It seems all Terry Gilliam's movies have been cursed - and the latest keeps up the trend, he tells Steve Pratt.
MAKING movies has never been cheap or easy for Monty Python's Terry Gilliam. His projects have been dogged by budget difficulties, bad weather, sick actors and dogmatic producers - problems that seem to be the price he must pay to achieve his artistic vision.
A Terry Gilliam film without a crisis is unimaginable. They're usually worth all the trouble. You might not always like the result - Brazil, Time Bandits, The Fisher King and Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas have detractors as well as admirers - but you have to admire the visual flair and uncompromising vision.
They even made a movie about the misfortunes that dogged his film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, abandoned after a few weeks due to freak weather conditions and the poor health of leading actor Jean Rochefort. Lost In La Mancha charted the film that never was in intimate detail.
It would be nice to report that production of his latest fantasy film, The Brothers Grimm, was straightforward. But it wasn't. At one point, the film ground to a halt, giving him time to go and make another picture, Tideland, before shooting resumed on the Grimm movie. "We reached this point when there seemed to be a disagreement about what the film was and what it should or it could be and wouldn't be," explains Gilliam.
"The money for Tideland was available so, rather than get into a big fight about where we are, I thought I've got this other film that has to be shot now because of weather and everything, so I'll go away and do it. Then in January I got a call to finish Grimm, so I ended up editing two films at the same time."
There was a dispute too about the Grimm Brothers' leading lady. Gallantly, Gilliam says nothing more than that the casting was "slightly difficult" and that Lena Headey wasn't cast "the way she'd like to be cast".
He certainly didn't take it easy on her because of that, asking vegetarian Headey to skin a rabbit on camera. Hunters showed her how to do it once, after which she ran off with the bunny being groomed for the shot and kept it. "She saved a rabbit's life. In the film, it's a plastic rabbit with lots of condoms full of blood and guts. It was really hard for her to do, even with the plastic one," he says.
The Brothers Grimm seems obvious Gilliam material, being about the fairy storytelling brothers (played by Matt Damon and Heath Ledger), portrayed as conmen making money from fake exorcisms. They have to face a real magical curse in an enchanted forest where maidens keep disappearing under mysterious circumstances.
He wasn't taken with the original screenplay. "It read like a proper Hollywood script and had two contemporary smartass guys who went to Ye Olde Germany and basically got involved with a lot of special effects," he says.
"It was a very big, elaborate movie that was pretty much the same sort of structure that you saw in something like The Mummy or Scorpion King. We tried to bring it back into the world of enchantment and fairy tales, and playing with that.
"We were making a fairy tale about the men who gathered the fairy tales. We didn't want to be tied down with a biopic. The only thing we did do was stay within the world of early 19th century Germany with the French invasion."
The Brothers Grimm has that dark edge associated with Gilliam's work, right back to the animations he did for the Monty Python TV series. He says the movie plays brilliantly for kids, despite people claiming it's too rough for them.
"We're doing a lot of screenings for kids and they love skinning rabbits. That's what you did in the 19th century. And horses swallowing children. Read your fairy tales. Grimm's were dark, so that was important, not to do some modern PC, bland version," he says.
"Fairy tales scared the hell out of me when I was a kid. They also gave me immense pleasure because you go to some dark places and you come out alive at the end. Those things are very much part of it. Somehow people think fairy tales are things with tinkly music and lots of people in pink."
Every film he's done has been difficult to get off the ground, perhaps because it's hard to write visuals into a script. "I have a lot of ideas in my films that I'm trying to get across, which often bothers people. The people who sit on the money, especially large amounts of money, are very conservative people," he says.
"More and more they seem to be less informed about films. In half the conversations I have on something like this, they're always referring to other films. 'Can we have a scene on a bicycle like in Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid?' or 'You know, like that one with Leo on the front of the boat?'.
"You end up in these conversations that are all a series of cliches, referring to other successful films. The dialogue shrinks down, the vocabulary shrinks down, so it's hard.
"This film got the money because it appeared to be developing into a traditional adventure film, so it gained momentum. Once a film gets going and more people are involved, it's very hard to stop, so I suppose that's the trick with a lot of film-makers."
The Python influence lingers on. There are characters in The Brothers Grimm that could have come from that series, he admits. "It's always going to be there because I've got that same sense of comedy. I love over-the-top performances, extreme characters, all the things we used to do.
"We've each done a personal best that's coming out soon and looking at the show today, it's shocking how bad it is. It's so bad, so cheesy, so cheap and yet it's still really funny. Nothing's come along and matched it. I don't know why. The League of Gentlemen I loved because I thought they captured a similar grotesqueness.
"Python's always going to be there. It'll be on the gravestone. Depending what I do next. Maybe it will say ex-Bond girl."
* The Brothers Grimm (12A) opens on Friday.
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