CBS News has some new concept art and behind-the-scenes photos, and here are our favorites. Gilliam talked to CBS about the genesis of the movie's storyline, about a magic mirror behind which your imagination is tested — and if you fail, you lose your soul to Tom Waits' Devil. Apparently, the story comes from the sour reaction to Gilliam's previous film, Tideland, which made Gilliam want to make a movie about "the notion of a storyteller whose stories didn't have an audience," as CBS puts it.

Apparently the movie's biggest challenge was that tall, thin wagon, which couldn't fit under London bridges. Says Gilliam's daughter Amy, "That wagon was the bane of our lives."

Both Gilliams also talk about the shock of Heath Ledger's death, and the challenge of replacing him — as well as the unexpected richness the three replacement actors — Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law — added to the film. Instead of being labeled as a Terry Gilliam film, the finished product bears the sobriquet "A Film By Heath Ledger And Friends." The whole article is worth checking out. [CBS News]

Here are the clips he showed:

Parnassus and the Devil

The first part of this scene between Dr. Parnassus and his daughter Valentina is here:

But the scene goes on from there. As the bird flies back down inside the monastery, we see a giant statue representing the world: a disc resting on the back of a turtle, resting on the backs of four elephants. Monks sit below the statue in fanciful Himalayan-inspired monk garb: saffron robes and tall pointed hats. Parnassus, the chief steward of these monks, sits apart from them in heavy eyeliner.

Parnassus continues to explain that the chief steward, after performing his task of keeping the world spinning on its axis, had a dream that a dark rider came and visited him. The heavy front door to the monastery opens and we see the masked rider outside — only now he is revealed as Tom Waits' Devil, riding mask in hand and a bowler hat on his head, ready with a genial greeting.

Your dreams:

Here's the whole thing:

Weird voyage:

A man is standing in front of the Imaginarium's faux mirror. Parnassus' daughter Valentina, wearing a dress and a white wig, comes out of the mirror, then back in, and the man follows her into the Imaginarium.

They are transported to a forest of fake trees, the sort of flat, painted set pieces you might see in a play. The man lustily chases Valentina — whose hair has become the wig and whose dress is transformed into something fancier and more fitted — as she runs away giggling. But when he finally catches up with her, she rewards him not with a kiss but with a punch in the face, and she dashes off giggling again. He falls face first into the mud, crying, "Come back, you bitch."

He starts to get up, but he catches his reflection in a puddle of water. The face staring back is now a different face. He becomes frightened, first shouting, "My face!" and then "Is anyone there."

Suddenly, we hear a horrible shrieking and an oversized green hand attached to a rope seizes the man and drags him up into the sky. The green hand has no body, but a tiny head with a mop of red hair where the elbow should be. It continues to shriek as it pulls the man up, up into a sky populated by gently pulsing jellyfish. The man begs the hand to release him. It complies, and of course he plummets to the ground.

We suddenly cut to a giant tack that is sitting on red sand prong-up, and we're obviously meant to fear that he'll be skewered when he lands. But instead, he merely falls into the bowl and, when he realizes he's safe, breathes a sigh of relief.

After showing those clips, Gilliam went upstairs for a chat with a handful of reporters, including us. He praised Ledger's deft, multi-layered performance, which laid down tons of clues for the actors who replaced him in the fantasy sequences: Colin Farrell, Jude Law and Johnny Depp. It was pure luck, he said, that Ledger made the artistic choice (which wasn't in the script) to wear his weird mask every time he went inside the magic mirror, which made it easier for the other actors to replace him in the weird sequences on the other side. He says Ledger's character was partly inspired by Tony Blair, because Gilliam was so angry at Blair for serving as such an eloquent mouthpiece for George Bush during the Iraq war.

We asked Gilliam what he thought he would see if he went inside the mysterious Imaginarium, and he laughed raucously, saying:

That's what's on film, what I see. You get to see what I see. I just had a lot of silly ideas. Let's make this mirror and on the other side... I was playing a bit, to see if I could find a world halfway between the realistic world and the cartoon world. Like the Grant Wood scene, with Jude, it's all a sort of Grant Wood landscape, a painterly landscape, but the trick is you have to feel you're in the space, even though it is what it is, and it's not realistic.

Someone pointed out that Gilliam actually started out his career as a cartoonist, so this is sort of returning to his roots. He replied:

This is my Fanny And Alexander, my Amarcord. This is a compendium of all the things I used to be good at. (Laughs)

He says he conceived of this film because he was fascinated with the idea of anachronism, and wanted to bring an old-fashioned carnival troupe into the present day — although he also wrestled with the idea of bringing in some futuristic elements or having a future setting.

Gilliam says he's "trying to push the idea that it's Parnassus' story." Ledger's character doesn't show up for the first 15-20 minutes of the movie, so if you go in expecting it to be about Ledger's character, you're going to be disappointed.

Gilliam is working on a movie called Zero Theorem, confirms the screenplay's author, University of Central Florida professor Pat Rushin. He won't divulge much about the movie's storyline, but it's supposedly a smaller story, more along the lines of The Fisher King than a huge 12 Monkeys-style operatic piece. Rushin is the author of a book of short stories called Quantum Physics And My Dog Bob, a title which which can't help filling me with hope for his writing.

Of course, Gilliam has some other projects on his plate. He's just finishing work on The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus, the last movie featuring the late Heath Ledger, which has Colin Farrell, Jude Law and Johnny Depp subbing in for Ledger. Says Gilliam:

Basically the movie (Dr Parnassus) is finished apart from about 600 special effects shots which are not quite finished,” Gilliam told City Times. “We’re in the final stages of development. Some of the effects have to be reshot because of Heath’s passing. He’s never computer generated in the film, but certain other things have to be changed. We had to change the script in certain ways. It was also partly due to the schedules of Johnny, Colin and Jude because they were all involved in other projects and we had to shoot very fast and not as controlled as I would like to be just to get them done. We literally had Johnny for a day and a half and I had a lot of work to do. Trying to work the transitions out from Heath’s character to the others took longer in some instances so everything just started growing.

He also says he rewrote the script in two days to accomodate the changing actors. I have a feeling Parnassus will be an interesting movie rather than a great movie. [Film Ick]

Evidently this system is already in practice in Spain, and the organ-harvesting ambulances are only dispatched when a known volunteer donor is in a life-threatening situation, and now a group of NYC doctors led by surgeon Lewis Goldfrank of Bellevue Hospital Center at New York University want to replicate the process. Still, it's not hard to picture the harvesting paramedics looking over the regular EMTs saying "oh man, that looks bad. Don't think he's going to make it..." or carting someone off to be 'redistributed,' only to have the patient protest, "I'm not dead yet," Monty Python-style:

Normally, transplant and organ preservation specialists don't get involved until after a patient has been declared dead. "Declaring someone dead out in the field, when the person is either not decapitated or decomposed ... is a critical decision," said Michael Grodin, a specialist in health law and bio ethics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

"I think it is a bad idea, a counterproductive one," he said. "The public will see it as an ambulance floating around in the city ready to take your body."

The project's goal is to send an ambulance to the scene of an accident and for the paramedics to do what they can to save the victim's life.

But without necessarily telling these paramedics, project administrators will also order a special ambulance in charge of collecting fresh human organs to the accident site. Its personnel will intervene only if the patient dies.

Source: PhysOrg