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]

In Gilliam's film, the ancient and immortal Dr. Parnassus travels with a troupe of entertainers, including his teenage daughter Valentina. One of their attractions is the Imaginarium, a mystical mirror that transports people to a realm of imagination. But all is not well for the troupe; Parnassus long ago pledge any child he had to the Devil, and the time on their deal will soon be up. As the clock ticks down, Tony, a mysterious stranger, wanders into their midst.

Here, we meet Heath Ledger's Tony for the first time:

Parnassus helps the amnesiac Tony jog his memory:

A young carnival-goer takes a candy-coated jaunt through the Imagniarium:

Tony, now played by Colin Farrell, enjoys a romantic boat ride with Valentina:

And now Jude Law gets his turn as Tony, climbing a literal ladder to success:

And finally Johnny Depp plays Tony, although here he calls himself Barry:

And in non-Tony-related business, we get Dr. Parnassus' first meeting with the Devil:

And another meeting, during which Dr. Parnassus, who has agreed to give up any child he has in exchange for immortality, makes a new deal with the Devil:

[via Cinema Blend]

This film is starting to look better and better.

[Images from Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus]

You have to admit the sight of Tom Waits as a sleazy, louche devil gets you kind of excited. And then there's the added visual evidence of Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell all playing the same person, which is something no other movie will ever attempt. Will the movie disappoint? You'll find out for yourself, when it opens Oct. 16.

[Cinemablend and Playlist]

During an interview to promote his new The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Gilliam revealed what he thought about Snyder's take on the classic graphic novel:

It got trashed, but there are great sequences in there, but the overall effect is kind of turgid in a certain way. I started putting it down to… you know, in the comic book, or graphic novel… They're still comic books to me (laughs)… It's like the Comedian's coffin is going into the grave with the stars and stripes on top of it and reading it in the comic book it's three panels, boom, boom and boom. On film "hhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmm…"

The pace is wrong. I was glad our version didn't get done, the one that Charles McKeown and I had wrote, because we had reduced it down to about two hours and five minutes I think and we lost so much. Comedian was cut down to next to nothing. So (Zack Snyder) did a good job, but it just felt… I also thought The Incredibles had kind of fucked it for him... [S]o much of that material had been in a quarry that everybody had been digging goodies out of and suddenly you get lost. I think Watchmen really bothered me, because I thought it should be better. It was all there. It looked right, but to me it was pace. It didn't have pace. It needed a bit more quirkiness in there. Dr. Manhattan was getting boring, frankly, and then Ozymandias by the end I thought "Oh, come on!" They lost me by the end, frankly, but it was certainly looking better than what I was going to do! (laughs)

Quint chats with Terry Gilliam about The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, Watchmen, Pixar, Ledger and much more! [Ain't It Cool]

In the film, Christopher Plummer plays Dr. Parnassus, a traveling showman who, a thousand years ago made a deal with the Devil: Parnassus could live forever, but any children he had would become property of the Devil upon their sixteenth birthday. As Parnassus' daughter Valentina approaches her sixteenth birthday, the Devil returns to collect. Ledger plays Tony, a mysterious outsider who suddenly joins the troupe and arouses Parnassus' suspicions.

The trailer takes us inside Parnassus' Imaginarium, a magical mirror that transports people to strange and surreal worlds. We also get a look at Tony's transformations after Ledger's untimely death led to Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law being cast as Tony's additional forms. It's visually striking, to be sure, but we'll have to wait to see if it all adds up to a movie.

During an interview with HitFix, Gilliam mentioned his admiration for Dick's work, and when asked about the possibility of adapting The Man in the High Castle, Gilliam revealed that he would be meeting with Dick's daughter to discuss bringing a different Dick novel to the screen:

One of the things that is... there's another one that people don't know called "The World According to Jones." Do you know that one? That really fascinates me... where we're in a world where basically everything is relative. It can't be black and white because there's a more religious fundamentalism that we're talking about. So now everything is relative. And then the idea that a guy comes along that can see the future, and it is not relative... that intrigues me, and I don't know exactly how to do it.

The book is actually The World Jones Made, a 1956 novel set on a post-apocalyptic Earth. After clashes between political and moral ideologies led to a devastating nuclear conflict, a world government, called Fedgov, instituted a strict orthodoxy of moral relativism. Anyone may believe what they want, but any person who tries to impose their beliefs upon others — or asserts a belief as fact — will end up in a labor camp. But one man, Floyd Jones, has an unusual precognitive ability, and quickly goes from telling fortunes at a carnival to instigating a war against an apparently unintelligent alien species.

