Terry Gilliam Talks Tideland


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Published: Dec 13, 2006

interview

Ah, for the days before the smackdown. It was September 2005, and Terry Gilliam had just premiered Tideland at the Toronto Film Festival. It was already clear that the film was polarizing audiences (never a problem for Gilliam), but it's doubtful even he suspected the savagery of the critical assault to come. (Even The Village Voice, which you'd expect to take the movie's extremes in stride, called it "unreleasable," a prediction that thankfully turned out to be untrue.) There is little question that Tideland is the loopiest and most abrasive film in Gilliam's oeuvre, narrowly edging out Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas — which is at least mildly impressive, given that its protagonist is a 10-year-old girl (Jodelle Ferland). Gilliam and I talked about the freedom he experienced making his lowest-budgeted film, especially in contrast to the big-budget ordeal of The Brothers Grimm, which opened in the U.S. a few weeks before the festival.

City Paper: You've done a lot of films about characters trying to escape from an unforgiving world, but this seems like a new take, in that it's very much about the downside of escape. It's a pretty frightening vision of what happens when you leave the world behind.

Terry Gilliam: Every film I've done has not been escape into fantasy. It's trying to escape into fantasy and not pulling it off. Every film has been about the borderline between reality and fantasy, and imagination and dry facts. With Brazil, it was somebody who refuses to grow up and take responsibility, always running off into these juvenile and infantile fantasies of saving the world. This one, I think she survives because she can reinvent the world. It doesn't make it a better place, but she's the survivor. She's the resilient one that, no matter what life throws at her, she tries to find a way of making it better. But all these things keep happening, and she's probably got to go a bit madder each time to keep it together.

CP: How different was the experience of making Tideland from making The Brothers Grimm?

TG: Without getting into the grim details, the Grimms thing was such a big heavy thing to deal with, a big ocean liner that takes forever to turn. The kind of inventiveness I can do with this one was just fantastic. We didn't have all that weight. We could just have an idea, and boom! Because of Jodelle, we had really short days, so we always had to be moving fast. It cut out the need to overthink anything, or double-think anything. Everything was immediate and instinctive. I could make instant decisions. Like the room, when they clean it up and paint it all white. That was the night before. I said, "Let's paint the room white!" And then, the poor art department had to get in there and paint. We couldn't have done that on a big film like Grimms.

CP: Tideland is about childhood, but it's hardly a movie for children. There's subject matter here even some adults don't want to face. How did you approach dealing with the movie's more sensitive scenes?

TG: The difference here was trying to be an innocent making it. Because we could never be salacious or voyeuristic. It was just presenting the facts. People say, "How do you direct Jodelle?" You don't. It was letting Jodelle direct herself. There's things going on there I could never have thoughts of. It's extraordinary. I just had to keep being supportive and be the kid she was. This and Fisher King were the only two movies where I've really been able to spend enough time with the actors, where we really got to play and work things out.

CP: The reaction to the movie has been pretty split. How closely do you follow what people say about your movies?

TG: I'm just going to be amused to watch how it's perceived, how it's taken, what happens. When you're doing something like Grimms, it's with the intention that it's going to get a decent-sized audience. This one is like, I don't really care. It's an experiment. Just throw it out there and see what happens, how the reactions go. This one, I'm going to read everything that's written about it. It's going to be curious to see how divisive it proves to be — it will be.

(sam@citypaper.net)