Gilliam Talks About “Parnassus”

When actor Heath Ledger passed away in January of 2008, he was currently working on the Terry Gilliam film, “The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.”

With Ledger’s death, Gilliam thought for a while that production on the film would cease and possibly be abandoned.  But thanks to three of Ledger’s contemporaries–Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell–and the fantasy nature of the script, the movie was able to finish filming and was released in theaters last weekend.

Looking back on it now, Gilliam says that while the final product may  be different from what a full movie with Ledger would have been, the overall film isn’t radically different.

“The story didn’t change, basically,” Gilliam told SciFi Wire. “I just got these three other guys in. What happened is we’d shot almost everything outside the mirror, but there were a couple of scenes on this side we hadn’t shot. One of them I had to throw out completely, and the other I moved to the other side of the mirror. There’s a scene between Jude and Anton—Andrew Garfield—when he confesses. That used to be Tony’s trial, and it used to be in the wagon with all the others. By putting it on the other side of the mirror with just the two of them it’s a better scene, because they’re ones that are battling for Valentina. So Anton has information the others don’t have. It worked out better. That’s why I say this was co-directed by Heath.”

“So it’s very simple that the middle-aged shopping lady can be dreaming of Johnny Depp and not Heath Ledger,” Gilliam said, referring to a particularly memorable scene. “So the only thing I changed was when the drunk goes through at the beginning, I had his face changed to establish the principle. Other than that, the dialogue, everything is exactly as it was before.”

Gilliam does admit that the final product would have been different with a full Ledger peformance.

“It might have been a much stronger film,” Gilliam conceded. “This way, it might be a more entertaining film. It’s certainly more surprising, because you don’t know who you’re going to see next. But it was important to me not to change anything. The scene with Princess Di and James Dean and all of that, a lot of people think it was written as a eulogy to Heath. It was exactly what was written before he died. That’s the advantage of not being a studio film, because how many studios would have let me introduce Heath’s character as we do and leave the dialogue in? I said, ‘We’re not changing anything. This is what we wrote.'”