It's easy enough to see how, despite it being one of Dick's less acclaimed novels, Gilliam would be attracted to Jones. It's chalk full of moral ambiguity, high concepts, and oddball bits ripe for Gilliam's visually powerful imagination — atomic mutants who perform in live sex shows, humans who genetically engineer themselves for life on Venus, and spore-based aliens. But I can't help but wonder if Gilliam's dreaminess is too good a match for Dick's, and if the combination of the two would yield too abstract a film. Still, if Gilliam does move forward with a Dick adaptation, the product should be, at the very least, a fascinating watch.

[HitFix via /Film]

Tim Ollive was an animator and model maker for Monty Python movies The Meaning of Life and Life of Brian, and has done visual effects for numerous other Gilliam projects, including Brazil, Twelve Monkeys, Time Bandits, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Now Gilliam is backing Ollive's own film 1884, a collaboration with production designer Dennis De Groot.

The promotional trailer is a proof-of-concept reel, shot entirely on Ollive's kitchen table, to test out the effects for an eventual feature-length film. The clunky feel of the animation and Thunderbirds-style marionettes is deliberate, trying to evoke the sense that it was filmed using the same steam-powered technology it depicts.

[Peculiar Productions via Quiet Earth]

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.

In an interview with fansite Dreams, Gilliam explained how his next big science fiction project, about a cubicle zombie, with Billy Bob Thorton attached, is now dead in the water. The delay in The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus along with the prep work needed for his next project The Man Who Killed Don Quixote seems to be the culprit:

I thought I could do it quite quickly and cheaply, and that would be a nice one, rather than getting caught in more expensive, more complicated or hard-to-finance things. But the year just got swallowed up by Parnassus and publicity, and preparation for Don Quixote. I just didn't think it would be viable and I pulled the plug earlier this year.

This makes us sad, because more people should be giving Gilliam time and money to make tripped out mind blowing scifi, plus we hate to see original work get pushed aside for endless remakes.

Here is the long synopsis of Zero Theorem from Voltage Pictures:

Qohen Leth, a socially maladjusted "cubicle zombie" with a genius for computer work, is waiting for a phone call. His entire life has been consumed with the wait for this call. He doesn't know the nature and origin of the call, but he knows it will provide him with the purpose that he has long lived without.

Qohen is given a special project by his corporate managers. His task is to solve a mysterious theorem that has stumped, and mentally broken, the long list of computer geniuses that were previously assigned the job.

Living in an Orwellian corporate world where "mancams" serve as the eyes of a shadowy figure known as Management, Qohen works on a solution to the strange theorem while living in isolation in his home-the shattered interior of a fire-damaged chapel.

His isolation and work are interrupted by a gorgeous, sexy woman who has recently befriended him named Bainsley. They communicate and make love via a tight, translucent, red virtual reality suit. An unlikely torrid romance develops, in which Bainsley has gotten Qohen to open up and come out of his shell like never before.

Qohen is occasionally visited by Bob, the rebellious whiz-kid teenage son of Management. These visits seem to be orchestrated by Management to keep control of Qohen's progress on the project. But Qohen and Bob become friends, and start to dig deeper into the meaning of the Zero Theorem. Bob lets it slip that Bainsley has been hired by Management to help control him, and, as a result, when Bainsley earnestly tells Qohen she's going to run away and pleads with him to come with her, he coldly rejects her.

As work on the project reaches a critical point, it becomes clear that the key to both the theorem's final solution and the source of a much-awaited phone call actually reside within Qohen himself. He holds the answer to the theorem and his own long-awaited epiphany. Bob modifies the virtual reality suit and creates a program that will carry Qohen on an inward voyage, a close encounter with the hidden dimensions and truth of his own soul, wherein lie the answers both he and Management are seeking. The suit and supporting computer technology will perform a sort of inventory of Qohen's soul, either proving or disproving the Zero Theorem.

But the program doesn't work and Qohen must find the answer within himself, as no machine can truly search the human soul. Qohen is now able to solve the Zero Theorem and find the meaning of his life. He burns the church and takes off with Bob on a search for Bainsley, the one person who has given his life true meaning.

Is it the freshest idea in the world? No, but with Gilliam's eye who knows what it could have looked like.

Le voyage dans la lune (1902)
French cinema pioneer Georges Méliès' silent classic is generally considered the first great sci-fi film, with the first great indelible image in movies, of the rocket ship hitting the moon smack in the eye. With his tale of scientists who shoot a rocket from a cannon to the lunar surface, where they meet hostile aliens, Méliès knew he had a hit; alas, Thomas Edison pirated the movie and made a mint from it in America before Melies could taste that sweet overseas box office. Watch the whole silent film below; it's only eight minutes.

