It’s nine in the morning, and I am in a cab threading its way through a tangle of narrow country lanes toward Pinewood Studios, in Iver Heath, about 20 miles west of London, where I am to see Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, or, as it is more popularly known, “Heath Ledger’s last movie.” As everyone who hasn’t been hiding under a rock is well aware, Ledger died in January 2008, after accidentally taking a toxic combination of prescription drugs, while Doctor Parnassus was still in production. After a mad scramble to pick up the pieces, the film was finished with a little help from his friends Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell.
Built in 1935 on the grounds of a historic country home, Heatherden Hall, Pinewood is a storied production facility that has hosted a sparkling array of pictures, from early Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean to the James Bond series, not to mention recent blockbusters such as The Da Vinci Code (2006), The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), and The Dark Knight (2008). But I’ve never had the pleasure and am eager to see the studio.
As the hedgerows bounce past, I glimpse solitary cows grazing in absurdly green meadows, and look in vain for the kind of garish movie billboards that herald arrival at a Hollywood lot. There are none, not even a signpost, and just as I begin to suspect that I’m being taken for a different kind of ride than I anticipated, we heave to at the front gate, a modern affair of steel girders and glass that replaced an old, Tudor-style gatehouse when the studio changed hands, in 2001.
Behind the gate lies the back lot, looking like any other back lot, save for the magnificent Victorian gardens that surround it. I make my way to the Technicolor Screening Room, where I meet Gilliam; his director of photography, Nicola Pecorini; Samuel Hadida, the film’s French producer; and a few others. I have always been interested in Gilliam. He is one of the few true auteurs left to us, with an unmistakable personal voice and style, as well as the scars to show for his epic campaigns against the studios, the most notorious being his tussle with Universal over the final cut of Brazil, in the mid-1980s. But I have to confess that I haven’t followed his later career as assiduously as I might have, and so I am extremely eager to see where his quirky sensibility has taken him.
The film is fresh from the lab, and we are seeing it at this facility because the production cannot afford to rent a screening room in London. (The filmmakers are so cash-strapped that at one point during postproduction Gilliam had to take the bus to work.) This is the first opportunity the director and his colleagues have had to see the picture with the special-effects shots in place, melded with the live action, so there is a palpable air of expectancy in the room. I am alarmed when Gilliam sits down one seat away; I have just arrived at Heathrow after a sleepless night flight from New York, during which I was squeezed into my slot in coach like a herring, and am afraid I will doze off or, worse, snore. He’s anticipating all the film’s shortcomings, muttering under his breath, “Piece of shit movie.” But when the lights go down and a funereal horse-drawn wagon thunders down a dark London street, the thing lurching precariously from side to side, the director falls silent and I’m jolted awake. The story is set in the present, but through Gilliam’s lens the locale looks more like Dickens’s London than Gordon Brown’s.
Despite the revolution in special effects that has transpired since the director wowed audiences with his 1981 fantasy, Time Bandits, Gilliam, a master of cinematic prestidigitation, retains a fondness for old-fashioned models, though he’s happy to play with today’s digital effects. Here he is in top form, opening with a display of outlandish visual pyrotechnics, an eye-popping mélange of imagery appropriated from everyone and everywhere—Salvador Dalí to Tex Avery—all given his own peculiar spin. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a wildly ambitious movie, stuffed as it is with political satire, philosophical musing, puns and jokes, throwaway allusions both arcane and mundane, fleeting references to Gilliam’s previous pictures as well as classics such as The Seventh Seal and La Strada, not to mention a handful of Big Ideas—including the nature of narrative, the relation of the artist to audience, artifice to truth—all of which get turned over and ruminated upon without becoming boluses that stick in the throat of the story. Or, to change metaphors in midstream, Doctor Parnassus is like a piñata exploding with brightly colored gewgaws, as if Gilliam were afraid the movie police would lift his license and this would be his last shoot, so he decided to cram it with everything in his head, downloading his entire mental hard drive into a two-hour hallucination.
One element is conspicuously absent, however, over the film’s first 15 or so minutes: there is not a trace of Heath Ledger, and I find myself wondering in my sleep-deprived daze if I’ve traveled all the way to London on the basis of some misunderstanding. But then, finally, he appears, abruptly, dangling from Blackfriars Bridge at the end of a rope, a scene so shocking, in light of his subsequent death, it takes your breath away. (Gilliam is referencing the mysterious demise of Roberto Calvi, “God’s banker,” a figure at the center of the Vatican bank scandal of 1982—alluded to in The Godfather Part III—who was found hanging from the same bridge. Before Ledger died, the image of him swinging in space popped up on the Internet under jokey headlines such as heath ledger hangs himself. )
Ledger’s fans—a category that now embraces almost everyone who goes to the movies, thanks to his Oscar-nominated performance in 2005 as the emotionally closeted Ennis Del Mar in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain and his Oscar-winning re-invention of the Joker last year in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight—will not be disappointed. There is a lot of Ledger in this picture, which has the added advantage of showing him reloaded or, better, unplugged: without the slathered layers of white goo that were de rigueur for Batman’s clownish nemesis but obscured the actor’s features. This final performance, while not the tour de force of weirdness that was the Joker, is good enough—more than good enough—to remind us that Ledger’s death has deprived the movies of one of their most accomplished, and promising, talents.
When he signed up for Doctor Parnassus, Ledger was coming home, in a manner of speaking. Gilliam and his partner in crime, Nicola Pecorini, the cinematographer, were among the actor’s closest friends. The two filmmakers “come as a package,” observes Nathan Holmes, Ledger’s former assistant. They are so close they finish each other’s sentences.
