Paul Risker continues his Terry Gilliam retrospective....
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Seven years would elapse between the release of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) and The Brothers Grimm (2005). As there should be with any great storyteller, there is a story behind what is a magic number at this point in Gilliam’s career. In the seven years starting in 1991 with The Fisher King and concluding in 1998 with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Gilliam would direct three feature films, though in the seven years following Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Gilliam would find himself caught in the labyrinth of development hell, before he directed his ninth film: The Brothers Grimm.
During his three year hiatus from filmmaking between The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Fisher King, Gilliam had resorted to humorously holding up boards like a hitchhiker, “Studio-less filmmaker. Family to support. Will direct for food”, was quite the leap from three years to seven between his eighth and ninth films. As is so often the norm in Gilliam’s career, irony is a constant, and The Brothers Grimm was inactive in attempting to disrupt this habitual pattern.
It would be Charles “Chuck” Roven, producer of Twelve Monkeys, who would play an instrumental role in orchestrating Gilliam’s return to filmmaking. Back in 1995, Chuck Roven was married to Dawn Steel, the former head of Columbia who took over from David Puttnam during the Munchausen disaster. Steel passed away from a brain tumor the following year, but nine years on there is still a whiff of irony, the willingness of Chuck Roven to produce two films by Terry Gilliam. This in itself could be a pardon for the accusations and besmirching of Gilliam as an irresponsible filmmaker, if only for Roven being so close to someone at the centre of the anti-Gilliam camp.
From the outset Gilliam was dissatisfied with The Brothers Grimm. The original script given to him by Roven, which he rewrote with his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas co-writer Toni Grisoni, corrected only some of the nagging problems, yet he would push on with the project. This was perhaps in part due to Roven’s straight-shooting style. “Terry how many years have gone by? You’ve got to work. You’ve got to do something.” Of course having no rational response to counter Roven, Gilliam was forced to agree to direct The Brothers Grimm.
Gilliam confessed to Maša Peče that he considered the project, despite its inherent problems, as an opportunity, “to create a good world and have some fun.” But if it was meant to be fun, when the studio pulled out stranding Gilliam who was ready to go with his two leads, Heath Ledger and Matt Damon, a metamorphosis was set to occur. The prospect of fun in creating the world of the Brothers Grimm, whose stories Gilliam had read as a child - an explanation as to why the Gilliamesque has always been considered to have leanings towards the fairy tale - would turn into a nightmare.
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From the tumultuous relationship with Sid Sheinberg, Gilliam would come into direct conflict with two of today’s most powerful and successful producers: Bob and Harvey Weinstein. These are two men Gilliam had once told himself he would not work with. Speaking openly and honestly with Peče, Gilliam explained, “I just knew who they were and what they were like. They do what they do and I do what I do. But they were there and so it was a way of rescuing it, and I thought, 'Well, maybe we can make it work.'”
In hindsight this was naivety pure and simple. Gilliam would be proven wrong as they interfered from the get-go. They refused to allow him to cast Robin Williams, and fired Gilliam’s cameraman, Nicola Pecorini, who shot Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and has since shot Tideland and The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus as well as Gilliam’s upcoming film currently in post-production, The Zero Theorem.
Bob and Harvey Weinstein represent the closing of a chapter in the career of Terry Gilliam. In what had been an interesting and productive experiment working on studio pictures, perhaps Gilliam’s luck ran out. In truth he and Roven were forced to compromise and work with the Weinstein brothers for the sake of the film, with lead actors in place, the film trumped any personal reservations.
Reflecting back on a miserable experience, save for the pleasant experience of working with the crew as well as Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, Gilliam was a director eager to escape the set and return home. After the Weinstein’s fired Pecorini, Gilliam admitted to thinking, “This is my chance to get out of the film, but I was then told by my lawyer that it wasn’t as easy as that, so I had to continue.”
The Brothers Grimm features as a film of importance in Gilliam’s career for the creative acquaintances Gilliam forged. Ledger signing on to star in Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Paranssus would be integral to securing the film’s funding, and Matt Damon is set to star in Gilliam’s The Zero Theorem, released later this year. More significantly than that, his time working with the Weinsteins, who he claims tried to control him throughout pre-production up until the completion of the film, marked his final studio film to date.
