. A lot of them are doing well. None of us spend money extravagantly, so there’s not a huge disparity. So that’s never an issue,” she sighs, irritated.

“I was with my sister just last week. I know she really loves me. Within that love there’s no jealousy. There’s an acceptance of her life and my life and their differences. I don’t think she’d want my life, running around all the time, being recognised, all those things that come with it.” She pauses, then laughs: “But I’m sure she’d like to make as much money as I’m making!”

Cole grew up in a bohemian family that moved from Torquay to London when she was a baby. Her mother, an artist and a writer, was left on her own with two small daughters. I ask if she is more like her mother or father. She says her mother thinks she’s very much like her father, and Cole is not sure if that is meant as a compliment. He went to live in Spain about 15 years ago. She doesn’t really know why. “I guess he just preferred it there. He likes to make things. He built a boat, a 64ft yacht, because he wanted to sail around the world. He’d already built that by himself when he met my mum on the Bayswater Road. He was selling jewellery that he’d made and she was selling paintings.

“I don’t know him that well. I lived with my mum growing up in London. I take after my mum as well, because she’s an unusual, free-spirited person. She’s often said I take after my dad, his wild personality. Perhaps she’s just assigning the bad things to him. She thinks my stubbornness and my being quite smart comes from him.”

Does she see him at all? “Every year, every few years.” There is no hint of sadness, instead a hint of intrigue: intrigued by the father she doesn’t really know, intrigued by the maleness missing in her upbringing. There was no stepdad. And her mother still doesn’t have a boyfriend. At home there were just three 6ft redheaded females. Was that as fiery as it sounds? “Sure. I don’t think we clashed. Mum is a very peaceful woman. But me and my sister... What can I say? I’m calm now, but as a child I was very passionate. Either very happy or very loving or very raging. I was quite sure about things. Me and my sister fought a lot.” They get on well now, and her sister teaches at the primary school that she used to attend.

When she was a little girl she had a spell at the Sylvia Young Theatre School, which she hated.

“I went to a state school which did a lot of performing arts. I acted a lot there. I had a scholarship. Then I went to Latymer [in Hammersmith], and they had an amazing theatre department, but I was always away modelling so much, it didn’t make sense for me to do drama, because you have to rehearse with the whole group. But acting was the thing I always loved.”

Cole excelled at both arts and sciences. She did her maths GCSE a year early. “The logical part of me loved the idea of maths. I found the creative aspect of English harder because the marking is so ambiguous, whereas maths stuff is either right or wrong.” Her love of maths strikes me as odd. Everything else about her seems so spontaneous, fluid, ambiguous. Perhaps it partly explains why university is so important to her. Maybe it’s the intellectual challenge of maths that appeals to her.

Will she finish her degree? She deliberates. “I’m going to see. I would like to. I like learning. I was going to do social and political science, then I switched to history of art, but I could have done either. I can get impassioned about politics, but I find studying it can lead to a boxy way of looking at the world, so I was put off studying it.”

And her own personal politics? “I don’t think there’s one political system that’s watertight. I believe in freedom, personal liberty.”

She doesn’t want to be pinned down about this. She admires Obama, doesn’t commit her thoughts on Brown, and we go into a brief if vague discussion about the nature of freedom. She would make a great politician. She gives something of herself in every answer, but never necessarily answers the question you ask her.

Cole is not sure how her future will play out, but a bad boy, a yacht and a beach in the south of France would never be enough for her. Would she say she was conventional in any way? “What is the implication of that question? You don’t ask a person who you think is conventional that question. So the implication is you don’t think I’m very conventional.” She’s laughing rather than irritated. “My family is important, and my close friends are important, and believing in love is important. I haven’t got a lot of stability, because I’m running around, but I’m seeking stability in relationships with friends, family and lovers. So in those ways I am quite conventional. And I want to get married and have children. That’s quite conventional. It’s human nature.”

I wonder if she plans to marry her boyfriend, the LA-based 36-year-old American actor Enrique Murciano, who starred in the long-running detective series Without a Trace and who she’s been with for a year.

“Who knows?” she says, with a look that suggests she might really like that. “Yes,” she concedes. “I love him and he knows that. And he loves me. So we’ll see.”

