Gilliam specializes in mind-bending films and has, of course, directed the likes of
Time Bandits,
Brazil,
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,
The Fisher King,
12 Monkeys,
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and
The Brothers Grimm, not to mention such Monty Python comedies as
Monty Python and the Holy Grail and
Jabberwocky. Now he's back with
Tideland, one of his most disturbing and controversial films yet.
Based on the Mitch Cullin novel of the same name,
Tideland spins the Alice in Wonderland-on-crack-esque tale of Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), a 9-year-old girl who lives with and routinely prepares heroin fixes for her rocker dad, Noah (Jeff Bridges), and chocolate-loving mother, Queen Gunhilda (Jennifer Tilly). Jeliza-Rose has her own quirks: Her best pals are the doll-head finger puppets she converses with relentlessly.
When mom dies suddenly, Noah and Jeliza-Rose head out to Middle America, to Noah's mother's dilapidated home, and here Jeliza-Rose's flights of fancy really take hold, especially after she meets the neighbors: Dell (Janet McTeer), a veil-wearing woman with a strange relationship to bees, and her epileptic, innocent brother Dickens (Brendan Fletcher), who plays in a fantasy world of his own. As is his wont, Gilliam blurs the lines between fantasy and reality, and he rarely flinches.
The film is powerful stuff, an R-rated two hours most definitely not for children and likely not for the average moviegoer, either. That is just fine by Gilliam, as he explains during an interview with
SCI FI Weekly in the lobby of the W Hotel on Park Avenue in New York City.
You were originally planning to do Tideland before The Brothers Grimm, right? So how did the order get reversed?Gilliam: We thought it would be a low-budget film and that we'd get the money easily, and Jeremy Thomas, the producer, couldn't get the money. So when Grimm came along, I said, "OK, gotta work. Let's go to work." During the making of it, suddenly Jeremy called and said, "I got the money."
And it was at a point in
Grimm where we'd finished the film. We did screenings. I was happy with it and the Weinsteins weren't. They wanted a different movie. So I said—first time in my life I've ever done this; you get wise in your old age—"Well, OK, take the movie. Do whatever you want with it. I've got another thing to do."
So I went up to Canada. And that's exactly what happened. Then the funny thing is, when we came back from Canada and were editing
Tideland, I got a call from the Weinsteins saying finish
Grimm my way, not their way. So I was editing both films at the same time.
What was it about the novel that triggered you to make Tideland?Gilliam: Well, I just loved the character of Jeliza-Rose. She's this incredible child, and I thought it was a child I'd never seen or heard before. Her voice in the book is fantastic, and the world she's part of and the world she's trying to reinvent were so extraordinary. And I knew it would push a lot of buttons.
You do something very interesting with Tideland. As fantastical and dreamlike as the story and the visuals get, you've also grounded it all in a sense of reality that is sometimes harsh and dark, sometimes hopeful. How did you go about finding the balance of all those elements?Gilliam: It was quite easy, I guess, because I didn't think about it. I never distinguish between fantasy and reality, in a strange way. They're the same thing to me. I'm just making a world. We could have shot it and made everything look really grim and kitchen-sink and really sh-tty. When you do a drug film, normally it's all really gritty and on the ground. I didn't want to do that. There's a kind of beauty even in the decaying, rotting house.
The only thing that was important to me was to create the two worlds, which was the outside world with the fields and the open space and the beauty, and then this dark inside of the house that's almost like the inside of a smoker's lung. So one is claustrophobic and dark and the other is wide open.
That's about the only intellectual approach I had to it. Once I got into it I found the house, and we designed as we went along. It's not all designed in advance and then we make it. It was a lot of found objects on
Tideland.
How fertile was your own imagination as a child, when you were Jeliza-Rose's age?Gilliam: Oh, it was full-on. My imagination still continues to reinvent the world, no matter what the world is or what's going on in it. You create your own version of it, and that's what Jeliza-Rose does. I didn't have the luck of having terrible parents and death and destruction all around me. I had to create imagination out of normal things.
At the end of the day, what is Tideland about?Gilliam: It's the search for love. That's all it is. They all are looking for love.
Jodelle Ferland is in nearly every scene, and the whole film rests on her shoulders. What was your experience working with her?Gilliam: She's everything. There's no film without her. The thing that was most frightening about making this film was, "Where do you find this child?" We were in preproduction and I still hadn't found Jodelle, and I was getting to get to that point where I was beginning to make noise to Jeremy. I said, "What if we don't find Jeliza-Rose? We're going to have to pull the plug on this thing, because I can't make this movie without the right child." We found some kids who were really good, but they weren't it. Then, at the last moment, this tape came in from Vancouver, from a casting director, and there was this little girl with these big eyes. She came on like gangbusters, and she got the part.
It was nothing. It was a breeze. Her mother was great. Her mother was very important, because she understood everything and approved of it. The point was that one has to do this with innocence. She is innocent. She knows exactly what she's doing. You say, "Well, you're shooting up heroin. Here's what you've got to do." So it was a process. She learned a process.
The scenes with Dickens, which are the ones that get a lot of people concerned, she led the way on all of those scenes. I didn't direct her. In those scenes in particular there's a situation, there's a script, and you go. We'd sit back by the monitor and say, "God, look at that!" That's a child. She's playing with the things you see on television about love and romance and seduction, all those things. It's innocent, but powerful at the same time.
In one of the takes, Brendan completely lost it. I said, "What happened?" He said, "I don't know. I couldn't remember anything. She completely entranced me, mesmerized me." She was constantly surprising. That was part of what I kept trying to do; I'd say, "I'm a 64-year-old man. I'm not going to try to tell a 9-and-a-half-year-old girl what a 9-and-a-half-year-old girl is supposed to do." So I let her take the lead on all those, and she was amazing. That's what children are.
I've got three kids, so I've seen them all, but adults are so afraid of what children really are, and they kind of sentimentalize children. I think they're tough as nails, children, and they're designed to survive.