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The years 1991 – 2005 were an experiment that started out with surprising promise and led to initial success, only to end with a bitter taste for the director. Though in this time he had achieved what he had set out to do: “It was head-in-the-lion’s-mouth-let’s-show-‘em time. The point was to make sure I came in on budget and did all the right things: it was like putting together a new business card.”
Sadly, The Brothers Grimm failed to gross the required $176 million to turn a profit on its $88 million budget. If Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ failure at the box office marked Gilliam’s short-lived box office success, then The Brothers Grimm was a firm punctuation mark.
Reflecting back on the experience Gilliam told Maša Peče, “It’s not the film they wanted and it’s not quite the film I wanted. It’s the film that is a result of two people, or two groups of people, who aren’t working well together.” He added, “They wanted a big successful, wild adventure movie. They kept saying they wanted a Terry Gilliam movie. But they really wanted a Terry Gilliam movie with their involvement.”
Gilliam’s experience as allowed him to offer an interesting assessment from his first-hand experience of working with these two heavyweights of contemporary cinema. “Marty [Scorsese] said almost the exact same quote I said, without us knowing it: “They took the joy out of filmmaking.” There’s just something about them, because they want to be filmmakers. But they’re not filmmakers! They’re great salesmen, they’re great marketing people. They’re fantastic! But they want to put their fingerprints on it so they can say it’s their film. And if you’re working with people like Marty and me, you just can’t do that. It doesn’t work.”
Just as the fairy tale must come to an end, from Sid to Bob and Harvey, so the book closed on Gilliam’s interesting experiment.
This article is indebted to the following interview for quotes from director Terry Gilliam: ‘“You’ve got to work at maintaining your version of the world. So start being alone!” An Interview with Terry Gilliam’ by Maša Peče for Senses of Cinema.
Paul Risker is co-editor in chief of Wages of Film, freelance writer and contributor to Flickering Myth and Scream The Horror Magazine.
Seven years would elapse between the release of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) and The Brothers Grimm (2005). As there should be with any great storyteller, there is a story behind what is a magic number at this point in Gilliam’s career. In the seven years starting in 1991 with The Fisher King and concluding in 1998 with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Gilliam would direct three feature films, though in the seven years following Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Gilliam would find himself caught in the labyrinth of development hell, before he directed his ninth film: The Brothers Grimm. During his three year hiatus from filmmaking between The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Fisher King, Gilliam had resorted to humorously holding up boards like a hitchhiker, “Studio-less filmmaker. Family to support. Will direct for food”, was quite the leap from three years to seven between his eighth and ninth films. As is so often the norm in Gilliam’s career, irony is a constant, and The Brothers Grimm was inactive in attempting to disrupt this habitual pattern.
It would be Charles “Chuck” Roven, producer of Twelve Monkeys, who would play an instrumental role in orchestrating Gilliam’s return to filmmaking. Back in 1995, Chuck Roven was married to Dawn Steel, the former head of Columbia who took over from David Puttnam during the Munchausen disaster. Steel passed away from a brain tumor the following year, but nine years on there is still a whiff of irony, the willingness of Chuck Roven to produce two films by Terry Gilliam. This in itself could be a pardon for the accusations and besmirching of Gilliam as an irresponsible filmmaker, if only for Roven being so close to someone at the centre of the anti-Gilliam camp.
From the outset Gilliam was dissatisfied with The Brothers Grimm. The original script given to him by Roven, which he rewrote with his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas co-writer Toni Grisoni, corrected only some of the nagging problems, yet he would push on with the project. This was perhaps in part due to Roven’s straight-shooting style. “Terry how many years have gone by? You’ve got to work. You’ve got to do something.” Of course having no rational response to counter Roven, Gilliam was forced to agree to direct The Brothers Grimm.