Gilliam, who looks chicly grizzled with close-cropped gray hair and a shadow of a beard, is a self-exiled American who took refuge in England during the Vietnam era and stumbled upon John Cleese and his Monty Python pals, becoming the sixth Python, which was sort of like being the fifth Beatle but better: Gilliam created the group’s memorable animated titles and transitions and co-directed Monty Python and the Holy Grail in 1975. He went on to fashion a singular, if checkered, career for himself as the director of, among other films, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988), The Fisher King (1991), Twelve Monkeys (1995), Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), and The Brothers Grimm (2005).
Given the swing-for-the-fences ambition of his movies and his consequent dependence on capricious financing, along with his manic disposition, most of Gilliam’s productions have been high-wire acts. In 2000 he suffered an ignominious fall when his The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, with Johnny Depp, collapsed six days into production after storms destroyed the sets, and Jean Rochefort, the actor who played Quixote, had to be hospitalized—events all lovingly detailed in the documentary Lost in La Mancha. In fact, the director has been so unlucky in so many ways that people speak of a “Gilliam curse.” But, although his work is uneven, he is incapable of making a boring movie.
Gilliam met Pecorini when he hired the D.P. to work on Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Pecorini had been the great Vittorio Storaro’s Steadicam operator for many years, and first encountered Ledger in 2002 on the set of The Order (or “The Ordure,” as the D.P. refers to it), a sort of low-rent Angels & Demons. A large, bearish man with a head of tangled dark hair beginning to go gray, Pecorini says he was mesmerized by Ledger. “He was like a young Richard Burton,” he recalls. “Burton was one of the most intriguing faces ever to be on-screen. And I’m sure that, if Heath would have aged, he would have aged that way—like scars, but carried with pride.”
Pecorini recommended Ledger to his friend for The Brothers Grimm, saying, “I think he’s fantastic. His name is Heath Ledger. You should meet him.” At that time, though Ledger had shone in films such as The Patriot (2000) and Monster’s Ball (2001), his name meant nothing, at least to Gilliam, and the director replied, “Heath who?” But, says Pecorini, “Terry fell in love with Heath.” As Holmes, who became Johnny Depp’s assistant after Ledger’s death, puts it, “Terry was to Heath what Tim Burton is to Johnny. They struck up a fantastic friendship.”
Ledger was more than ready for what Gilliam had to offer. As his career had taken off, he had grown increasingly uneasy with the trappings of success. In 2001, as A Knight’s Tale, his first big Hollywood vehicle, was nearing release, he famously jumped up in the middle of a meeting with top Sony executives who were grooming him to be a teenage heartthrob and ran into the men’s room, sequestering himself in a stall while he had a panic attack. His friend and agent, Steve Alexander, chased after him and engaged him in conversation through the door. “He was ready to bust out of the gate, but he didn’t want to step on the gas and become something that he didn’t want to become: a matinee idol,” says Alexander. “He was a private person, and he didn’t want to share his personal history with the press. It just wasn’t up for sale. That’s part of the reason he initially tore down his career. He wasn’t motivated by money or stardom, but by the respect of his peers, and for people to walk out of a movie theater after they’d seen something that he’d worked on and say, ‘Wow, he really disappeared into that character.’ He was striving to become an ‘illusionist,’ as he called it, able to create characters that weren’t there.”
The Brothers Grimm was shot during the summer of 2003, with Matt Damon playing Wilhelm Grimm to Ledger’s Jacob Grimm. In the outspoken director, Ledger found a mentor, a role model. As Christopher Plummer, who plays Doctor Parnassus in the new film, puts it, “Terry loved Heath and treated him like a son.” Adds Alexander, “The relationship with Terry was quite wonderful, in that Terry is a very free, creative spirit.” Gilliam, not disinterestedly, thinks that The Brothers Grimm marked a turning point for Ledger. “He was liberated,” he says. “He suddenly felt free. He was ad-libbing. Nobody noticed his performance”—the film was dissed by critics and ignored by audiences—“but it was extraordinary.” (The film has its charms. It’s full of screeching ravens, dark forests, and all manner of witchery, but it’s not exactly an actor’s showcase. That Ledger’s performance was eclipsed by Gilliam’s mise en scène isn’t surprising.)
Between The Brothers Grimm and Doctor Parnassus, actor and director followed very different paths. Ledger went on to make Brokeback Mountain, a critical and box-office success that put him in the front rank of young actors. But, for Ledger, shooting the film had been difficult. “There was nothing fun about the process of creating the character of Ennis Del Mar,” Alexander recalls. “Heath worked really hard at it, and it was exhausting. He thought Ang Lee was an incredible director, but Ang is a taskmaster, and he doesn’t coddle his actors. He pushes them until they give him what he’s after. It wasn’t what Heath was used to, but it obviously worked.” Gilliam explains, “He was looking for a father figure, and I think that’s why it was difficult with Ang Lee, because Ang Lee is not a father figure. That’s why he felt very isolated there.”
The subsequent awards season, in which Ledger was nominated for a Golden Globe as well as the best-actor Oscar, ate away at him. “You have to whore yourself around,” says Gilliam (who was himself nominated for an Oscar in 1985 for co-writing Brazil). “And on Brokeback he really did whore himself around, doing all the things he hated. He felt angry with himself for going along with the way the system worked. He felt dirty. And then he didn’t win,” losing the Oscar to Philip Seymour Hoffman, nominated for Capote.
Gilliam’s follow-up to The Brothers Grimm was Tideland, with Jeff Bridges and Jennifer Tilly. It features an obliging little girl who cooks heroin for her parents, who both die, and the story only gets weirder from there. Perhaps not surprisingly, according to Gilliam, the distributor, ThinkFilm, dumped it. Unhappy, he took to the streets of New York to hawk Tideland himself. Like the Ancient Mariner, with a square of cardboard hanging around his neck on which was scrawled studioless filmmaker … will direct for food, he buttonholed passersby, broadcasting the date of the opening as he collected coins and small bills, and muttering, “Independent filmmaker on the brink … God bless you and help a filmmaker out … You’ve made an old man happy … ” Addressing one startled young man, he said, “I hope you’re not trying to get into films, are you? This is how it all ends up.” He raised $25.
