Terry Gilliam

No.

It’s just what it is. The book is what it is. The budget was what we needed and the actors weren’t afraid. I hate working with actors who are worried about what they look like other than the character that they should be playing. Everybody there just dove in and they were all very fearless and nobody had any qualms and off we went.

No, when I read the book I thought, “Oh this is fantastic. This will be great.” [Tideland co-writer] Tony Grison said, “Fantastic, let’s do it.” Jeremy Thomas the producer said, “Terrific, let’s go to work.” But then we couldn’t raise the money [laughs]. It seemed that some people thought it was not quite the jolly little jaunt that we thought it was [laughs].

No, [Tideland author] Mitch Cullin is the one that actually sent it to me. It was sitting on a stack of books and scripts that I never look at. One day I was just frustrated or bored, I can’t remember, and I picked it up off the top of the pile and I go, “What’s this?” Started reading and said, “Hello? This is really great.” A few pages in, I was hooked. All Mitch was trying to do was get a blurb for the cover of the book. He didn’t expect to make a movie out of it [laughs]. But I said, “No, I’d love to have a go at this thing” and off we went. It was very interesting because when we were raising the money, that’s when we began to realize that it was dealing with subject matter that a lot of people found difficult. Somebody said, “Well, it’s men that control the money and men find this more disturbing than women.” I said, “What we need is a woman with a lot of money.” Ultimately that’s what happened.

In Canada, yeah, they finally turned up.

Yeah.

Yeah, I was intrigued and excited by everything in there but at the same time I’m not a fool. I know a lot of people are going to go “Whoa.” Here’s a little scene where the girl is preparing heroin for her father. Somebody’s going to go. Here’s a scene where the girl’s beginning to kiss a retarded 20 year old, something’s going to happen there. So I know full well what’s going to happen but all those scenes were absolutely fantastic. That’s what I liked about the book. I think they were honest. I think they were something I hadn’t seen before and I thought “Here is a child that is being treated like a child and not some romanticized, sentimentalized version of an adult’s version of childhood.” That’s what I liked about it. I was getting really tired of hearing non-stop tales of child victimization until it wasn’t even victimization after a while. There are all sorts of difficult things in life but this was just a way of selling newspapers and doing television shows. I was really getting angry. I said, “Here’s a chance to show a really tough, strong, child. What children really are. They’re designed to survive and she’s put through some very difficult situations and she comes out alive and well.”

Exactly. I didn’t say it you did [laughs].

Oh yeah, I think it’s clear. To me this is real and the moments when she goes into full fantasy, there’s no question that it is fantasy. But somebody the other day was saying, “So, at the end is that her imagination? Is that really happening? Is the whole film really a flashback?” I said, “No, it’s exactly what it is. It’s telling the story and when we go into fantasy it’s very clear it’s a fantasy thing.” I can’t see a single moment where you don’t know that it’s real as opposed to fantasy. She’s distorting the world. When Dell turns up I shoot it from Jeliza-Rose’s point of view so Dell is a giant. But then Dell is a real person. So Jeliza-Rose is trying to make things more interesting than they really are.

No, I was just doing the book. This is Mitch Cullin’s world and I’m just trying to translate his world honestly and that’s exactly what I did. But there are a couple of things. When she goes up the stairs and starts crawling through the trunks and all the clothes that were in there. I don’t think in the book it was an endlessly long trunk of clothes so that was me. I thought we should make this idea of this little girl amongst all of her granny’s clothes endless. That’s me expanding the book. I’m the Jeliza-Rose that’s taking Mitch dull, banal mundane world and turning it into something magical [laughs].

Extraordinary performance. Absolutely wonderful. That was the first time I’ve ever cast an actor without meeting him in the flesh. He sent this tape in that he and his girlfriend put together. I said, “Fuck, this kid’s amazing! He’s got the job.” But it is very funny because in the flesh he looks like Sting.

He’s a great actor and he is also very funny and sweet. A lot of the other actors who were auditioning for the role, could bring out the humor but it wasn’t believable, it wasn’t real. I was at a film festival in Germany a few weeks ago and the guy in the front row said, “Where’d you find that kid?” I said, “He’s a wonderful actor.” He said, “You’re kidding because I work with retarded kids all the time and he’s spot on. There wasn’t one moment of falseness in that performance.” I said I’ll be glad to tell Brendan that because he’ll be very proud and pleased.

No, I don’t direct actors like that. I sort of work with them. I encourage them to go wherever they want to go with these things. I think the one thing I did was the thing he does with his tongue. I thought that would be interesting because the audience would squirm. So that will have an affect and it’s very good because the audience is behaving exactly right. But he moves his tongue like he has a goldfish in his mouth and that scene’s stunning. There’s another moment that I did when they swim through the grass. She reaches for his hand and I said, “Let’s do that because there has got to be moments when the audience might think you’re a potential danger to her.” It’s not that you’re trying to do that, but it just gets so dark and I don’t rush away from that because it will make the audience feel, “Where is this going? Is this girl in jeopardy?” So in that sense I’m playing with the audience but there are very slight moments. I’m not pushing it. I’m not trying to make it a horror film or anything like that but in almost every one of those moments it’s only a beat, that’s it, nothing more.

Or in many cases, a lot of people don’t like the film and they walk out [laughs].

I know.

Do you remember where they walked out? Did they all walk out at specific points?

It was getting too much for them.

No, I expected people to walk out. I said that if they didn’t I’ve failed. I don’t mind people walking out. What I mind is when reviewers walk out and then write about it.