Cat-Women of the Moon (1953)
The early 1950s saw a spate of movies built around lunar expeditions. This is one of the silliest — and, in the right light, the most fun. Did you know that there were giant spiders on the moon, or that in lunar caves the air is breathable enough to take off your space mask? The tale of a race of hot chicks on the moon planning to take over the earth has been parodied often, most notably in 1987's Amazon Women on the Moon (which often apes this film shot for shot), but for campy laughs, it's hard to top the original.

2001: A Spacy Odyssey (1968)
It's hard to come up with enough praise for the lunar segment of Stanley Kubrick's mind-expanding space opera. Plotwise, very little happens, save for the discovery of the monolith on the moon that sends Dave Bowman hurtling toward destiny But oh, those visuals! Even while trying to depict commercial space flight as an ordeal as mundane as airline travel, Kubrick still makes it look graceful and lovely. Same thing on the moon's surface, where eerie quiet coexists with beautiful desolation.

Space: 1999 (1975-77)
The whole series (shot in Britain for ITV and syndicated in America) took place on the moon, though not in our solar system. The premise of the show saw the moon sent careening out of earth's orbit and into deep space after a nuclear waste dump on the far side of the moon exploded (oops!), leaving the crew of Moonbase Alpha to fight for survival in hostile encounters with strange creatures. The season 2 opening credits told the story economically, as you can see.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)
Terry Gilliam's overstuffed fantasy did have one minimalist sequence: its trip to the moon. That's because the production ran out of money, so Gilliam's plan for a vast set and a cast of thousands was canceled. Instead, Gilliam settled for a cast of five and a lunar city that consisted of little more than the former Monty Python animator's production sketches shuffled about. The changes worked, however, resulting in an austere yet enchanting sequence in which the human characters encounter the king and queen of the moon, two giants with detachable heads. As the jealous king, Robin Williams brings his usual bagful of crazy, but just imagine the sequence if Gilliam's first choice, Sean Connery hadn't bailed when the money got tight.

A Grand Day Out (1989)
The short that introduced the world to Wallace & Gromit (and to claymation king Nick Park) features a wonderfully daffy story that has the tweedy inventor and his silently suffering dog building a rocket in their basement in order to fly to the moon to satisfy their jones for cheese. This 20-minute short is as brilliant and hilarious as the rest of the Wallace & Gromit tales, and if you haven't seen it, or can't remember the unique nature of the creature our heroes meet on the moon, you must watch now.

Space Cowboys (2000)
Clint Eastwood's adventure about four oldtimers — NASA also-rans who didn't quite have the right stuff — who get another chance to blast off as seniors is a surprisingly sentimental story. But the finale, in which an ill-fated member of Clint's team finally gets his wish to reach the moon, gives the movie an unexpectedly lyrical and moving final shot.

The Time Machine (2002)
This update of the H.G. Wells story (and the 1960 George Pal film) isn't that great (even if it was directed by H.G.'s great-grandson, Simon Wells), but it's on this list for its striking sequence of lunar destruction. Time traveler Guy Pearce learns that, in the early 21st century, we sent demolition teams to level the lunar landscape in order to build condos on the moon, and, well, we broke it. D'oh! Watching the moon crumble over the heads of panicky earthlings is an awesome and horrifying sight.

Bruce Almighty (2003)
Given God-like powers, Jim Carrey emulates Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life, except his ability to lasso the moon to give it to his gal is literal. Who wouldn't swoon the way Jennifer Aniston does to see such a magnificent moon, almost close enough to touch? Unfortunately, Carrey learns the next day, his moon-yanking stunt caused tidal waves in Asia. Gravity's a bitch.

Bruce And Grace Romantic Evening - The funniest movie is here. Find it

Watchmen (2009)
During the revisionist-superhero saga's celebrated opening-credits montage, there's a brief moment that pays homage to a celebrated urban legend. When Neil Armstrong lands on the moon, Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) is already there, taking his picture. Armstrong can be heard saying, "Good luck, Mr. Gorsky!" It's a reference to the old joke (which some believe came from an actual Armstrong utterance), in which Armstrong supposedly followed up his boffo "That's one small step for man..." line with a reference to something he'd heard a neighbor's wife say years before, that she wouldn't give her husband a blow job until the kid next door walked on the moon. Alas, it's not true. Armstrong never said it. Snopes says so.

So far, Parnassus seems to be getting mixed reviews, with critics enjoying Gilliam's inventiveness (especially in figuring out how to switch in other actors for Ledger) but feeling like the film is mostly for an arthouse audience or for die-hard fans.

Says Screen Daily:

To anyone not sympathetic to Gilliam's flights of fantasy, Parnassus will reek of rambling self-indulgence but fans will welcome it as a return to what he does best.