Gilliam’s career seemed to have hit a wall. Doctor Parnassus was born in the latter half of 2006, when the director hooked up with Charles McKeown, with whom he had written The Adventures of Baron Munchausen two decades earlier. “I was literally digging things out of my desk drawer—old ideas—and we just started throwing things around,” Gilliam says. “I was thinking of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, with Joseph and Mary’s little traveling theater. So we hit upon the Parnassus traveling theater going through London.”
The picture is an ensemble piece, revolving around a trio of characters: Doctor Parnassus, a God-like figure, pitted against his nemesis, the antically Mephistophelian Mr. Nick, who tricks him into incautiously trading his daughter for eternal life; Ledger plays a con man referred to as “Tony Liar,” the joker in the pack, if you will, who further complicates a convoluted plot. Explains Gilliam, “Both Charles and I were obsessed with Tony Blair at the time, and that’s why he’s called Tony. It’s about all of the hypocrisy that’s out there.” To the extent that the film has a central locale, it’s Doctor Parnassus’s traveling show, the distinguishing feature of which is a delightfully tacky mirror, resembling nothing more magical than a silvery Mylar curtain hanging inside an old picture frame, which nevertheless conveys people, when they plunge through it, into a fantasy world that reveals their true selves—or something like that. Rarely, it seems, is the journey a happy experience.
After The Brothers Grimm, even as Ledger’s star ascended, the actor had kept tabs on Gilliam, hanging out with him whenever he was in London, always wanting to know what his friend was up to. Gilliam showed him the Doctor Parnassus script, and they discussed the role of Tony, but Ledger kept backing away. “The first thing he would do was pass on almost everything that came to him,” says Alexander. “Or he would commit to things and then walk away from them. As much as he wanted to work, there was a part of him that was always looking for a reason not to work. He was always afraid, insecure about could he nail it. Then finally he would come around and embrace the challenge.”
But after Brokeback Mountain and Casanova, released the same year, in which he had unhappily starred for director Lasse Hallström, Ledger was so distressed he wanted to stop working. (He did stop for a year and a half after his daughter, Matilda, was born, on October 28, 2005.) He told his friends that one of the reasons he had taken The Dark Knight was that it would be such a long shoot it would give him an excuse to turn down other offers. In fact, a few years earlier he had met with director Christopher Nolan regarding the title role in the first of his Batman films, Batman Begins, but the actor was reluctant to become involved in a franchise. Says Alexander, “He was always hesitant to be in a summer blockbuster, with the dolls and action figures and everything else that comes with one of those movies. He was afraid it would define him and limit his choices.” But on The Dark Knight, he had a pay-or-play deal, so he felt he had the freedom to do whatever he wanted as the Joker, no matter how crazy. “We talked about Johnny Depp’s episode on Pirates of the Caribbean,” says Pecorini. “The very first day, Johnny showed up with 40 gold teeth. [Producer Jerry] Bruckheimer wanted to get rid of him. Finally, they said, ‘O.K., keep six.’ And that’s what he wanted, six.” According to Pecorini, Ledger went Depp one better, hoping his performance would be so far-out he’d be fired, and thus become the beneficiary of a lengthy, paid vacation.
Alexander, who now works with Charles Roven, producer of the Batman franchise, insists Ledger was eager to take the part, but wanted to follow up The Dark Knight with something less conventional. Among other projects he was considering was The Tree of Life, a coming-of-age story set in the 1950s to be directed by Terrence Malick (and now starring Brad Pitt).
Director Terry Gilliam and Ledger at the Los Angeles premiere of The Brothers Grimm, 2005. By Kevin Winter/Getty Images.
And then there was the Doctor Parnassus script. One day in 2007, as Gilliam was going over his storyboards with his effects crew, the actor, who was working on a music video in the same facility, slipped him a note. It said, “Can I play Tony?” Evidently, he’d overcome his anxiety about the role. Or, as he explained in a 2007 interview, “I’d cut carrots and serve catering on a Gilliam film. I really love the guy.” Gilliam was thrilled. Says Alexander, “Heath felt like Terry had given him the nod on Grimm when it might not have been the most popular decision”—given Ledger’s relative lack of fame at the time. But now his name meant something. Says a source, “Everyone is terrific in the movie, but none of them could get a movie financed. Heath gave it wings.”
Not to hear Gilliam tell it. “We couldn’t raise anything,” he says. By his account, he flew to L.A. to graze the indie pastures for financing but was met with variations on the theme of: “No, we don’t get the idea.”
“But you get Heath Ledger,” Gilliam would counter. “Do you understand what’s going to happen in the summer of 2008? The Dark Knight is going to come out. Heath is going to be the biggest star in the world.” But still the answer would be no.
“Not one of them rose to the occasion,” Gilliam recalls. “They couldn’t see it. Live or dead, Heath would have stolen [The Dark Knight].”
The only way the director has been able to keep working, given his uneven track record at the box office, is to keep his budgets down to a fraction of what effects-laden films generally cost. Doctor Parnassus had been budgeted at an already skimpy $28 million, but Gilliam eventually launched production with no guarantee that he’d ever reach that goal. Says editor Mick Audsley, “There was always an uncertainty about whether we were going to have enough funds to make the film that was in Terry’s head. Every week we’d be thinking, Oh, is this our last Friday? But that’s true of more and more independent films. We start and see where we get to.”
