Terry Gilliams talks about Dr. Parnassus

"And after the death of his star Heath Ledger last year, Gilliam came very close to giving up on his latest film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. A lesser man would have crumbled into retirement by now. So what is Gilliam’s secret? “We were devastated,” Gilliam says. “We spent the whole day — Amy, Nicola Pecorini, the director of photography, and myself — lying flat on the floor. He’s dead, and you don’t quite get over that".
Gilliam’s initial reaction to the news was that he would have to call a permanent halt to the production. “I thought, ‘There’s no way I can make this film without Heath’.” “Ideas are floating around. Then finally we decided, ‘OK, let’s get three other people to take over the part’. And we were lucky because we have a magic mirror in this movie. Not every movie has a magic mirror. So you can very genuinely say that these other actors are different aspects of the character that Heath plays. And it works. The point was, we’ve got to keep going. It was a bit like half being there, but apparently on autopilot I can still do a few things.”

In casting the actors who would step into the role, Gilliam says that a key considerations was that they had to have been close friends of Ledger. Fortunately, Ledger’s friends included Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law, names that no doubt helped to persuade the film’s financiers that Doctor Parnassus was still viable. He has no doubt that Ledger fully deserved the Oscar for his chilling portrayal of the Joker in The Dark Knight. “But wouldn’t it have been nice if they had noticed before? Even before Brokeback Mountain he was doing brilliant work. Everything he has done has been solid, even the earlier silly things. I first saw him in The Four Feathers and he just takes over the screen. He was what, 21 years old?”

The planned release date for Doctor Parnassus is in the autumn. “We want to be in that last third for the Academy Awards! Maybe we’ll get another award for Heath. We’re going to get as many awards as possible for him, long after he’s gone.”

Source: entertainment.timesonline.co.uk