Terry Gilliam’s misery turning Matt Damon into Marlon Brando: “Matt’s profile worries me”
Ever since he first shot to fame, winning an Academy Award for Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon has always come across as a decent, down-to-earth guy who never rocks the boat and does what his directors ask of him.
It was a trick he picked up very early on when he decided to state his case to Steven Spielberg during production on Saving Private Ryan before being swiftly shut down, so when Terry Gilliam decided he was going to turn him into a character approximating a young Marlon Brando, Damon went along with it no questions asked.
Unfortunately, there were two very powerful people who did ask questions, and they also happened to be the producers of the movie being made. Bob and Harvey Weinstein were notorious for their meddling, and because Gilliam was equally infamous for butting heads with the suits in the boardroom, sparks were almost guaranteed to fly on The Brothers Grimm.
Sure enough, the Weinsteins fired Gilliam’s regular cinematographer Nicola Pecorini after six weeks, with shooting having to be shut down for a fortnight because the director was about to “go nuclear” as Damon described it. All he wanted to do was make a small prosthetic enhancement to the star’s nose, but Bob and Harvey were having none of it.
“Matt’s profile worries me because it’s this little nose there,” Gilliam explained to the BBC when he wanted the character of Wilhelm to be a “stronger guy”. To achieve that effect, the makeup team added a small bump on his nose that resembled “a young Marlon Brando”, but the people above his pay grade were having none of it.
“Harvey and Bob love their posters,” he lamented. “The person up there on the poster has to look just like he is, supposedly. Harvey’s very obsessed about that sort of thing so that’s what the fight was about.” It was just one of many fights the filmmaker had with the siblings during the shooting, which ended up leaving neither party satisfied.
Caught somewhere between Gilliam’s initial vision and whatever the Weinsteins wanted it to be, The Brothers Grimm emerged as a limp, lifeless, and tonally jumbled slab of expensive nothingness. There are some sumptuous visuals to be found, but it was clear to anyone watching the blockbuster fantasy that the producers had used their influence to diminish the director’s input.
In the end, nobody won, and one of the pivotal battlegrounds between the warring factions was a Brando-esque bump on the nose. It was a molehill that quickly became a mountain, though, with Gilliam having one of his most miserable experiences attempting to deal with the Weinsteins on The Brothers Grimm, matters that weren’t helped by repeatedly emerging on the losing side.