I am sure she will mostly get what she wants. Parnassus, with all its dramatic background, is an incredible showcase. She went into it a model and has emerged as a rare talent who will one day be a draw in her own right.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article6812668.ece

Offline Kay-Nasty

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Re: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
« Reply #157 on: August 31, 2009, 09:49:47 am »
The US release date was finally made official as of Aug 31 (I guess wiki had jumped the gun a while ago and passed the info around. But apparently they got lucky ;))

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus to Open Christmas Day

Source:ComingSoon.net August 31, 2009

ComingSoon.net has learned that Sony Pictures Classics plans to release Terry Gilliam's new movie The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus on Christmas Day, confirming earlier conjecture about the possibility.

Featuring the final screen performance by the late Heath Ledger, who earlier this year won a posthumous Oscar for his performance in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, the film will be making its North American premiere at the Toronto Film Festival on September 18 and be released in the UK on October 16.

The movie also stars Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, Jude Law , Christopher Plummer, Tom Waits, Lily Cole, Andrew Garfield and Verne Troyer.

http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=58533


"I never had money, and I was very happy without it. When I die, my money's not gonna come with me. My movies will live on - for people to judge what I was as a person."  ~Heath, I swear

Offline sel

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Re: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
« Reply #158 on: September 28, 2009, 10:15:25 am »
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/sep/27/heath-ledger-parnassus-terry-gilliam

Terry Gilliam: 'Parnassus was star Heath Ledger's film even after he died'Terry Gilliam was devastated by the death of his friend Heath Ledger before they finished shooting his latest movie, but it was the actor's spirit that drove him to complete it

Tim Adams The Observer (British newspaper), Sunday 27 September 2009 Article history


Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus, starring Heath Ledger

The first time we see Heath Ledger, the star of Terry Gilliam's forthcoming film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, he is hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London with a noose around his neck; he is subsequently brought, coughing and choking, back to life. Given that, in January 2008, Ledger himself died during the making of Parnassus, from a probably accidental combination of sleeping tablets, it is an unnervingly shocking moment.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus Production year: 2009 Directors: Terry Gilliam Cast: Colin Farrell, Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Jude Law, Lily Cole More on this film It is also a pointed reminder that film routinely deals in immortality: Ledger, who won a posthumous Oscar last year for his performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight, has never looked as alive as he does in what follows.

When he first heard of Ledger's death, Gilliam didn't know how he could go on with the film. Ledger, who had worked with him on The Brothers Grimm in 2005, had become like a son and a muse rolled into one. Over a late-morning margarita in a Soho hotel, Gilliam tells me that while making Parnassus "Heath had been running full pelt, carrying the whole film on his shoulders. Telling me what to do; insatiable, exhausting."

Full of grief and despair, Gilliam's first instinct was that it would be impossible to finish what Ledger had started; only two-thirds of his role had been filmed. Moreover, on the morning after the news of his death emerged investors began pulling out. "You can't believe how quickly the money ran away from this thing," he says.

It was Gilliam's 31-year-old daughter, Amy, working for the first time as a producer, who persuaded him that it could be done. "She turned out to be really fantastically pig-headed and good," Gilliam says. "It was like a mother instinct took over." They turned off the phones and locked themselves in a room with "some red wine and prosciutto and parmesan" and, along with Gilliam's cinematographer Nicola Pecorini, worked out a plan. This involved finding someone who could complete Ledger's role, because as Amy Gilliam put it at the time, "a dead star wasn't big enough. Now we needed a bigger star to continue the movie."

Gilliam called Johnny Depp, who had been Ledger's friend, and when Depp immediately said he would do whatever was needed they felt they might just be able to go on. In the event, Depp's schedule allowed him to fill only some of Ledger's remaining scenes, so Gilliam persuaded Jude Law and Colin Farrell to cover the rest and then rewrote the script to add an almost seamless capacity for shape-shifting to Ledger's already mercurial character.

If that solved the logistical problem, however, there was also the emotional fallout to negotiate. Though he knew Ledger had been suffering after the breakdown of his relationship with the actress Michelle Williams and a custody battle over their two-year-old daughter Matilda, there had been no particular reason for Gilliam to fear for his friend. "He was so strong," he says. "That's why none of it makes sense. The last night before he died we were shooting in Clerkenwell in London, this scene where Dr Parnassus's wagon collapses. The last piece of film of Heath is of him holding on for dear life to the back of a runaway travelling theatre. What a way to go! He was doing everything that night, all his own stunts. You really felt as a director there was nothing he wasn't capable of."

