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The Imaginarium of Terry Gilliam

Terry Gilliam is one of my favourite people.

We’ve talked a few times over the years – our first interview was for Twelve Monkeys, in December of 1995 – and every time, he’s been an eloquent conversationalist, positively giddy with enthusiasm for his projects, his friends and his collaborators.

You would never know he’s spent the last decade struggling to overcome one catastrophe after another: the collapse of his Don Quixote movie (documented at length in the brilliant Lost In La Mancha), the post-production torment of his fairy-tale fantasy The Brothers Grimm the belly-flop of his moody psychodrama Tideland and, finally, the accidental death of Heath Ledger halfway through the production of his new film, The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus. Gilliam recruited Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell to play Ledger’s character in the remaining sequences, and even found a way to make it work within the context of the film.

Welcoming him back to TIFF for the North American premiere of Parnassus, I find myself discussing the frigid temperature in David Letterman’s studio (in protest, Gilliam showed up for a spot wearing a parka), and the joy of watching Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder. (“The layers,” he says. “I haven’t seen anything like that, ever, at all.”)

We’re nearly halfway through our allotted time before I realize we should really be talking about his movie.

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“This is more fun,” he says with that contagious grin. “Let’s not talk about my film, I’m bored with it.”

We talk a little more about Downey, and how Downey’s energy is a lot like Depp’s: “There’s several people like that. Johnny has it, Downey has it. I think Colin Farrell has it. He’s out of rehab, but he’s still got that hanging over him – he’s just astonishing, just working with him a bit on Parnassus, I was just utterly blown away by him. And he’s funny. Heath had that energy, Johnny had it there’s a group of people I know who are all right up there – they’re all incredibly funny, incredibly talented, they can spin on a dime. They can do just about anything, and they’re all incredibly intelligent, so it’s good fun to be with them.”

There it is. Heath. I can’t not ask about Ledger – and, like virtually everyone else who worked with the actor, Gilliam is intensely protective of his friend’s memory.

“That’s the stuff that just makes me crazy,” he says. “It happened the other night here – a lady journalist came up to me and said ‘oh, yeah, all the drugs and everything really killed him.'”

Gilliam draws back in his chair, reliving the memory: “‘What the fuck are you talking about? You have no idea who that kid was.’ He was probably one of the most grounded people I’ve ever met. He was very old for his age – I’ve said he was about 240 years old when he died. There was such wisdom in that kid, and such excitement about everything he was just learning, he was sucking it all in – and he was just getting better and better and better. We have lost probably the greatest actor of a couple generations. And just an extraordinary human being, as well. They don’t quite understand, and all that fucking shit that was going on – that was not him.

“Heath had the ability which all the great actors had, which is the ability to play. It’s play, what they’re doing. When we were getting this thing going and he was shooting (The Dark Knight) in London, he used to come back giggling, and saying ‘you can’t believe what I got away with today! I worked with Gary Oldman’ – who he was utterly in awe of – ‘and I’m doing this scene, and Gary can’t do anything! I’m invulnerable! You can smash me to pieces, and I don’t care!’ And he was just giggling with glee. That’s what people don’t understand, because we’ve been so beaten to death by American method acting, thinking that you’ve got to ‘be’ the character. No, you play the character, that’s what you do.”

The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus premieres today (Sept. 18) at 6:30 pm at Roy Thomson Hall, and repeats tomorrow (Sept. 19) at 2:30 pm at the Elgin.

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