The A.V. Club: When we last spoke three years ago, we talked at length about how dark your films are. But Tideland seems exceptionally grim. Do you see it that way?
Terry Gilliam: Not at all, that's very interesting. I was talking to somebody just recently who felt it was the tenderest film I've ever done. And I actually tend to agree. I don't find it grim at all, because Jeliza-Rose rises above everything that's thrown at her. That's the wonderful thing about it. So Grimm, no, that was my previous film. [Laughs.]
AVC: In that interview, you said you'd thought Brazil would appeal to college students, but they found it too dark, and it went over better with high-schoolers. Do you have a sense yet for who's mostly likely to appreciate Tideland?
TG: No. Tideland's a really good one. I can't predict, I honestly can't. I've screened it enough times in enough places on this planet, and I know how it plays. I know some people switch just off very early on and run away. And others, from all walks of life, different ages, different sexes, all love it. Those who love it cannot see how anybody cannot. And those who dislike it can't see how anybody could ever watch it. [Laughs.] So it's very strange. I had a theory that women tended to like it quicker than men, because they can identify with Jeliza-Rose, not specifically her adventures, but her ability to deal with what life throws at her. That's been quite true. Young girls really like it, and I kept saying it could be the new Titanic, because teenage girls really responded to it. In Japan, it's doing incredibly well, it's been playing for 12 weeks in select theaters. The Japanese get it. It's an interesting one. When we were making it, I kept thinking, "This is a litmus test for the world today."
AVC: The Japanese trailer and the American one are very different. The American trailer makes it look more like a pretty thriller, while in Japan, it's being marketed as Rose In Tideland, and the Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole aspect is more emphasized.
TG: Exactly. When I saw the Japanese poster, I wasn't quite sure about it, because it seemed like a real chick-film poster. It looked like Barbara Cartland might have designed it. But it seems the core audience these days in Japan isn't 7- to 25-year-old males, it's females, which is very interesting. [Laughs.]
AVC: Do you think it's being marketed correctly here?
TG: I don't know. I saw the trailer last night, and I thought it was very intriguing. It's the kind of film I'd like to go out and see, because the imagery and everything was quite amazing. I don't know what else is going on. I'm not sure what the marketing is, except for me blabbing to people like yourself. [Laughs.]
AVC: What would be the ideal individual response to the film? What would you like to have people walk out of it thinking?
TG: I don't care. That's the truth. I want people to come out with whatever it is they come out with. I don't want to limit it by what I think. I love the film, personally. I wallow in it. There's enough people like me, it seems, to get our money back. [Laughs.] Mike Palin, he saw it very, very early when we hadn't put the music on and we were still cutting and so it was longer. At the end of the screening, he left. And I thought, "Uh oh, he didn't hang around for a chat." The next morning, I called him up and said, "Come on Mike, what do you really think?" And he said, "Well, there's a lot I didn't like. But I woke up this morning and I can't get it out of my head. The images, the ideas are spinning around there. They won't let me sleep. It's either the best film you ever made, or the worst." [Laughs.] And I thought that was fantastic. I liked the idea of something that can get that kind of extreme reaction. I keep promising people, "If you see it, then have dinner afterward, at least you're going to have something to talk about." [Laughs.]
To be honest, I'd much prefer people to like it than not like it, but one of the things that did happen when we were editing—normally, when we pre-screen a film, I can talk to the test viewers afterward to get a sense of what they think. And we were finding people didn't really know how to talk about it yet. And we gave them an e-mail address and said, "When you're ready, write me." It takes some people five or six days, a week, before they got their thoughts in order. And then it was like, "God, it changed the way I look at the world," people would say. "It's made me completely re-examine how I think about things." And I thought, "Well, that's great. That's fantastic." They're all interesting responses. I think what has been most intriguing is, those who don't like it, don't want to really even talk about it.
AVC: Well, if people don't enjoy a piece of art, it can be awkward to go to the artist and explain why.
TG: No, but they don't have to go to me. They can do it publicly. I read the reviews, the bad reviews, and they don't even confront the film. I understand people not wanting to come and tell me they don't like it. But when I read the reviews and they're not even describing the film that was made, what are you talking about? If you're going to do the work, do the work. So that turned out interesting, because I thought we could maybe create a big public debate between various viewpoints on my film. But we're not getting the negative side in any kind of argumentative state. They just don't want to talk about it.