Gilliam confessed to Maša Peče that he considered the project, despite its inherent problems, as an opportunity, “to create a good world and have some fun.” But if it was meant to be fun, when the studio pulled out stranding Gilliam who was ready to go with his two leads, Heath Ledger and Matt Damon, a metamorphosis was set to occur. The prospect of fun in creating the world of the Brothers Grimm, whose stories Gilliam had read as a child - an explanation as to why the Gilliamesque has always been considered to have leanings towards the fairy tale - would turn into a nightmare.
From the tumultuous relationship with Sid Sheinberg, Gilliam would come into direct conflict with two of today’s most powerful and successful producers: Bob and Harvey Weinstein. These are two men Gilliam had once told himself he would not work with. Speaking openly and honestly with Peče, Gilliam explained, “I just knew who they were and what they were like. They do what they do and I do what I do. But they were there and so it was a way of rescuing it, and I thought, 'Well, maybe we can make it work.'”In hindsight this was naivety pure and simple. Gilliam would be proven wrong as they interfered from the get-go. They refused to allow him to cast Robin Williams, and fired Gilliam’s cameraman, Nicola Pecorini, who shot Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and has since shot Tideland and The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus as well as Gilliam’s upcoming film currently in post-production, The Zero Theorem.
Bob and Harvey Weinstein represent the closing of a chapter in the career of Terry Gilliam. In what had been an interesting and productive experiment working on studio pictures, perhaps Gilliam’s luck ran out. In truth he and Roven were forced to compromise and work with the Weinstein brothers for the sake of the film, with lead actors in place, the film trumped any personal reservations.
Reflecting back on a miserable experience, save for the pleasant experience of working with the crew as well as Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, Gilliam was a director eager to escape the set and return home. After the Weinstein’s fired Pecorini, Gilliam admitted to thinking, “This is my chance to get out of the film, but I was then told by my lawyer that it wasn’t as easy as that, so I had to continue.”
The Brothers Grimm features as a film of importance in Gilliam’s career for the creative acquaintances Gilliam forged. Ledger signing on to star in Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Paranssus would be integral to securing the film’s funding, and Matt Damon is set to star in Gilliam’s The Zero Theorem, released later this year. More significantly than that, his time working with the Weinsteins, who he claims tried to control him throughout pre-production up until the completion of the film, marked his final studio film to date.
The years 1991 – 2005 were an experiment that started out with surprising promise and led to initial success, only to end with a bitter taste for the director. Though in this time he had achieved what he had set out to do: “It was head-in-the-lion’s-mouth-let’s-show-‘em time. The point was to make sure I came in on budget and did all the right things: it was like putting together a new business card.”Sadly, The Brothers Grimm failed to gross the required $176 million to turn a profit on its $88 million budget. If Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ failure at the box office marked Gilliam’s short-lived box office success, then The Brothers Grimm was a firm punctuation mark.
Reflecting back on the experience Gilliam told Maša Peče, “It’s not the film they wanted and it’s not quite the film I wanted. It’s the film that is a result of two people, or two groups of people, who aren’t working well together.” He added, “They wanted a big successful, wild adventure movie. They kept saying they wanted a Terry Gilliam movie. But they really wanted a Terry Gilliam movie with their involvement.”
Gilliam’s experience as allowed him to offer an interesting assessment from his first-hand experience of working with these two heavyweights of contemporary cinema. “Marty [Scorsese] said almost the exact same quote I said, without us knowing it: “They took the joy out of filmmaking.” There’s just something about them, because they want to be filmmakers. But they’re not filmmakers! They’re great salesmen, they’re great marketing people. They’re fantastic! But they want to put their fingerprints on it so they can say it’s their film. And if you’re working with people like Marty and me, you just can’t do that. It doesn’t work.”
Just as the fairy tale must come to an end, from Sid to Bob and Harvey, so the book closed on Gilliam’s interesting experiment.
This article is indebted to the following interview for quotes from director Terry Gilliam: ‘“You’ve got to work at maintaining your version of the world. So start being alone!” An Interview with Terry Gilliam’ by Maša Peče for Senses of Cinema.
Paul Risker is co-editor in chief of Wages of Film, freelance writer and contributor to Flickering Myth and Scream The Horror Magazine.