Director Terry Gilliam talks about his latest film and how the death of its star during filming made success all the more important

When news broke that 28-year-old Heath Ledger had died of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs last year, the world was in shock.

A young actor with a formidable talent, Heath’s lifeless body was discovered in his New York apartment.

He was halfway through filming the enticingly entitled fantasy adventure, ‘The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus’ and the film’s devastated director, Terry Gilliam says he just wanted to give up and drop the project.

“We’d just finished shooting in London, that was Saturday,” says Gilliam. “I went on to Vancouver to prepare for the following week’s work, Heath went on to New York and by Tuesday he was dead. None of us could believe it was possible. He was doing his own stunts on Saturday night and he was fantastic and then suddenly he was gone.

“We were halfway through and the star was dead. I was ready to give up.

“Fortunately my daughter kept kicking me as I lay there on the ground until I got up and came up with a solution.”

The solution didn’t prove as difficult to find as Gilliam feared.

‘The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus’ is a “magical idea, which sees a group of extraordinary people travelling around London in a horse drawn theatre,” says former ‘Monty Python’ star Gilliam The central character - Parnassus has a magical skill of helping others to physically enter their wildest dreams, but it turns out his magic comes at a price. For centuries he’s been gambling with the devil, who is coming to collect his prize, Parnassus’ daughter Valentina, on her 16th birthday.

Oblivious to her fate, Valentina falls for Heath Ledger’s character Tony, a charming outsider with motives of his own.

In a bid to save his daughter, Parnassus makes one final bet with the devil which sends the entire troupe on a journey through the Imaginarium’s spectacular landscape. It was the magical mirror, a doorway to the doctor’s fantastic universe of limitless imagination, that proved Gilliam’s saving grace.

“We established the principle that people can change on the other side of the mirror.

“We had already covered most of the scenes with Heath that happen on the London side of the mirror, but the big question was ‘Do we get one person to take over the part or not?’

I already felt it couldn’t be just one, it was too much of a weight, so we should get several people to do it,” he adds. “I started calling my friends and people who were very close to Heath.”

Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law stepped into the breach. They flew out to Van-couver to play various aspects of Tony. And it’s because of Heath, Gilliam says, that he allowed his actors greater freedom and the opportunity to improvise more than on any film he has done before.

“Heath was so full of ideas and fresh dialogue and so unbelievably fast and inventive,” says Gilliam.? “He was always telling me ‘I am doing things in scenes that I didn’t know was inside me’.”

It was while Heath was working on The Dark Knight in England that he and Gilliam discussed the role of Tony.

“He had brought over a mutual friend and they were doing an animated musical video and needed a place to work, so I offered them space at my company.

“One day I was in there to show my storyboards to the people who were doing some pre-visualisation work on this film and Heath was there.

Heath slipped me a little note, which said ‘Can I play Tony?’ ‘Are you serious?’ I asked and he said, ‘Yes, because I want to see this movie’. It was as simple as that.”

Gilliam says Heath has “seemed to be with us the whole way”.

He adds: “His energy, his brilliance, his ideas - the constant pressure on all of us was to end up with a film that was worthy of Heath’s last performance. I was just nervous all the time but I think the end result is something I’m proud of and I think Heath would be too.”

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