The announcement of a new Terry Gilliam film tends to evoke a lively mixture of excitement, curiosity and not a little apprehension. The visionary director has the reputation of a singularly creative maverick, but his creations' passage to the screen has not always been easy. The tragic loss of Heath Ledger during the production of THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS, threatened closedown, but Gilliam fought to reconfigure the story without losing the fine performance which his star had already committed to film. The director, his ensemble cast and his crew worked tirelessly together to complete the journey which had begun in the fervid, boundless imagination of Gilliam and his co-writer Charles McKeown less than eighteen months before.
"Since the format of the story allows for the preservation of his entire performance, at no point will Heath's work be modified or altered through the use of digital technology," the film's producers reassured the media and public: "Each of the parts played by Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law is representative of the many aspects of the
character that Heath was playing." "I am grateful to Johnny, Colin and Jude for coming on board and to everyone else who has made it possible for us to finish the film," added
director Terry Gilliam, "and I am delighted that Heath's brilliant performance can be shared with the world."
In the modern-day fantasy adventure, Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) has the extraordinary gift of inspiring the imaginations of others. Helped by his traveling theatre troupe, including his sarcastic and cynical sidekick Percy (Verne Troyer) and versatile young player Anton (recent BAFTA®-winner Andrew Garfield), Parnassus offers audience members the chance to transcend mundane reality by passing through a magical mirror into a fantastic universe of limitless imagination. However, Parnassus' magic comes at a price. For centuries he's been gambling with the devil, Mr. Nick (Tom Waits) who is coming to collect his prize - Parnassus' precious daughter, Valentina (Lily Cole) on her upcoming 16th birthday.
Oblivious to her rapidly approaching fate, Valentina falls for Tony (Heath Ledger), a charming outsider with motives of his own. In order to save his daughter and redeem himself, Parnassus makes one final bet with Mr. Nick, which sends Tony (played during his several visits to the world beyond the mirror by Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law) and Valentina and the entire theatre troupe on a ride of twists and turns, in and out of London and the Imaginarium's spectacular landscape.

The film began principal photography at the beginning of December 2007 in Britain's capital, where Gilliam shot dramatic scenes featuring Parnassus, his company and their imposing horse-drawn dwelling cum theatre, against a wide range of the city's familiar landmarks. The wagon, driven by Verne Troyer's Percy, became a familiar if mindboggling sight for the City of London's merry pre-Christmas revellers as it clattered through the nighttime streets.
A series of wintry night shoots saw the Imaginarium's travelling stage fully dressed and unfolded in a bustling fairground dominated by the familiar profile of Tower Bridge; then at the centre of a drunken riot in the imposing shadow of Southwark Cathedral; and later invaded by Russian mobsters in the glorious Victorian confines of Leadenhall Market. Two of the principal characters were suspended perilously, in an icy gale and an artificial downpour, from Blackfriars Bridge over the Thames, while the gigantic, crumbling magnificence of Battersea Power Station, the largest brick-built structure in Europe, hosted a variety of domestic scenes featuring Doctor Parnassus and his extended 'family'.
On completion of these present-day sequences, the production moved to Bridge Studios near Vancouver in Canada for seven weeks of blue-screen photography, creating the epic grandeur of the Imaginarium. Vancouver also offered some striking locations, such as its magnificent art deco theatre, The Orpheum, which hosted the film's charity ball and press conference.

Synopsis
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a fantastical morality tale, set in the present-day. It tells the story of Dr. Parnassus and his extraordinary 'Imaginarium', a travelling show where members of the audience get an irresistible opportunity to choose between light and joy or darkness and gloom.
Blessed with the extraordinary gift of guiding the imaginations of others, Doctor Parnassus is cursed with a dark secret. An inveterate gambler, thousands of years ago he made a bet with the devil, Mr. Nick, in which he won immortality. Centuries later, on meeting his one true love, Dr. Parnassus made another deal with the devil, trading his immortality for youth, on condition that when his daughter reached her 16th birthday, she would become the property of Mr Nick.
Valentina is now rapidly approaching this 'coming of age' milestone and Dr. Parnassus is desperate to protect her from her impending fate. Mr. Nick arrives to collect but, always keen to make a bet, renegotiates the wager. Now the winner of Valentina will be determined by whoever seduces the first five souls. Enlisting a series of wild, comical and compelling characters in his journey, Dr. Parnassus promises his daughter's hand in marriage to the man that helps him win.
In this captivating, explosive and wonderfully imaginative race against time, Dr. Parnassus must fight to save his daughter in a never-ending landscape of surreal obstacles - and undo the mistakes of his past once and for all!

