irector Terry Gilliam does great movies—when he can get them out. The only Yank who's part of Monty Python directed Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Time Bandits, 12 Monkeys, The Fisher King, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Brazil. Sure, he's known for being a rather prickly director, and his run-ins with Harvey and Bob Weinstein on this film have already been reported. But, it was simply some special-effects problems that delayed the release of this fanciful movie, nothing more, says producer Charles Roven. "People just assumed it was a problem with Terry, but they never really asked what the delay was all about," Roven told Science Fiction Weekly.
Gilliam cast Matt Damon and Heath Ledger as fictional versions of the Grimm brothers who collected folk tales to compile in a book. He sets them in the 19th century, when the actual brothers lived in Germany, and takes them on an adventure where they confront the actual demons and magic in the stories they're collecting. Monica Bellucci is a 500-year-old witch, Jonathan Pryce is a French officer chasing them because he believes they're con artists, and Lena Headey is a beautiful trapper.
The dark story, with moving trees, haunting creatures and murderous wolves, ties in all sorts of classic fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, such as "Cinderella," "Rapunzel," "Hansel and Gretel," "Little Red Riding Hood" and "Snow White."
Science Fiction Weekly interviewed Gilliam and the cast at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif., and the movie opened nationwide on Aug. 26.
Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, what do you have in common in real life? Can you be brothers?
Damon: Oh, wow, we f-----g hate each other. No, we have a lot in common, I hope. I have a lot in common with Heath. We have a real similar approach to work and outlook on our careers and how to approach them.
He has that Australian sense of humor. We had a lot of laughs while we worked. I think we had a pretty similar sense of humor.
Ledger: We kept each other fired up. We really bounced off each other really well. Yeah, as kids we both had the [Grimm] stories read to us; I think that's significant.
Those original stories are pretty scary. Didn't they frighten you as kids?
Damon: I had a copy of the Grimms' fairy tales. So did Heath, and we were read them. But maybe it was just being a child, or maybe my mother didn't read all of them, but going back and reading them, yeah, they were very dark. I kind of always remembered the bullet points. I didn't quite remember some of the darker details.
And, well, depending on your different translations, there's a point in "Rapunzel" where the guy keeps climbing up her hair, [and] she starts to develop a bump on her stomach. It's because the guy's climbing up her hair and they're having sex in the room, and she gets pregnant. They're kind of adult stories.
Do you remember any scary moments in your childhood?
Ledger: There wasn't a tree chasing after me—
Damon: My father took me to Invasion of the Body Snatchers when I was like 8, and that was some real poor parenting, I can tell you that. We still talk about that one. For a year, I thought there were pods in my closet. I couldn't go to bed. That was probably as scared as I ever was.
The original I saw when I was 10. I remember feeling like "Oh, I've seen this." I saw the one with Donald Sutherland, and it was in color, and it scared the s--- out of me.
You've both worked with very different directors since working with Terry Gilliam in this movie. Heath, you worked with Hulk director Ang Lee, and Matt, you worked with Martin Scorsese in The Departed. Can you talk about their differences?
Damon: Ang and Terry are probably the greatest polar opposites in show business.
Ledger: Terry knows everything about me, and Ang knows nothing about me. The only conversation you really ever have with Ang is just really kind of obscure, profound little bits of direction or insights to a character. But they were also just two completely different movies to work on. Brokeback Mountain was a very lonely experience, and it was supposed to be.
Sometimes Ang will be like, "OK, drag cigarette. OK, blow out. OK, look at mountain. OK, now look at feet. Look back at mountain. OK." You try to take this in, make it look natural.
Terry does that, too, in a way. He'll yell out things to you, but it's kind of in different tones. Terry laughs a lot more.
Damon: [Scorsese] was incredible. He loves actors. He really loves the process, understands the process of acting. He's really respectful of it, and he's just a terrific director. He's a real actor's director, and yet he designs these really complex shots. He's not just catering to the actors. He's directing a beautiful movie at the same time. I think it's going to be a really great movie, The Departed, but we won't know for another year, because I don't think it's going to come out until fall of next year.
What does Terry Gilliam bring to directing?
Ledger: Just his eccentric energy and his enthusiasm and passion for creating. It's just so infectious. It just kind of bleeds into your performance.
Have either of you ever had any real-life supernatural experiences?
Damon: I had a long-term affair with a ghost. [Laughs.] No, I've had no experience with the supernatural.
Ledger: I'm open to it.
What kind of collaboration did you two do for your roles as the Grimm brothers?
Damon: Well, I think when it came to being heroic, Heath and I both kind of ran in the other direction. We tried to make them as cowardly as possible and just turn them into real blunderers, and that was what was fun for us. [Seeing] who could scream at a higher pitch.
And who could?
Damon: It was probably a tie.
Monica Bellucci, you just took some time off to have a daughter last fall. Will you ever be reading Grimm fairy tales to her?
Bellucci: I think she is too young for that, but I grew up with all the Grimm fairy tales, and actually what I like about the movie was there are so many references to all of them, and you can recognize the darkening trademark.
Children love to get scared. We all love the wolf. You know, it's "Mmmm, big ears, big feet." But you do want to get in touch with them and discover. So it's almost something sexy. We all need to get scared, and we all need fantasy, so fairy tales are for children, but they are also for us. We need to dream if we want to survive in some ways.