AVC: How did you pitch such an extreme project? How did you get it funded?
TG: Well, I read the book, and I thought, "Fantastic." I sent the book to Tony Grisoni, who I write with, he said, "Fantastic." We got it to Jeremy Thomas, the producer, he said, "Fantastic. Let's go." Easy. All of us, there weren't any qualms. We knew we were going to be pushing buttons, but they were all buttons worth pushing. Still, it proved very difficult to get the money, even though it was a low-budget film. One of the problems, we felt, was that men tend to control the money. I kept saying, "We're going to need a woman who's in charge of some money to get this film made." And that's in fact what happened. In Canada, a woman producer came on and the company called Telefilm, which was run by a woman, that's where we got the money. And they understood and loved the project, where men were slightly unnerved by it.
AVC: Your last film, The Brothers Grimm, cost about $80 million to make, whereas Tideland cost about $12 million. But Tideland actually looks better on the screen. It's a luminous movie. How did you make it so cheaply?
TG: Well, there's nothing expensive in it. There's a few people, a house, and a couple doll heads. There's nothing expensive in it, and that's the reality. In Grimm, there's 750 effect shots. There's horses. We had to build an entire forest. In Tideland, we found the house. We did some work on it. The people just walk around, they don't get in fast cars and race around the place, or in spaceships. Every movie I make, I try to do it for what it should be, not the kind of budget that people just throw around. Something like Grimm by anybody else would have cost you $120 billion, I guarantee it. [Laughs.]
AVC: Tideland does use a lot of computer effects, though.
TG: It's the scale of everything. The thing with Tideland is, you've got these beautiful exteriors. But we didn't build them—they were there. You just point a camera. And the places we chose are beautiful. The house, it's inside, it's dark, it's rotting, and it's a very small place. Doll heads only sit on the end of your finger. The scale is very, very small, and that's why it's cheaper.
AVC: Is CGI in any way changing the way you approach films or put together individual scenes?
TG: No. It's just one of the tools you can use. I'm doing more with it these days than I did before, because I'm just getting more familiar with it.
AVC: What do you think about the way it's been changing how films are made, and how they look?
TG: I just think everybody's just hiding behind it. You're putting on a lot of elaborate visuals there to cover up no story, no idea. I sometimes worry about it. I was talking just recently with somebody about King Kong, the early version, the first version, and then the Peter Jackson version. Peter Jackson's version is the pinnacle of technical achievement. It's stunning. It's phenomenal. And yet it doesn't have the magic of the original, and I think it's because all of the work is being done for you. It's like television. It's turning cinema into a passive experience, because you don't have to imagine anything. You don't have to use your imagination. Everything is there. In the original one, you've got this puppet running around. And you've got to use your imagination to make it a living creature. And then you're engaged, you're involved. It's like radio. If you're doing a drama on radio, you have to imagine. And I think that many could get people's imaginations functioning, exercising, they're in the film. The end result, the end experience, is much more rich. That was my feeling. That was the film that really got me thinking about what you do and don't do with CG work.
AVC: Sarah Polley famously contacted you as you were working on Tideland to discuss how working with you on Baron Munchausen traumatized her. Did that exchange in any way change how you worked with Jodelle Ferland on Tideland?
TG: I worked with her the same way I worked with Sarah when we did Munchausen. We go to work, we're professionals. The talk with Sarah was quite interesting, because by the end of it, she'd begin to say, "Well, it really probably wasn't the film. Actually, I was having problems with my parents back then." I said, "Sarah, there was nothing we were doing that would endanger you ever, because you were too central to the whole thing." And I said, "Sarah, you never gave me a hint you were anything but at ease with what we were doing. If I'd seen something, I wouldn't have done it." And it was very nice, because it was the first time I really talked to Sarah in a long time. It was nice to become friends again. Jodelle and Sarah were interesting in the same way. They both would have worked 12 hours a day if we could have worked them that long. They just loved what they were doing. Jodelle is, again like Sarah, incredibly intelligent, and in some ways, constantly surprising. I tended to not direct her. "There's the script, there's the situation, sit here, walk here," those kinds of things, but what you see up there are her choices on how that character responded to things.
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