Background Notes

Hammering away at the marble:
In November 2006, Terry Gilliam and Charles McKeown started on the script, the third of their written collaborations, following "Brazil" and "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen."
Gilliam had decided to write something original again, after a number of projects based on finished scripts or adapted from books. "It was nice to see whether we could still do it ourselves from scratch," he explains. He set himself to exploring his store of unused materials - various ideas, some from unmade films, which had been lying around in a drawer - and started dragging them all out to see what could be used.
He wanted to explore the idea of a troupe of travelling theatre people, based in modern-day London, who entered into a variety of exotic and fantastical worlds. Gilliam also devised the central character of a man who is a bit lost, out of his time, and out of gear with his audience, who don't want to listen to the stories that he tells any more, while it was McKeown who came up with the name Parnassus. "It's his adventure, really, I suppose. It wasn't absolutely fixed, but that was fairly clear in Terry's mind. I think the idea of Dr Parnassus as a semi-Eastern medicine man just evolved. I don't think he started quite like that."
The next stage involved them sitting down and throwing ideas around, although as Gilliam admits, there was no real plan to it. McKeown felt that choice was very important in their movie - entering this extraordinary world involves a series of choices which rule the lives of the characters. The two writers worked on computers, e-mailing back and forth. "Then we'd have another sit down," says Gilliam. "We'd go through it and, little by little, something was worked out. There is no form as such, it was just sitting down and hammering away at this big block of marble until something beautiful was carved from it."
"We talked for a couple of weeks around the subject, very broadly," says McKeown. "We spent a day talking about the whole range of subjects and then, finally, we started talking about the thing itself, and how it related to current events. It was a mixture of a whole medley of stuff for a couple of weeks and then we started to write a treatment.
"In fact, I insisted that Terry write the treatment because he had a better grip of what it was he wanted than I did at that stage. I didn't really quite get it at that point, I don't think. Although it was fun and I could see the story, I thought that Terry had a clearer view. Then I started writing scenes and dialogue and characters and settings and so on, clarifying it a bit. I would send him by e-mail six or seven pages, and he would work on that. He'd change it and embellish it and take what he wanted and add what he wanted, and so on. Meanwhile, I'd send him another lot of pages and he would send that back and show me what he'd done.
"It was a rolling process, going back and forth and, at one point, we'd stop when we got right to the end of the script, and discuss where we were going, and where we were so far."
According to Gilliam, "It was like a tennis match, throwing things back and forth, and slowly things kept developing. You have ideas, you start plugging them in - and out of it comes a tale. It's nice working with Charles again - it's been a long time since 'Munchausen'."
"I don't think what we ended up with was what we started out with, in every respect," admits McKeown. "Maybe Doctor Parnassus is fairly close to how he started, but the other characters changed a bit as we went along. Certainly, the character of Valentina, Parnassus's daughter, changed a lot and the other characters shifted too, when they weren't quite working as well as they might do.
"We break the rules really. You are supposed to focus on a central character. That's one of the recipes for success, to have a central character with whom the audience can identify. But this is a group piece and although it's called Doctor Parnassus, and he's very much the centre of it, and everything goes on around him, nevertheless, you are caught up in everybody else's story as well.
"The theme of imagination is central - the importance of imagination to how you live and how you think and so on - and that's very much a Terry theme. For some time, he's taken other scripts and books and made them his own, in the sense that they are identifiably Terry Gilliam movies. But I think this goes further than what he's done more recently. He's had more of an input, this is more his thing. This is more a Terry Gilliam film than there has been for some time. Terry always throws himself into what he does with such tremendous energy and vigour, that it has to be worth his while. It has to be worth knocking himself out for, and I think 'Brazil' was like that, and to some extent 'Munchausen'. It has this visceral quality, and Terry doesn't hold back when he commits himself.
This is something to which he has committed himself 120%, and it has all the possibilities of delivering more of him than the other work he has been doing recently."
"I'm not sure whose autobiography it is," confesses Gilliam. "I mean, I thought it was vaguely related to mine, but I'm not sure any more! It's about the struggle of creative people…artists... They try to inspire others, encourage them to open their eyes, to appreciate the truth of the world, but most are not successful - that's the reality.
"It's a tragical/magical idea - a group of extraordinary people in an amazing theatre, travelling round London, but nobody's paying attention to them. I am convinced that in the modern world people don't see what is really important any more. Everybody's trapped in their IPods or their video games or playing the stock market - all interesting and timeconsuming - but there are really extraordinary and important things happening out there and nobody is paying attention."

