The movie Terry Gilliam didn’t enjoy: “It was not a good experience”
At this stage in his life and career, it’s much more of a surprise when a Terry Gilliam production manages to go off without a hitch. It’s not as if he’s been doing it deliberately for decades, but the filmmaker’s entire career has been repeatedly dogged by behind-the-scenes incidents.
Even on 12 Monkeys, which reigns as the highest-grossing movie he’s ever directed, Gilliam was reticent to cast Bruce Willis because he couldn’t see past his belief the Die Hard star’s mouth “looked like an asshole”. Whether that’s true or not, he overcame those misgivings and enjoyed his most lucrative success.
From his cursed decades-long odyssey to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote to the tragic death of Heath Ledger in the midst of shooting The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, via the nightmarish schedule endured by The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and his run-ins with Hunter S. Thompson on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, it’s never straightforward when Gilliam’s around for a variety of reasons.
However, one experience stands out as among the least enjoyable, which is largely due to the involvement of a notorious pair of producers he swore he’d never work with. And yet, as Gilliam admitted to Sense of Cinema, he ended up biting the bullet and partnering up with Harvey and Bob Weinstein on The Brothers Grimm.
“The brothers Weinstein have given us so many great films and they’re fantastic salesmen, and they’re interesting producers, but they are people who are good at those jobs and not at directing movies,” he said. “And yet they want to be filmmakers. They interfered more than I’ve ever been interfered with before. If I were younger, we’d call it child abuse.“
Despite being awarded the largest budget he’d ever worked with on the fantasy that cost a reported $80 million in what’s since proven to be a once-in-a-lifetime canvas to paint on, Gilliam found himself at the whim of the Weinsteins. “They created a situation at the beginning of the film that was very unpleasant,” he continued. “And so I started working in not the happiest of moods. And they were still determined to control me. And when they didn’t allow me to cast who I wanted, I was getting more and more upset. I don’t like this.”
After battling with the siblings over star Matt Damon’s prosthetic nose and losing, Gilliam admitted that “I just didn’t want to make the movie, I went to work on the first day of shooting and I just wanted to go home.” When his cameraman was fired four weeks into the shoot, Gilliam thought his chance to escape had presented itself, only to be told by the legal team it was nowhere near as simple.
“It was not a good experience,” he acknowledged of The Brothers Grimm. “But the good part of it was working with Matt and Heath and the cast. We had a great time.” The end result was neither a Gilliam film nor a Weinstein creation, leaving it as an aimless mess that was just kind of… there. It wasn’t terrible, but it was far from being memorable, either.
