Terry Gilliam on Heath Ledger and 'Doctor Parnassus'

Pop quiz, hot shot: Who's older, Terry Gilliam or MTV's Kurt Loder? It's Gilliam, by a handful of years, but Loder's certainly blown out his share of candles, too. Anyway, that quiz is slightly germane to our topic here because Loder sat down with Gilliam to talk about The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, the new film out in selected cities now. Gilliam opens up - not for the first time - about the passing of Heath Ledger and the impact it had on him personally and professionally, since Ledger's death occurred during the production of Parnassus. The original plan, of course, was to have Ledger play his character, Tony, throughout the film, but Colin Farrell, Jude Law, and Johnny Depp filled in to help Gilliam keep the production on course. "We hadn't got the stuff on the other side of the mirror done. But the principle was already there: If you go through the mirror with somebody else — their imagination being stronger than yours — then you might start looking different," Gilliam says. "I just took that to an extreme." "There is a scene that Johnny has where he's talking about Princess Diana and Valentino and James Dean dying young," continues the director. "People think it's a eulogy for Heath written after he died and it wasn't. It was always there." You can find out a bit more about how Gilliam came to discover Ledger's unique gifts leading up to their work together on 2006's Brothers Grimm in the following video, as well as how he learned of Heath's untimely death.

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