Gilliam hired his daughter Amy and her producing partner, Bill Vince, who made Capote, to raise money. “He was wonderfully devious, like a good producer,” Gilliam says. “Lied to everybody.” The pair called producer and former CAA agent John Ptak and asked him to put together the financing. He in turn introduced Gilliam to Samuel Hadida, the French producer, who paid for the production out of his own pocket until a bank was found to secure financing.
Gilliam also gathered a support group of people he’d worked with before, among them production designer Dave Warren, who had just done Sweeney Todd. When the director called him, Warren remembers, “It was like the strange old friend you never want to phone you. Why do we quake in fear at the phone call offering us work? It was like, Oh, my God! We’re going to be dragged into this fucking madhouse again.”
Gilliam proceeded to put together an unconventional cast to fill the remaining parts: a dapper Tom Waits as Mr. Nick; model Lily Cole, who had virtually no acting experience, as Valentina, Parnassus’s daughter; and another near novice, Andrew Garfield, a young actor who had had small roles in Lions for Lambs and The Other Boleyn Girl, as Mercury the barker, complete with winged helmet. Verne Troyer (Mini-Me in the Austin Powers films) plays a dwarf gussied up as a medieval demon. Gilliam rounded out the cast with Plummer, whose ageless Doctor Parnassus first appears suitably guru-ish—brittle as parchment, a dried insect under glass—with chalky makeup and a wisp of a beard.
The start date of Doctor Parnassus had been put off to accommodate The Dark Knight, which was still shooting into the middle of November 2007. There would be no more than a narrow window between the end of the one and the start of the other—a very brief respite for Ledger after a long and exhausting shoot. Moreover, the Joker was a dark, twisted character, and Gilliam was worried about the effect it might have on the actor’s state of mind, especially in light of his chronic insomnia and the pressure he was under due to the end of his relationship with the actress Michelle Williams and an increasingly fractious custody dispute over their then two-year-old daughter, Matilda.
Ledger and Williams had met in the summer of 2004 on the set of Brokeback Mountain, where she played his character’s wife. He had recently broken up with Naomi Watts, and he and Williams (who declined to be interviewed for this article) established a strong physical connection. As Ledger revealingly described it in a 2006 interview, “We just fell very deeply into one another’s arms, our bodies definitely made those decisions for us.” Which is not to say that there wasn’t a genuine emotional bond between the two. Says Alexander, “Heath fell deeply in love with Michelle. Their relationship was extremely special to him. They have a daughter who is an incredible product of their love, and an incredible sign of how much they cared for each other.” Adds Nathan Holmes, who was Ledger’s assistant during the Casanova shoot, “On that film, they were totally devoted to each other. They were like young kids.” Ledger himself was quoted as saying, “When you’re this happy everything seems to fall into place.”
But fault lines soon made themselves evident. When A Knight’s Tale opened, in 2001, Sony had flown in 14 of Ledger’s old friends from his birthplace, Perth, Australia, at his request. They stayed at his home, a sprawling house with five or six bedrooms in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles. Some of the friends never left, while others—newer friends and acquaintances—joined them, and the house became familiarly known as “the Aussie artists’ colony.” Says Alexander, “It seemed like anytime someone would be new in town, and was from Australia, it was ‘Just call Heath.’ He was so welcoming.” In Gilliam’s words, the house was “a place where you could hang out. It just felt good.” Says Pecorini, “Probably 50 people had the keys. It was like open house. ‘You’re a friend of a friend? Of course you can stay here. Of course you can show up without calling first.’”
But when Ledger and Williams moved in together in a new place in L.A., the open-house policy ended. “He had to cut that,” Pecorini says. “It was totally against his nature. He was a social animal.” Williams had been living in Brooklyn, near her parents, and the couple eventually bought a new house there.
According to Gilliam and Pecorini, the pair were too different for the romance to last. “My impression was that they had nothing in common,” says Pecorini. “They didn’t fit. They kept two separate lives. She never mingled with his friends—he never mingled with her friends.” The two men say the couple’s relationship mimicked the marriage between the characters they played in Brokeback Mountain, with hers, lonely and resentful, watching his go off on his mysterious fishing trips. But another source says that to this day Williams remains tight with some of Ledger’s best friends. During the early days of the relationship, the couple vacationed with each other’s closest companions, and Ledger even threw a birthday party for Williams’s best friend. It was only as the relationship faltered that these bonds dissolved.
Gilliam and Pecorini agree that the romance began to unravel during the Oscar campaign for Brokeback Mountain, when Williams was nominated for best supporting actress alongside Ledger’s nomination for best actor. For him, they say, the Oscars were a kind of game that he went along with grudgingly, whereas Williams took the hoopla more seriously. “The whole machinery started growing up around them,” Gilliam says. “That was the moment when it changed, when he realized, Uh-oh. We perceive the world differently. He didn’t care about things like those awards.”
It should be said that Gilliam and Pecorini’s version of Ledger and Williams’s relationship seems, at the very least, incomplete, perhaps reflecting the couple’s adversarial separation, which coincided with the shooting of Doctor Parnassus, when the filmmakers were seeing Ledger every day. They sound a little like the boys complaining when the wife-to-be comes along and breaks up the old gang. As for the Oscars, Alexander, for one, claims that Ledger was for the most part happy with the Brokeback Mountain Oscar campaign: “Doing press terrified him, and the campaign was really grueling. There were a lot of red-carpet events, which he didn’t win, so he found himself watching Philip Seymour Hoffman accept award after award. Still, he loved Philip, and he thought Focus Features [which made Brokeback Mountain] treated him very well. He knew it brought him a lot of opportunity.”
