Fanciful fantasy director Terry Gilliam has been honored with a BAFTA fellowship, so he’s making the press rounds (he self-deprecatingly calls it a gesture of “sympathy”).
There’s lot of notable things said in this U.K. Telegraph article, but it’s interesting to note that he says “Harry Potter” author JK Rowling was a fan and wanted him to direct one of the films.
Gilliam –well aware he’s been box-office poison of late — laments, “but the studio was never going to let me.”
Man, what a missed opportunity. Think of all the fucked-up nightmares Gilliam could have given kids that were fan of that series had he properly channeled his inner “Brazil.” But then again, Gilliam hates Hollywood suits (“hollow, desperate people”) and they really haven’t been much interested in him in recent years either (dude desperately needs a hit).
Whenever he talks about Heath Ledger, whose last screen appearance is in Gilliam’s “The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus,” the asshole in us dies a little bit and we get all feelings. “[Heath] lifted everybody. He wasn’t like Marlon Brando or James Dean or any of the more neurotic actors, his was all positive energy. I knew he was tired but that Saturday he had been doing all his own stunts, he was leaping off wagons, indestructible. On no level did his death make sense,” he said.
It’s interesting to note how Colin Farrell became one of the actors involved in replacing Ledger after he died. And apparently Jude Law was in line to play Ledger’s part initially.
He had worked with Johnny Depp on The Man who Killed Don Quixote, another of his films. “I called him. He said, ‘I’m in.'” Next he asked Jude Law, who would have played Ledger’s role had he not been busy. He too was up for it. He found his third substitute at Ledger’s funeral. “I didn’t know he was a friend,” he thought, seeing Colin Farrell. Farrell also accepted.
The disaster-prone filmmaker has been talking about resurrecting the aforementioned ‘Quixote’ project (he recently began work on a new script for the take-two attempt) in recent weeks. Let’s hope for his career (or at least Ledger’s sake) that ‘Parnassus’ is half decent.
PS, as one of our astute readers point out. Lots of fantasy authors are big fans of Terry Gilliam. Philip Pullman wanted him to direct “The Golden Compass,” and he was also approved by Roald Dahl‘s widow to remake “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” but in each case, the studio totally cockblocked and shut the ideas down. Poor Gilliam.