The only worry that Gilliam had for Ledger at the time was his insomnia, which seemed to leave him strung out on occasion. "In real life, the one thing he could not do, it seemed, was sleep. He would arrive in the morning and look awful, but then after an hour he would be – bam! – full on. It was like he was going wooooooooooo, and then stopped for no reason."

Gilliam talked to Ledger's family about his plans to continue with the film. "It was the following weekend, I think," he recalls. "Everything was spinning. We all wept, it was one of those awful lunches when it seemed like there would be nothing to say, but then about halfway through we just started telling stories about Heath and we couldn't stop; we were all giggling and laughing by the end."

Gilliam managed to carry some of that spirit back to the film set with him. "The thing about Heath was that he was all positive," he says. "There wasn't a darkness about him, and we had to hold on to that. It eased the grief, in a way. Because even after he died we were still working with him every day. It was still his movie. We'd be like: 'Fuck, that bastard Ledger hasn't shown up again, he better have a good excuse this time.' That's how you deal with it. It was only when the film was finally finished that it hit me."

All of Gilliam's films, particularly the imaginative epics like Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, have seemed on one level to be running commentaries on the creative nightmare of the film industry and the near impossibility of making anything other than formulaic movies. This film takes that impulse further. Gilliam can certainly see himself in Dr Parnassus, played by Christopher Plummer, who is in eternal combat with the Devil (Tom Waits) for human souls, and is armed only with his clapped-out theatre and some half-forgotten tricks. "Parnassus is a transparent kind of self-portrait," Gilliam says, laughing at the idea. "Man with imagination wants to share it with the world, and the world doesn't want to listen. And he is getting really old before our eyes."

Gilliam is 69 now, though you'd never guess. He recently attended the latest reunion of the Monty Python team, their 40th anniversary – "a good one because we just spent hours talking about John Cleese's divorce settlement, and privately asking ourselves, where does he get that kind of money?" If his career has had anything as grown-up as a purpose, he suggests, it is to bring some Python-like surprise to films. "Because the world is such a complete mess," he says, "people increasingly go to the cinema for tidiness. They want to exist for an hour or two in a world where everything is explained, and everything is logical.

"I, however, am inherently messy, and have a feeling that is what a lot of being human is about. I seem to have a perverse side to myself that I have to make it as difficult as possible both for me and the audience, but still try to entertain."

Sometimes, as almost happened with Parnassus, the chaos of the world simply overwhelms Gilliam's best-laid plans. Almost 20 years ago now he set out to make what might have been his defining film, a reimagining of Don Quixote, to be filmed in La Mancha, in Spain. It took him a decade to raise funding, and a couple of years to engage the perfect Don (Jean Rochefort, a Frenchman). In the first week of filming Rochefort suffered a herniated disc and was hospitalised, then a freak mudslide carried away all of the cameras and equipment and the film itself was buried under insurance claims. A documentary of the events, Lost in La Mancha, preserves Gilliam's anguish.

A less hopeful man than Gilliam, I say, might consider himself to be jinxed. "I don't think I would even describe it as hope any more," he says. "I'm just a fatalist. I try to do my best to make things happen, and then they either do or they don't."

Gilliam is planning to start shooting The Man who Killed Don Quixote again next year, believing the script has been improved by returning to it after a long hiatus. Johnny Depp is still promising to be in it. Does Gilliam believe it will happen this time? "I'm very confident that it will," he says, "but then as I've got older I've become more Sisyphean in my thinking: I believe a lot of it is all about pushing a rock up a hill and endlessly watching the fucking thing roll down again."

To that extent, I suggest, each time he finishes a film it must feel like a little act of defiance against the prevailing forces of the world. Given the tragic circumstances, in the case of the new film, Parnassus, I guess that feeling has been magnified?

"I think it is important that we got it done," he says. "Heath would have wanted to see it finished. I mean, there is this feeling that in the face of death we have to do something appropriate, we have to be polite or something, but that wasn't Heath at all." Gilliam grins. "My attitude is that the only way we keep death away from us is to keep giggling. Death really hates laughter, it just has no sense of humour at all."


The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus will be released on 16 October.
BbM, I swear

Offline stonebiscuit

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Re: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
« Reply #159 on: September 29, 2009, 06:01:50 am »
Great article, thanks.