In any event, Ledger and Williams separated for good in the summer of 2007, while he was making The Dark Knight. Some press accounts blamed Ledger, citing heavy drinking and hard-drug use, including cocaine and heroin. A video clip even surfaced purportedly showing him snorting what looks like coke and saying, “My girlfriend is going to fucking kill me.”
According to Pecorini, “Heath was always blaming himself, asking, What did I do wrong?” Adds Gilliam, “Because he’s a much nicer person than I am, he really thought he could do the right thing. He was trying to be decent and graceful, give her whatever she wanted—the house, every fucking thing. But once it started going south, it went very quickly. He was overwhelmed by lawyers, and there were more and more of them, as if they were end it. Get out—it’s bad. You’ve got to just walk away from it.’ The stakes kept going up. He wouldn’t listen to any of us.”
Above all else, Ledger was devoted to his young daughter and feared he might lose custody. “He was absolutely obsessed about Matilda,” Gilliam continues. “Before we started shooting [Doctor Parnassus], he literally put her in a backpack, got on the tube, and would come up to my house. It was wonderful.” According to the director, “The thing that really made Heath snap” was legal wrangling over Matilda. “He said, ‘Just fuck all of you! I’m not giving Michelle anything.’” Recalls another source, when it came to Matilda’s care, “there were definitely heated conversations, and emotions were high.” (Ledger’s lawyer declined to comment on any aspect of the separation or custody dispute.)
Pecorini says Ledger’s drug use—“He used to smoke marijuana on a regular basis, like probably 50 percent of Americans”—became an issue. “From that moment, he went clean as a whistle. He was so bloody clean that he didn’t drink a glass of wine anymore.” Adds Gerry Grennell, who was Ledger’s voice coach and shared houses, meals, and downtime with the actor, “Heath loved good food and good wine. From the rehearsal period on Dark Knight, right up to the last days in London, when we worked and lived together and went out for dinner, Heath would happily go to the bar, buy a round of drinks for friends, and come back and have a soda or juice, never once drinking alcohol.”
Principal photography on Doctor Parnassus began on December 9, 2007, a few weeks after Ledger had wrapped The Dark Knight. The actor had always been passionate about his work. He once said, “The only time that I’m alive and loving and expressing and feeling and relating is when I’m on set during the time between ‘action’ and ‘cut.’ That’s the only thing that’s really important.” According to Mick Audsley, who edited Doctor Parnassus, “In our job, we get to tell if somebody’s rolling their eyes when they’re asked to do another take. But he gave us 150 percent and was devoted to Terry and the project. He was physically moving props around himself, to save time.”
“There were certain days, I thought, I’m not up to doing this thing,” recalls Gilliam. “Heath is better than I am. He’s quicker, he’s cleverer. He had very clear ideas of what he liked and what he didn’t like, and he just went there. There was no telling him anything, really. I just followed along.”
Recalls production designer Dave Warren, “I was dragging Terry all over to look at locations, and Heath would come with him. There was this sort of constant dialogue between the two on the structure of his part, but he was just as interested in all of those other bits of the filmmaking process, in addition to character and acting, which quite surprised me. He wasn’t the kind of guy that would just sort of disappear into his trailer for a whole day.”
Gilliam and Pecorini are of the opinion that the turmoil in Ledger’s personal life, rather than distracting him from his performance, helped him concentrate on the task at hand. “It actually made him more focused,” says Pecorini. “For him, work was a shield against everything else.” Gilliam recalls, “One day, he showed up with a terrible cough, shivering. He was clearly bloody sick. And completely soaked in sweat. We called a doctor, who said, ‘This is the beginning of pneumonia. You need antibiotics. Go home and rest.’ He said, ‘No way. I’m not going to go home, because I can’t sleep, and I’ll be just thinking about the situation. I’d rather stay here and work.’ But he would arrive in the morning completely knackered. He looked awful, because of lack of sleep and just the shit he was going through with the lawyers. By the end of the day he was beaming, glowing with energy. It was like everything was put into the work, because that was the joy; that’s what he loved to do. The words were just pouring out. It was like he was channeling.”
Plummer, a veteran of countless plays and films, who has received awards too plentiful to enumerate, was impressed by Ledger. “Heath was an extraordinary actor, abundantly talented,” he says. “He was really something, this kid. He was wonderfully versatile. Look at the difference between his roles in The Dark Knight and Brokeback Mountain. It’s staggering. He was so quick to learn everything. I could see him actually develop during the making of the movie. If anything, he was driving himself too fast and too hard. He wanted to do everything. He hung himself over the river Thames in January, wanted to freeze to death. But there were moments when he relaxed, and I thought, He’s learnt to stop and let the audience come to him rather than forcing himself on the audience.”
Ledger was generous with the other actors, especially the ones with less experience, such as Lily Cole and Andrew Garfield. Cole has a face like a pixie—heart-shaped, with rosebud lips and porcelain skin—on the full body of a woman. “Heath gave her constant tips,” says Pecorini. “He was the first one to realize that you have to keep her busy. You can’t leave her standing there, saying something, without doing anything with her hands, because she still doesn’t know exactly how to carry around this amazing body she has. You can see the results. She was a model; now she’s an actress.”
Garfield was intimidated by Ledger: “It was like stepping into an arena with Goliath. I was really scared, scared of failing. Because I was a genuine fan boy. Heath really fucked with me at first, because his character fucks with my character. Like we’d be improvising around a scene, and he’d intentionally step on my lines or change my lines. He’d give me advice where I wasn’t asking for advice. He knew he was needling me, and it really, really worked. There was nothing malicious in it. It was all to assist me. Like there was one day where we were shooting a scene. I was struggling. It was kind of underwritten, and I was nervous because I was scared that I couldn’t make it work on all the different levels. He went to Terry and said, ‘Do my close-up first. We’ll do a shitload of takes—Andrew will get knackered. Then, by the time we turn around on him, he’ll just be relaxed, he won’t give a shit anymore, and he’ll give something purer.’ And that worked. He was constantly looking out for the people who he thought needed a bit looking out for.”
Ledger was a gifted chess player, and he approached acting as if he were playing a match. Once, in rehearsals, he advised Garfield, “Don’t do what you’re going to do in front of the camera. Do something ridiculous and terrify Terry, so that he’s scared he’s hired the wrong guy. And then later, when the camera’s rolling, do what your instinct tells you.” Explains Pecorini, “He was very, very clever, and he knew how most directors work. If you give them the time to digest what you’re about to deliver, then they’ll want something else.”
The London portion of the shoot, which consisted mostly of the part of the film set in the “real” world, wrapped on Saturday, January 19, 2008. The plan was to take a week’s break and then resume production in Vancouver, where the special-effects scenes that take place on the other side of the mirror were to be shot.
The next morning, Ledger got on a flight to New York, while Gilliam flew to Vancouver. The actor was to meet with Steven Spielberg to discuss a role in an upcoming project, The Chicago Seven. At the time, Matilda was with her mother in Sweden, where Williams was on location shooting a picture called Mammoth. According to a source close to both Williams and Ledger, Matilda and her nanny had been scheduled to visit Ledger in London—a two-and-a-half-hour flight from Stockholm—just before he left for New York, but because he was fighting off pneumonia, Williams decided against sending the two-year-old. Ledger then hoped to spend a few days with Matilda in New York, but Williams balked at sending her on the much longer, nine-hour flight because the actress wasn’t free to accompany her herself. According to Gilliam, the separation from Matilda “was really destroying Heath, just ripping at his heart.” But the source close to both performers, who emphasizes Williams’s devotion as a mother, points out that the long trip across six time zones would have been disruptive to a young child, and that Ledger could have himself flown to Sweden to see his daughter.
With his chronic insomnia, Ledger would typically spend night after night awake, diverting himself with time killers like re-arranging the furniture in whatever space he happened to be living in at the moment. Now, physically run-down by the arduous shoot, unable to sleep, and distraught over his differences with Williams, Ledger found some measure of relief in massages and prescription drugs.
Ledger filming The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus in London, 2007. By Liam Daniel/Poo Poo Pictures Productions Ltd.
He also sought help from Gerry Grennell, his vocal coach, who practices the Alexander Technique, a therapeutic discipline that focuses on posture and musculature. Recalls Grennell, “I would say, ‘C’mon, let’s do some Alexander Technique,’ and then he’d get maybe a couple of hours’ sleep, and then he’d be up again. I’d wake up and say, ‘Let’s do a little bit more,’ and he’d get a little more sleep, but it was exhausting. The last few days before he went to New York, we did discuss how much the medication was affecting him. I’d say, ‘If you can possibly bear it to stop taking the medications, do, because they don’t seem to be doing you any good.’ He agreed. It is very difficult for me to imagine how close he came to not taking them.”
On Tuesday, January 22, sometime between 3 and 3:30 a.m., a masseuse found Ledger dead in his loft, on Broome Street in New York’s SoHo. An autopsy would find that his death was accidental, resulting from “the abuse of prescription medications,” according to a spokeswoman for the New York City medical examiner. Among the drugs found in his body were the essential ingredients of Valium, Xanax, Oxycontin, Vicodin, and Restoril—a stew of painkillers, anti-anxiety medication, and sleeping pills. “It’s the combination of the drugs that caused the problem,” said the spokeswoman, “not necessarily too much of any particular drug.”
That explanation notwithstanding, many of Ledger’s friends continue to puzzle over his death, its larger meaning, almost as if they can’t quite let him go. “Everyone has a different view of how he passed away,” says Grennell. “From my perspective, and knowing him as well as I did, and being around him as much as I was, it was a combination of exhaustion, sleeping medication, which was doing less good than it was harm, and perhaps the aftereffects of the flu. I guess his body just stopped breathing.”
Says Gilliam, “He desperately wanted to sleep. And he finally got the big sleep. I don’t know if it was the combination of his tiredness with his emotional state. I wish I had the answer. It really bothers me that I can’t make sense out of it. There was nothing grand or dramatic about it. It just happened. It’s still a big mystery.”
One of the ironies surrounding Ledger’s death is that he wanted to make a movie about Nick Drake, a British singer-songwriter in the depressed Donovan vein, who died in 1974 at the age of 26 and developed a posthumous cult following. During pre-production of The Dark Knight, Ledger had created a music video based on one of Drake’s songs, “Black Eyed Dog.” The eerie part of it is the singer suffered from depression and insomnia, and he died from an overdose of amitriptyline, an antidepressant. Whether it was accidental, as some of his family claims, or a suicide, as the coroner’s report states, remains in dispute.
Doctor Parnassus, despite inclement winter weather in London and a bare-bones budget, had seemed to be proceeding too easily for a Gilliam film when the curse struck again. The director, in Vancouver, was in the art department at noon on the 22nd. Amy Gilliam burst in and said, “You’ve got to come into my office.”
“I’m busy. I’m saving some money.”
“No! Come into my office.”
He did, and recalls, “There it was, on the computer, the ABC Web site: ‘Heath Ledger found dead.’ I mean, What the fuck?” Gilliam punched the door with his fist, then looked out the window. “The sun was shining. The world was going on. Suddenly, a million ravens start flying overhead. A cloud of them, blocking out the sun—ravens and more ravens. It was just so strange and beautiful. I kept thinking, It’s the ravens from Brothers Grimm that have all come to salute Heath, but, nah, it turned out it wasn’t for Heath, after all. They do it every day.”
Ledger’s death threw everyone into shock. The second call Amy received was from either the bank or the bond company, saying, “We’re closing the movie down.” She recalls, “That just made me crazy. I was like, ‘Don’t you dare. Leave us alone and have some respect for the fact that we just lost a friend.’ For a couple days we locked ourselves in a room with red wine and prosciutto and Parmesan.”
Gilliam was paralyzed by a chilling sense of déjà vu. He had been through it before—albeit not so dramatically—with The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. The director’s initial reaction was to close down the picture. “When something like this happens, you’re just gone,” he explains. Moreover, “You can’t believe how fast the money ran away from this thing.”
“Terry will always go to the darkest side,” says Amy. “He’s very much a person who will go to the worst-case scenario.”
But Amy and Pecorini wanted to press on. Says Amy, “I told everyone, ‘There’s no way in hell this film is going to close down. We’re not having another Don Quixote.’” Pecorini told Gilliam, “O.K., Heath is no longer with us, but let’s not have two casualties, him and the movie. Let’s have only one casualty and preserve what is done so far that was brilliant. Let’s move on.”
The question was: How? One of the options would have been to start over and package Ledger’s material as an “extra” on a DVD. But no one wanted to do that. The filmmakers quickly realized, as Amy puts it, “a dead star wasn’t big enough. Now we needed a bigger star to continue the movie.”
At four o’clock on that first afternoon, Gilliam had called Depp. The actor was in pre-production on Michael Mann’s Public Enemies, in which he was to play John Dillinger, but told Gilliam he would do anything he could to help.
The director had also huddled with Audsley, the editor, whose first move had been to secure the footage. “We were terrified that somebody would find out about the material and misuse it,” Audsley recalls. “We literally hid the digital masters under the sofa in my cutting room.” Now they needed to figure out if it was possible to continue the shoot. In Audsley’s words, “We started to talk about the possibility of using the Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole idea, re-inventing things on the other side of the mirror in a sort of Cocteau, Orphée way,” which would make it feasible to use other actors to play Ledger’s remaining scenes. At that time, the director hoped that he would need only one, Depp, to replace Ledger.
Two days after Ledger’s death, Gilliam and Pecorini flew to Los Angeles to see Depp. Pecorini had hectored his friend: “You tell Johnny, ‘Look at the work that Heath did. There is someone who was better than you. Can you match it? Do you have the guts to be as good as him?’” Pecorini explains, “For my part, there was a bit of rage. Because I never thought it was right that Heath’s last role would have been the Joker, with all the respect for the movie. Because having lived close to him while he was shooting it, I know it wasn’t something he believed in. It was just for fun.” (Alexander insists that Ledger was excited by the role, and proud of the job he had done with it.)
According to Garfield, “Nicola just became like a fucking beast when Heath died. He was like, ‘No fucking way we’re giving up.’” Gilliam and Pecorini showed Depp a tape of Ledger’s performance and stayed until three a.m. drinking in his kitchen. “Johnny, we’re fucked,” Gilliam told him. “Can you help?” As the director recalls, “He loved Heath, and he liked me, and he said, ‘Yeah, I’m there.’ That’s the great thing about Johnny—he’s a real mensch.” Adds Pecorini, “Johnny was really impressed by the footage of Heath, which played a role in him moving his ass. He was in the position of being the saving angel, of rescuing Terry, avoiding another Terry disaster.”
With Depp on board, Gilliam returned to London and dumped the logistics of making the performance happen into the lap of his daughter, who, he says, “got stuck with dealing with the complexities of what it really means to get Johnny, post-Pirates, anywhere.” Adds Amy, “He was e-mailing back, to say, ‘Yes, yes, I’ll do it.’ But everyone around him—from agents to lawyers to sisters [who run his company]—none of them was giving us the ‘yes,’ and without it we didn’t have Johnny Depp.”
“I don’t think a lot of his handlers were happy,” says Gilliam. “Our friend is an empire now. In the heart of these layers and layers of people around him is still Johnny. But the layers are there, and so you have to peel the onion away. That’s the sad thing about success.” Explains Pecorini—who introduced Gilliam to Depp after the D.P. first met the actor, in 1997, working on The Brave, which Depp directed and starred in (along with Marlon Brando)—“We were friends. We used to go to his house and play pool, bring wine. [But now] it’s very hard to get into Johnny’s house. It’s easier to talk to Ratzinger, the Pope, face-to-face. A lot of people in his entourage saw coming to Vancouver as a burden. They were coming up with stupid excuses.”
But the filmmakers were faced with a ticking clock: they needed to resume shooting in three weeks, or they would eventually lose Plummer, who had a commitment to another picture. It got to the point where the Doctor Parnassus gang would drive over to Depp’s office or house and fruitlessly attempt to see him. One Saturday, Pecorini, Amy Gilliam, her sister, and her mother piled into their Range Rover and went over to Depp’s home yet again. Amy recalls, “We rang the buzzer, and all of a sudden the doors opened. We all went, ‘What the fuck?’ This never happened! We drove in. The guard appeared, completely shocked to see an old woman, a crazy Italian, and two girls.” Adds Pecorini, “The guard couldn’t believe that the Doberman didn’t attack us. Unlike people, they remember their old friends.” Nevertheless, the group was asked to leave.
Amy needed to return to Vancouver, but before she did so, she called her father, who was now in London, and explained the situation. “Dad rang Johnny, saying, ‘This is crazy,’ and when I got off the plane in Vancouver, I got a call from his agent saying, ‘It’s all good. Johnny’s going to be in the film.’ That was the first time I felt, O.K., we’ve got them. We’re in.” Better still, the insurer calculated that it would cost more to close down the picture than to continue.
But it quickly became clear that Depp’s other commitments would make it impossible for him alone to replace Ledger. Other actors, including Tom Cruise, offered their services. Gilliam decided to use Jude Law and Colin Farrell, both friends of Ledger’s. All three substitutes worked for scale, and the rest of Ledger’s salary went to Matilda. But, like Plummer, they too had other commitments, so making all three actors’ schedules mesh along with the rest of the cast’s was like solving a Rubik’s Cube.
One thing was relatively easy: Gilliam discovered he had to make only minor adjustments to the script to accommodate the new actors. He sat down with Depp, Law, and Farrell to decide how much they should carry on in the vein established by Ledger’s performance, or depart from it. According to Audsley, “Every visit through the mirror was intended to reveal more of the duplicitous nature of Tony. Johnny had the sort of charming-seduction thing going. Colin has a dark side, so as Tony was exposed, we thought he had to be the one at the end. And Jude fitted in between the two.”
Gilliam resumed production on February 25. “It was awful shooting after Heath died,” he says. “It was madness.” According to Gilliam, Christopher Plummer didn’t want to say a line that mentioned “an unforeseen death.” Gilliam told him, “Chris, that’s the script we were doing. That’s the script Heath wanted to do, so we do it.” Adds Grennell, “It was difficult to see the costumes that Heath was wearing being worn by the other actors. But knowing how much Heath would have wanted it to be completed, and how strongly he felt about Terry’s work, made it tolerable.” Says Gilliam, “Each day, it was really hard to keep going. It was: What are we doing? At times it felt like we were just going through the motions, because we just had to keep moving forward, looking to see where it went, hoping it would shape itself.”
There were more prosaic but no less difficult hurdles given the compressed shoot. Explains Amy, “Our schedule was so tight that construction would be pulling down sets before we’d even watched the rushes, and building the sets for the next day’s shoot overnight. You shoot, you wrap, it’s in the can, and good luck! It was just, Go go go.”
At one point, it looked like Depp would be unavailable after all because of his commitment to Public Enemies, but producer John Ptak discovered that the actor had no contractual obligation to the Michael Mann picture until the first day of shooting. In the end, Doctor Parnassus had Depp for only a day and a half. Gilliam worried that it would be hard for the actor to get into the part, because he was so immersed in preparing to play Dillinger. “But because he’s so good,” Gilliam says, “because he was so prepared, he was utterly brilliant. One of the weirdest things was, Heath’s last spoken words on the film were ‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’ Johnny called me up and said, ‘You know, I’ve got an idea. Could I ad-lib something?’ I said, ‘Sure. What are you going to ad-lib?’ ‘I want to say, “Don’t shoot the messenger.”’ Without knowing that Heath said that. I thought, What the fuck is this? Heath is still out there. Johnny’s channeling Heath somehow. I mean, Shirley MacLaine would love all this.”
Doctor Parnassus wrapped on April 15, but the project continued to be plagued by bad luck—illness, accidents, and worse. The producer Bill Vince died of cancer on June 21, 2008. In September, Gilliam was hit by a car near his office, in London’s Soho, and went to the hospital with a broken back. Despite it all, he managed to complete the picture. Says Garfield, “The only reason we got to finish it was because of Heath, and the relationships that he had made in his life. And the people that he had inspired, given something to. I mean, how incredible that those people that stepped in stepped in.”
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus had its world premiere at Cannes on May 22. It was greeted by a 10-minute standing ovation and generally positive response from critics. Kenneth Turan, writing in the Los Angeles Times, called it “a work as exceptional and unusual as its title … the director’s best, most entertaining film in years.” At press time, however, there was still no U.S. distributor.
In addition to whatever else it is, Doctor Parnassus is a deeply personal movie for Gilliam. It’s not much of a stretch to see him in the title character, the magus who has sold his soul in exchange for eternal life. But, as Doctor Parnassus wryly notes, he has been hoodwinked: True, he is immortal, but he never imagined that the world would change around him, would reach a point where people were no longer interested in watching his performances or hearing his stories. He never imagined that his audience would disappear. His public, such as it is, is portrayed in the movie as a collection of boobs, drunken louts, women who shop, and so on. In a one-from-the-heart scene, dressed in tatters, he’s reduced to begging for pennies. It’s a sadder replay of Gilliam’s Tideland stunt, scrounging for money in New York.
And then there is Heath Ledger. With his hoarse, smoky voice, his smile halfway to a grimace, parenthesized by parallel creases on either side of his mouth, Ledger is a highly physical actor; you can almost feel his performance before you see or hear it, like a bass line throbbing beneath the melody. In a complex and difficult part, he gives us everything we have learned to expect from him, and then some. A puzzle at the heart of a puzzle, his character gives him license to essay a blizzard of guises, calls upon him to be appealing, vulnerable, and frightening, all at the same time; he provides a whole new definition of identity theft. And in all these versions of Tony, the actor is wholly present, entirely in the moment, investing them with an almost uncanny immediacy. As Audsley says, “With all due respect to the other actors in the piece, who are all terrific, the film really only leaps into life when Heath appears.”
Adds Gilliam, “He was always evolving. Whatever it took, he would go down that road. Here was the guy who could do anything. There was just no limit. He was working on a script about chess with Allan Scott”—a screenwriter best known for Don’t Look Now—“which he was going to direct. He was directing Doctor Parnassus, in some way. We were planning our future with Heath. We were going to make a million films. He was off. Nothing would have stopped him. Except death.”
And perhaps not even death. As Plummer puts it, “Anybody in this business who enjoys themselves as much as Heath did is unusual, and valuable, and what it’s all about. I like to think of Heath as not having disappeared. Because the one thing the screen does, that the theater does not, is to make you immortal. He was a joy and he’ll go on being a joy. Heath will be with us forever.”
Peter Biskind is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.
