PLUME: I could get pathetically psychological – and you’ll have to forgive me for doing so – but the basic premise of the film is that here’s these two brothers staging these events as con men, but then are forced to confront and reaffirm belief in these things that they were merely staging. That makes for an interesting parallel to you recovering from Quixote and getting back some of that filmmaking magic…

GILLIAM: Yeah… I like that. That’s very simple… I’m a simple guy.

PLUME: I told you it was pathetically psychological…

GILLIAM: Admittedly, after Quixote went down I spent two years on various projects, and none of them seemed to come to fruition. I was really reaching a point where I thought, “Well, it’s finished. It’s over. I’m washed up. Nothing I can do gets off the ground.” Chuck Roven, who produced 12 Monkeys, kept pestering me about Grimm, and I kept saying no. Eventually I succumbed, because at least I was moving back into a world I understood and felt at home in, and I knew I could make something magical out of it. So that’s how I got lured into it.

PLUME: From an outside observer, it appears to be more most commercial project since 12 Monkeys…

GILLIAM: I hope! But unless we get some publicity out there, it’s going to be the least commercial project I’ve ever done!

PLUME: At which point it will be known as the film that could have been the most commercial project since 12 Monkeys…

GILLIAM: Exactly! (laughing) The deal that Johnny Depp and I made after Quixote was that we were both going to go off and make commercial films so that we were in a stronger position to re-float Quixote, and he certainly went off and made a commercial hit! And it looks like he’s made another one…

PLUME: So he’s wondering when you’re going to live up to the deal…

GILLIAM: Yeah, it’s my turn! I hope we do well, and at the end of this month we’ll know.

PLUME: Is Quixote still in play, in your mind?

GILLIAM: I just sits back there. It’s an interesting situation, because for the last 2 1/2 years I’ve been trying to get the script out of this legal nightmare that it’s trapped in at the moment, between the German insurance company and the French production company…

PLUME: It’s always the Germans and the French!

GILLIAM: That’s right! It’s Grimm all over again! That’s exactly what’s going on… Those are the two teams in Grimm…

PLUME: It always comes back to them…

GILLIAM: Yeah… I hadn’t thought about that! (laughing) In Grimm, we’ve got French-occupied Germany – we’ve got the French being the occupying force… the aggressors, for once… Which the Germans are very pleased about. It is that French-German world, so I can’t even afford, mentally, to think much about Quixote, but we keep marching forward trying to untangle this Gordian knot. There’s been some activity just recently that gives me some hope, but I still can’t even look at the script until I know it’s back in my hands.

PLUME: It’s interesting – and here I go, being pathetic again – but if Grimm were a success, it parallels the success of Time Bandits getting Brazil made…

GILLIAM: Yeah. I mean, that’s kind of what you do… The ones you really want to make, hopefully you can springboard off a surprising success. (laughing)

PLUME: But you’ve also been a director who seems bent on avoiding signing on to the kind of blockbusters that would afford you that kind of freedom…

GILLIAM: I know! I’m really dumb, aren’t I? (laughing) It’s pathetic, as you pointed out earlier…

PLUME: See, now I feel bad… and I’m sure you’ll make me pay for it again later!

GILLIAM: (laughing) Nooo! But yeah, I avoid them because I don’t think I can make them. I mean, when you see some of these scripts and you know some of the people you’ll be working with, and the constraints, I just run away from them.

PLUME: Is it that you don’t think you can make them, or just fundamentally that you don’t want to make them but you say it’s because you can’t? You’re not the most unoriginal filmmaker out there, you know…

GILLIAM: Yeah, I know… To be honest, it’s such hard work. It’s so painful that I’ve really got to believe in it to do it. I’m not interested in going out and just making a living making movies. Even just the process – the technology of making a film – doesn’t interest me that much. It’s got to be something else that moves me and gets me excited. Most of the scripts that I’ve said no to just haven’t done the job. But in the past I’ve probably been in a stronger position, so ultimately Chuck Roven took advantage of my depressed state and got me to do Grimm. (laughing)

PLUME: Isn’t that a recurring theme in your career, though? You look at Fisher King and 12 Monkeys, and it’s just people taking advantage of your weakened defenses…

GILLIAM: Yeah. It’s really boringly repetitive, my life! I get going, and I think now I’m going to be able to do everything I want to do, and then things grind to a halt, and I start slipping into the long slide into depression, and then I have to do something to dredge myself out of it – and then off we go again.

PLUME: Has there ever been a point where you’ve felt in control of that process, or has it always been people taking advantage of your periodic depressive states?

GILLIAM: No.. Sometimes I feel like I’m running the show… Most of the time I’m there. And usually if I’m dragged into it kicking and screaming, eventually I convince myself it’s what I really want to be doing.

PLUME: Do you think that would have been the case if you’d done something like, let’s say, Harry Potter?

GILLIAM: Now that, I knew, was never going to happen, number one. I sat in a room with the people that I’d be working with, and I just knew this was not going to work out.

PLUME: Well, there’s seven of them – there’s still time…

GILLIAM: (laughing) I suppose… Seven – that’d be the one to go for. The last one… Put the nail in the franchise! (laughing) In the third one, I think Alfonso Cuarón’s version was the first one that really felt like Harry Potter. It had a much better grasp of the whole thing, in its energy. I look at Forrest Gump, which I passed on, and Zemeckis did a fantastic job. He believed in what he was doing – and I never did believe in that script.

PLUME: Maybe it’s because you have more faith in the idea of the man-child that he did…

GILLIAM: Maybe, yeah… I do trust that child within without – the one that’s running around… The weird thing is that, on the other film I did, Tideland, I found out that the child within me was a girl! (laughing)

PLUME: For the second time!

GILLIAM: I know! (laughing) Even more, I got to play with dolls!

PLUME: What does that say about you, in your advancing age?

GILLIAM: I’m 64 years old, and playing with dolls! (laughing)

PLUME: You’ve always been about playing with toys…

GILLIAM: I know, but there’s a difference! (laughing) Well, there really isn’t a difference – that’s what’s wonderful about it. There’s nothing more fun than to try and get into the mind of a child…

PLUME: And you return again and again to either a child protagonist or a childlike, innocent world that adults are existing within…

GILLIAM: Yeah…

PLUME: Even the world of Hunter S. Thompson has that sort of wide-eyed aspect to it…

GILLIAM: Yeah, because I think drugs make you free! (laughing) So you can behave like that, spontaneously, without any sense of responsibility. But on the other hand, there is the battle that’s going on, which has to do with the adult side – so every one of those films has got an adult struggling to get out, as well.

PLUME: It’s almost like the brutal occupation of the child world by adults.

GILLIAM: Yeah, it is that. And that’s where the friction starts and where the battle is. In the case of Grimm, the child in that one is Jake, the Heath Ledger character. He’s very child-like, a dreamer, and he buys all the stories. The adult is Matt Damon, who is the pragmatist, the cynic, so they’re both there in that one. It’s interesting – in Tideland, we end up with a child who is in many ways older than the adult, because there is a retarded 20 year-old who in many ways is younger than this 9 1/2 year-old girl. So that gets interesting…

Continued below…

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