I’ve seen too much of that going on. Don’t touch it if you didn’t see the whole film, don’t write about it. But you don’t have to like it. But don’t sit there and write a piece about it and I’ve read a few unfortunately. I don’t mind people walking out. I’d say it’s the closest to Brazil of any film I’ve done in that sense and Brazil used to have huge walkouts but for very different reasons. In Tideland it’s obvious I’m getting to people and they don’t like what they’re seeing and they don’t want to confront it. They don’t want to deal with it. They just want to get out of there. That’s fair enough. I was hoping this film would actually create a lot of dialogue between people, those who don’t like it or have questions about it or are disturbed and those that love it. What I find so interesting is that those who don’t like it can’t see how anybody could like it.

And those who like it or love it can’t understand why people have a problem with it.

Good, that’s fine.

No, I know. But there are some, and they tend to be women, come out just beaming saying, “Yeah!” Those are the people who really love it. There’s more ambivalence than that for most people. I know I’m touching things, I’m getting to them. They can’t quite explain what it is or why they like it. There was one girl at a screening the other night that said, “The film, like so many of your films at the end I feel nauseous. But I loved it. It was a positive nauseousness. I’m in a place that I haven’t been before.” We had a thing when we were cutting it. Normally every couple weeks I get groups of people together to show the film because I’m just trying to find out, “Am I communicating what I want to communicate? Is it boring them at points? Can I tighten it?” I just don’t want to bore people too much, but they didn’t know what to say at the end of a lot of them. I said, “Here’s what, I’ll give you my email. When you’re ready to talk about it email me.” Then some people would take a week before they had got their thoughts in order. I thought, “Well, that’s great.” It’s shifted their parameters, the way they think, we jumbled up the boxes and maybe something interesting would come out of that. People are saying, “I really reconsidered the way I look at the world.” “It’s made me do this.” “It’s made me think like that.” I thought “Fuck, that’s great. I’m happy.”

Everything you see in there has been considered. On a simplistic level it was really about two worlds. One was the open space out there and the freedom of nature. It was big skies and grass and then the other was inside this house, which is decaying and rotting like the corpse itself. So there is that contrast and by juxtaposing those two things people come out and say “How did you shoot those exteriors? They’re so beautiful.” They’re not any different than any other exterior. They just happened to be contrasting what’s going on inside. We found the house. I added the porch on the front of it, that wonderful but weird porch, but the house was there.

I know. That porch was on another house about a mile away. I said, “I like that porch, let’s stick it on that place.” We did build the inside but they related to the outside. Andrew Wyeth’s paintings were very much a part of it from the beginning. When I read the book, I said, “That’s fucking Christina’s World.” Then I called Mitch Cullin and said, “Did you have a picture in mind when you made it?” He said, “Well, I had Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World in mind.” So I knew we were in good company and we looked at a lot of Wyeth’s paintings. Also my editor, Lesley Walker, is a woman. [production designer] Jasna Stefanovic is Canadian and a woman. There are a lot of women working on this film because that’s important to me when you’re doing this kind of story with a little girl. I wanted women’s takes on these things. Jasna got the job because she spent the night before we met putting all these scraps of images and photographs together. When I looked at that I said, “You’ve got it, you understand this child. You understand the world.” That’s how I work. It’s a totally collaborative little world of probably about eight or nine really critical people in the design and then we go from there.

It’s totally like that, yes.

No, it’s just that you work with different people so you leapfrog in different ways [laughs]. But you try to find people who have the right sensibility for the project. I worked with so many new people on this one because I had to work with a Canadian crew and we just found the right people. They understood it.

Well, it’s 25 years since I made it.

Yeah, I know, and I’m older. Tideland is another story about a child and their imagination, 25 years gone. Have I changed? Has the world changed? [laughs]

It’s the same view I had before I started that project, not to work with the Weinsteins. I had always said I wouldn’t work with them. They came in at the point where MGM pulled out. We were in preproduction so it was out of the frying pan and into the fire. It’s not that the Weinsteins are the worst people on the planet. They are who they are and I am who I am and I know it was always going to be a bad marriage. We’re going to head butt. At the end it got interesting because we got to the point where I thought the film was done but they kept going with it. Then Jeremy Thomas managed to raise the money for Tideland so I said, “I’ve another film to make so why don’t you go away and do whatever you want with Grimm?” That was instead of fighting, which is my normal mode of operation. I realized that those guys love a fight. They’re bigger, more brutal fighters than I am so I ran away. Tideland was a great escape from all of that. “Free at last.” Then what was interesting, was that when I was editing Tideland, I got a call from the Weinsteins to finish Grimm my way. So I was editing both films at the same time. I’d won by not fighting and it was really interesting doing both films because when you’re editing you’re watching the film constantly and you learn to hate it at a certain point. You can’t make it better, you get frustrated. So we’d run down the corridor and start working on Grimm until we reach that state and then we go back and do Tideland. It was fantastic [laughs].

There may come a point where I’m just tired of all the difficulties of getting money and making movies. When I do animation it’s just me and the computer now. About five or six years ago, there was a 35th Python reunion for the BBC. It was a crap show because we all like each other too much now. But I did one little bit of animation on my computer because now I can do everything I did before, easier. The computer has caught up with my really crude technology. I can do the same cutouts because they are easy to move around on the computer. So that’s always that fallback position if I get in trouble.

Ah. [laughs] You mean existing ones.

I think we ought to get the dead mother in the bag at the crematorium scene. You could burn her or you could eat her. That was one of the worst; most tasteless sketches ever written and that would be number one on my list of things to do [laughs].

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck