Word: gilliams
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...
This week's reunion could get talk started again about a new Python film or stage show. "The trick is trying to get us all together these days," says Gilliam. "But we do get all excited when we get together. Ideas fly around, and we feel the old magic is still there." --By Richard Zoglin and James Inverne