As a parent, of course, I am going to protect her the most I can. But I think it is important. Behind a fairy tale there is also meaning.
As a 500-year-old witch, you had to wear a lot of prosthetics. Was that a problem?
Bellucci: It was very hard, because, you know, there's a lot of makeup. And then you realize, when you see the movie, it's for a reason. When I saw the film in the end, I was very surprised. I said, "My God, he went really far." So it was challenging as a role because of the dual costume. The young queen and the old queen, I had to play the double voices. Terry in the beginning thought maybe he would use an old voice, but I said, "Listen, I think it is important, she should be the same." So we tried, and it worked very well, I think. It's still my voice even when she is old. I liked to play evil. [Laughs.]
Terry Gilliam, this is your most expensive movie, with an $80 million budget. Do you also feel to some degree that this is a sell-out movie?
Gilliam: [Laughs] Yes. Because, if you notice, the lead actors' teeth are pretty clean. It's the first time I've done a period film where your lead actors have got decent teeth.
When I set out to make this, I did say I wanted to make a commercial film, whatever that means. And who knows what a commercial film is? You get in arguments with people, you know, who say, "That's not commercial" if I do that, and then I think it was Matt [Damon] that said he doesn't know how to do a commercial film. He said, "All I can do is do what I actually believe when I'm doing it." And so I ended up just doing what I do. And I mean, hopefully there's enough people that will come to see it, that will pay for it.
Always figure when you're going to a bigger budget, you're under more pressure, and I'm sure Michael Bay succumbs and did a commercial film with The Island. And I think Van Helsing was a commercial film, wasn't it? [Laughs.]
You tried to use robotics and models in this, but ended up using computer graphic images. What do you think of using CGI?
Gilliam: I love it. It's very good. I've got my own company, they've done all the effects in my films from the beginning. I mean, this film, I actually started out to do things with models, because I really wanted to keep the film as tactile as possible. Models, you know, relate to the real world, so when the root comes out of the ground, the mud does it. It's hard stuff to recreate that convincingly, but unfortunately, you know, the model work we did, it didn't work as well as what we ended up doing in CG. So I've become much more of a convert to CG than I was before. But the trick with CG is to try to mess it up, because it's too perfect, and I spent all my time with the animators like no, no, no, when the wolf springs, and he lands, I want him to skid, I want him to stumble, I wanted the trees not to be beautiful, articulated things, and I said, we've got to make this stuff more believable. And they were quite frustrated, because they did this beautiful work, and I would basically f--- it up for them [laughs].
What were the challenges for you with such a big-budgeted film?
Gilliam: The expense of a movie is only about what you're trying to do, so you need bigger sets, you need horses—horses are terrible. All of those things, I needed, you know, the CG work, there's millions of dollars in that. And it's still a bargain, there's $80 million as opposed to the $160 million that a lot of these other films are going for, and ours is very rich for that money.
I was quite inspired by Sin City, and also, what was the—Sky Captain, what you can do for a lot less money, and I thought OK, maybe that's where I can start going with my stuff. The more money I need, the more restrictions people try to impose.
Did you grow up with the Grimm fairy tales, and which ones were your favorites?
Gilliam: I grew up with Grimms' fairy tales. I know them, and they've kind of become the pattern through which I see the world. I can't get rid of it.
Do you think children like to be scared? Is this too scary for kids?
Gilliam: I'm actually really angry this is a PG-13. This film is for kids as well as everybody else. I would say below 9 is the cutoff, 9 or 10. We actually had a lot of screenings, so I know how it plays. And I would sort of quiz the kids afterwards, get a bunch of kids together and say, "What do you think?" And they all said, "You know, my little sister is 8 and is too ..." So that's kind of the borderline, and we've got PG-13, so I'm really working hard to try to convince parents and the older brothers and sisters to take their kids. I hate the fact that kids are being protected from fairy tales.
There's a woman—she was German—I met a few years ago who wouldn't let her daughter read Grimms' fairy tales because they would give her nightmares. I said, "Yes, but they have happy endings!" And it's kind of the exercise for kids, to realize the world is full of strange and dangerous and wondrous things, and they're all out there. You've got to learn to distinguish, but as a kid you go through these experiences, and you try them out. Oh, we made it!
I grew up with Disney films; they were the ones I first remembered. Snow White and Pinocchio have always been the top two on my list. I think Pinocchio is just an extraordinary, wonderful film. So the irony of it all was the Grimms started burglarizing their stories before anybody else.
Rapunzel was in the first edition, and she starts complaining that her clothes are getting too tight across the belly, so clearly she's pregnant from the prince, who keeps climbing up there. And in later editions, they simplified that because they were aiming for a bourgeois middle-class audience, and they achieved it. So they were there long before Disney got to work [laughs].
And your favorite fairy tale?
Gilliam: Probably my favorite fairy tale is the Hans Christian Andersen one; it's the "Emperor's New Clothes." I mean, that story is always wonderful, you know, that the only one that can see that the emperor is walking down the street naked is the kid, who's still innocent enough to cut through all the bulls--t that is surrounding the king and his courtiers.
That's always been my story.
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