Putting it on film:
"I did storyboards for the first time in a long time on this one," remembers Terry Gilliam, gleefully. "That's why I was enjoying it. It was like going back to my earlier films on which I storyboarded everything myself. That's really an exciting part of the process as you write a script - sitting down and starting to draw pictures. It's transformed. It becomes a different thing. I don't read the script again, we rewrite it based on what I've just drawn and that's really nice. We build models, we use CG and mix everything up and try to get everybody confused, so you can't quite see how we're creating our world. It's like a magic trick…….Read more

Casting:
"Christopher Plummer was the first one we cast, I think," explains Gilliam. "He's a great actor. He's theatrical, he's of a certain age, and he has been a huge star. His daughter Amanda Plummer worked in 'The Fisher King' with me and there's an interesting relationship with him and his real daughter. What's fantastic about Christopher is that his theatrical sense proved to be absolutely perfect for the character - and the fact that he wanted to find the humour in the character all the time."  Read more


The Worlds of Doctor Parnassus:
Bringing the director's fantastic vision to the screen became a labour of love for his prodigiously talented production team.  Gilliam's close collaborator, cinematographer Nicola Pecorini, was involved from the beginning of the project. "It's the level of poetry that is present in the script that appealed to me the most. Having shared Terry's last ten years of passions and frustrations, I totally understand where 'Parnassus' comes from. A tired man, who has been trying to enlighten his fellow humans, to teach them to let their imagination fly and flourish, to consider the power of dreams as a richness and not as a burden. Read more

Carrying on:
On January 22nd, 2008, during a stopover in New York, as the production transferred from London to Vancouver, Heath Ledger died of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs.
A devastated Terry Gilliam's immediate decision was to close down. "I just said I don't know how I'm going to make this thing work. I was too distraught to actually work out what to do. But everybody around me said 'no, no, you have to carry on, you have got to do it.' Everyone was throwing in encouragement and ideas. The magical mirror solution was obvious, as we had already covered most of the scenes with Heath that  happen on this side of the mirror, but the big question was 'do we get one person to take over the part or not?' I already felt it couldn't be just one, it was too much of a weight, so we should get several people to do it if we could. I actually rewrote fairly quickly. There were only a few days to come up with a convincing solution and, luckily, there was no shortage of ideas, good and bad.Read more

TERRY GILLIAM (Director/Producer/Screenwriter/Original Design) first came to recognition in 1969 as the only American member of the wildly popular television show "Monty Python's Flying Circus", for which he crafted the animated sequences. In 1975, he co-directed, with Terry Jones, his first feature, "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", which was soon followed by his solo directorial debut "Jabberwocky" (1977). His subsequent films include "Time Bandits" (1981), "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life" (co-dir. Terry Jones; 1983), "Brazil" (1985), starring Jonathan Pryce and Robert De Niro, for which he received an Oscar® nomination for Best Original Screenplay, a Los Angeles Film Critics award for Best Film and widespread critical praise, "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen" (1988), a return to historical fantasy and "The Fisher King" (1991), which earned him a Golden Globe® nomination for Best Director and the Silver Lion at the Venice International Film Festival. Returning to the director's chair with the starstudded science fiction epic "Twelve Monkeys" (1995), he then went on to make "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" (1998), an adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's 1971 novel. In 2000, Gilliam started production on his lifelong dream, "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote".
Unfortunately, severe problems led to the production being shut down within the first week of filming - against his wishes. In 2005, Gilliam released "The Brothers Grimm", starring Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, followed, a year later, by "Tideland" starring Jeff Bridges, Jodelle Ferland and Janet McTeer.

THE ART OF ORIGINAL FILMMAKING

HOME