Word: grimm
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
Interference was a given, with Miramax--Dimension Films' Bob and Harvey Weinstein backing Grimm. The Weinsteins overruled Gilliam's choice of Samantha Morton as the female lead (they wanted a more conventionally beautiful actress, and got one in Lena Headey). They fired cinematographer Nicola Pecorini after six weeks (he was shooting too slowly, they said) and nixed a silly nose Damon was to wear (Bob says, "It would be the most expensive nose job in history"). "I'm used to riding roughshod over studio executives," Gilliam says, "but the Weinsteins rode roughshod over me." To Bob, it was just business...
...love to participate in a Terry Gilliam adventure. "It's like coming to work every day to see a skeleton," Depp says, "and you all start throwing meat on it to see what monster you'll bring to life." Damon pursued Gilliam for years before landing a part in Grimm. "I grew up loving Time Bandits, the way that movie created this weird but totally convincing world," the actor says. "When I first saw his intricate sets for Grimm's haunted forest, I felt like that kid in Time Bandits stepping into his incredible fantasy land...
...Grimm, it was Gilliam who nearly cracked up, but the strain doesn't show onscreen. The film is a colorful ragbag of fairy-tale tropes, with crones peddling apples, a girl in a red riding hood running into a wolf and a vain queen at her magic mirror. Gilliam, who loathes the "juvenile fantasy" of movie heroism, makes the brothers pleasant but oafish; Headey, in a gorgeous, starmaking turn, is the real hero as the fearless witch Angelika. The movie's sense of humor is high-low in the Python style. It alternates the drollery of Jonathan Pryce's French...
...thinks of Grimm as just an entertainment. Tideland may have been the more personal and satisfying. "It had to be done quickly, simply, or we'd run out of money," says Gilliam. "We were like sharks--if we stopped moving, we'd die. All the thinking was immediate, instinctive and liberating...