Terry's Flying Circus

By RICHARD CORLISS, James Inverne

The Grimm Brothers, Will (Matt Damon) and Jacob (Heath Ledger), have built a nice reputation as the ghostbusters of rural Germany circa 1812. Visiting a town that thinks itself in the thrall of some evil creature, the Grimms exorcise the demon, take the money and run. Their supernal powers are all trickery, of course--trapdoors and specters on a stick--but it's a good show. Then they come to a village where the mysteries can't be so easily explained away. Little girls vanish in the forest; trees tiptoe like goblins; a horse devours a child; a wolf can fly. In their newfound terror, the brothers learn a lesson about art and life: there are special effects--and then there is magic.

Terry Gilliam is like the Grimm brothers: he knows all the tricks of the movie fantast's trade, but what he's after is magic. He wants to make pictures that cast spells, that turn today's jaded viewer back into a kid, gawking with wonder. He hopes The Brothers Grimm, which opens Aug. 26, is one of those mesmerizing experiences: "It may not be the deepest film I ever made, but I do think there's real enchantment in it."

Film enchantment, of a baroque species that mixes the sordid with the soaring, is Gilliam's specialty--that, and making movies with big ideas and impossibly spectacular imagery. At times his films become missions impossible. The Spanish shoot of his epic The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, with Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort, was so plagued by calamities that the only productive thing to come out of it was the disaster-movie documentary Lost in La Mancha. So many other projects have stalled that, at 64, Gilliam has joined the ranks of such hard-luck masters as Orson Welles and Erich von Stroheim. He's as famous for the movies he hasn't finished as for the ones he has.

But the nightmare fantasy that is a Terry Gilliam movie usually allows for a happy ending. Right now the director may have two things to smile about. The $80 million Brothers Grimm, his most accessible, entertaining movie yet, is coming out in Gilliam's director's cut. Two weeks later the more intimate, $15 million Tideland, based on Mitch Cullin's 2000 novel about a lonely child who talks to Barbie-doll heads, will premiere at the Toronto Film Festival. The man who some thought would never make another movie has fooled them, twice.

Not that he has made it easy on himself. When Gilliam meets the moguls to pitch a new project, he wears the albatross of his lost films on one shoulder--and a grudge on the other. "I think I've got a certain talent," he says, "and I don't know how to defend it. So I end up defending it more vociferously than it may need, but I always feel under threat. It's a basic in-built paranoia. When people start interfering, I go a little bit crazy."

Interference was a given, with Miramax--Dimension Films' Bob and Harvey Weinstein backing Grimm. The Weinsteins overruled Gilliam's choice of Samantha Morton as the female lead (they wanted a more conventionally beautiful actress, and got one in Lena Headey). They fired cinematographer Nicola Pecorini after six weeks (he was shooting too slowly, they said) and nixed a silly nose Damon was to wear (Bob says, "It would be the most expensive nose job in history"). "I'm used to riding roughshod over studio executives," Gilliam says, "but the Weinsteins rode roughshod over me." To Bob, it was just business. "Any film involves the making of 10,000 decisions," he says. "If you only concentrate on the few we had issues with, you ignore the 9,997 we left totally to Terry."

Gilliam got so upset, the film was shut down for nearly two weeks. "I've never been in a situation like that," Damon recalls. "Terry was spitting rage at the system, at the Weinsteins. You can't try and impose big compromises on a visionary director like him. If you try to force him to do what you want creatively, he'll go nuclear." Now, with the release date fast approaching, the combatants have calmed down. "However difficult and painful it's been," Gilliam says, "everybody seems to like the film."

Gilliam is no stranger to conflict. His 1985 movie, Brazil, looked set to gather dust on the shelves until he took out an ad in the trade paper Variety publicly asking the studio boss, "When are you going to release my movie?" He needles the moguls, yet he needs them--and he hates that. "Hollywood," he says, "is run by small-minded people who like chopping the legs off creative people. All they want to do is say no." Yet he acknowledges his wayward streak: "I'm so perverse that I go the opposite direction of whatever's going on at the moment."

Born in Minneapolis and raised in Los Angeles, he lapped up the best of midcentury America's comic culture: the visual surrealism of Ernie Kovacs' TV shows, the lunatic satire of Harvey Kurtzman's Mad and Humbug comic books. Yet even then there was a zealot budding in him. He planned to become a missionary, until he had what he laughingly terms an "anti-epiphany" one day at Disneyland. Smartly dressed, he was turned away from the theme park by security guards for having long hair. "Suddenly this place I'd adored seemed in my animator's imagination like a cartoon Auschwitz," he recalls. "I knew I had to leave this country."

Or at least L.A. He showed up at Kurtzman's door in New York City and was hired as an assistant at Help! magazine, where he helped organize photo comic strips. One of them starred a young British actor named John Cleese. Gilliam vagabonded to Paris and then London, where his sharply surreal animations for BBC comedy shows impressed Cleese and four other Oxbridge grads--the gang that became Monty Python. "We'd never seen anything like these brilliant cartoons before," recalls fellow Python Michael Palin, who has acted in four of Gilliam's features. "Wonderful pictures, like a church with spires coming off and rockets shooting out." Gilliam became the Python's animator, linking sketches with crazy, hilarious cartoons.

The zeal to capture souls remains. "I do want to say things in these films," he explains. "I want audiences to come out with shards stuck in them. I don't care if people love my films or walk out, as long as they have a strong response." Gilliam is proud when he hears stories like the one the rock singer David Crosby told him: that The Fisher King had freed him from feeling guilty about his girlfriend's death in a car crash. "But there's a dangerous side to affecting people," says the director. The Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, was inspired by Robert De Niro's sinister portrayal of a dissident in Brazil and took the character's surname, Tuttle, for his alias.

Some of Gilliam's films have been hits: Time Bandits, The Fisher King and 12 Monkeys (his biggest earner, grossing nearly $169 million on a $30 million budget). Yet the zealot's rep sticks to him and makes potential backers wonder, What catastrophe will befall him this time?

Simply put, he gets to make movies because big stars--Robin Williams in The Fisher King, Brad Pitt in 12 Monkeys, Depp in almost anything--love to participate in a Terry Gilliam adventure. "It's like coming to work every day to see a skeleton," Depp says, "and you all start throwing meat on it to see what monster you'll bring to life." Damon pursued Gilliam for years before landing a part in Grimm. "I grew up loving Time Bandits, the way that movie created this weird but totally convincing world," the actor says. "When I first saw his intricate sets for Grimm's haunted forest, I felt like that kid in Time Bandits stepping into his incredible fantasy land."

The same energy can exhaust actors. Palin remembers almost breaking his back on Jabberwocky when Gilliam repeatedly got him to walk up some stairs leaning at an unnatural and painful angle. "He thinks he can make people in real life do what he draws on paper," says Palin. "He doesn't mean to upset anyone, but I have heard stories of people cracking up on his films."

On Grimm, it was Gilliam who nearly cracked up, but the strain doesn't show onscreen. The film is a colorful ragbag of fairy-tale tropes, with crones peddling apples, a girl in a red riding hood running into a wolf and a vain queen at her magic mirror. Gilliam, who loathes the "juvenile fantasy" of movie heroism, makes the brothers pleasant but oafish; Headey, in a gorgeous, starmaking turn, is the real hero as the fearless witch Angelika. The movie's sense of humor is high-low in the Python style. It alternates the drollery of Jonathan Pryce's French villain (when Will charges, "You killed my friends," Pryce purrs, "I only wish you had more") with the labored buffoonery of Peter Stormare's Italian henchman. But in the enchanted forest, Grimm's sense of wonder is spellbinding--a reminder that Gilliam is as much shaman as showman. His reckless, robust imagination leaves Hollywood's prime confectors of fantasy light-years behind.

He thinks of Grimm as just an entertainment. Tideland may have been the more personal and satisfying. "It had to be done quickly, simply, or we'd run out of money," says Gilliam. "We were like sharks--if we stopped moving, we'd die. All the thinking was immediate, instinctive and liberating."

The missionary still has a mission: to liberate movies from the ordinary. "My problem," he says, "is I'm like a junkie. I want a good movie fix, and I never get that fix. I want to be taken into some place, some world, some idea that I haven't thought of or imagined. And it doesn't happen." Transporting viewers to that place means a lot of heavy lifting. It's a big job, but maybe Terry Gilliam is the kid to do it.