The Hollywood Reporter says that Gilliam used great imagination and skill to replace Ledger, but the film doesn't rank with Gilliam's greatest work. And the HR offers a bit of a plot summary:

Filled with phantasmagorical images with the occasional echo of "Monty Python's Flying Circus," the picture involves a classic duel between the forces of imagination, led by Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), and the architect of fear and ignorance, known here as Mr. Nick (Tom Waits).

Andrew Garfield and Lily Cole provide youthful love interest, and Ledger is again the joker in the pack as a stranger who is not what he seems.

The setting is a horse-drawn carnival sideshow in modern London, an attraction in which Dr. Parnassus, who claims to be immortal, invites ticket buyers to enter a world of their own imagination by stepping through a large mirror. Once beyond it, faces change and fates vary, which is how Gilliam gets away with having Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell step into the Ledger role.

Ledger makes his entrance as a man being hanged from London's Blackfriar's Bridge with his arms tied at his back. Saved and named George by the members of Dr. Parnassus' troupe, he claims to remember nothing and joins the players. The doctor and Mr. Nick have a lifelong wager in which the soul of Dr. P's daughter (Cole) is the prize, and he suspects the devil has placed George there to make trouble. The rest of the film involves various plunges into the mirror's vast wonderland, with George changing physiognomy along the way.

Says Variety:

With Ledger onscreen more than might have been expected, the film possesses strong curiosity value bolstered by generally lively action and excellent visual effects, making for good commercial prospects in most markets.

IGN is more damning:

With clumsy dialogue, poor plotting and some downright terrible performances, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a huge disappointment for any fan of Terry Gilliam's work.

The BBC is muted:

There's no doubt that the imaginary world he's created is awe-inspiring, but it's ultimately designed for an art house audience.

The critics at Cannes loved it, but most cinema-goers would need to see it more than once to start untangling the multiple themes.

As for Ledger, it feels like a post-script performance - he's only in the movie for a third of the time and even if he had lived to complete it, it wouldn't be chalked up as one of his most memorable films.

The Huffington Post gives it one and a half stars out of four:

This modest fantasy feels like a mishmash of the usual Terry Gilliam obsessions, but less so.

And the Guardian seems to sum up the buzz perfectly:

When Gilliam shoots off into his surreal wonderland, his film has a kind of helium-filled jollity and spectacle. The moments when Plummer's face looms hugely out of the hallucinatory landscape are great: a reminder of the old Python magic. But the film's convoluted curlicues are tiring, insisting too loudly on how "imaginative" everything is. And when it descends into the real world – Lucy out of the sky without diamonds, as it were – the film can frankly be a bit ho-hum, with some very broad acting from the bit-part crowd players. Gilliam's previous movie Tideland showed he still has teeth, and he bares them occasionally here. The dark side reveals itself, time and again, in the ruined, unsentimental locations in London. But this movie, though perfectly amiable, could be for fans only.

Of course, plenty of original movies do get turned into books - but they're usually rushed novelizations, written in a month by someone who's juggling ten other deadlines and adding speech tags to the movie script. If you're lucky, you get a few extra insights into the characters and one or two scenes that the adapter added, or which were cut from the movie before or after filming. Plus, of course, the movies that get their own book adaptations aren't usually ones which could benefit from a really smart dose of storytelling. Movie adaptations of books, meanwhile, are usually disappointing for a whole different set of reasons.

But every now and then, a movie comes along down the pike that actually cries out for a smart, interesting book that brings out the ideas simmering below the surface. Here are ten movies that I'd love to see a really smart book version of, and the authors who would write them in my fondest dreams.

Twelve Monkeys. Cole (Bruce Willis) travels back in time from a plague-ravaged future to try and discover the source of the virus, but he ends up tangling with his own past in unpredictable ways. I was torn between listing this one and director Terry Gilliam's other dystopian epic, Brazil. But of the two movies, I think I'm more desperate to read a really thoughtful novel of Monkeys, preferably written by someone who watched the film with Gilliam a few times. There's so much confusing stuff in this movie, especially Cole's causal loop - is he creating his own dystopian future, or is he simply trapped in the logic of already-existing events? Did the scientists send Cole back on purpose to make sure their plague-ridden timeline "happens," as some have suggested? (In which case, why would they be worried about that, given that it's already happened?)
Who should write it: Marge Piercy, author of Woman On The Edge Of Time. She knows all about time travel, madness and the long reach of dystopia.

The Fountain. Meredith suggested this one - there's already a graphic novel adaptation of Darren Aronofsky's original screenplay, the one he never got to film. But there's no prose novelization of the actual movie, which I found to be a huge let-down despite its sprawling, ambitious plot. Judging from the results of our recent poll, many of you consider The Fountain an underrated masterpiece. Maybe a book could flesh out some of the confusing stuff about the present-day cancer cure and just what's going on with that weird tree-in-space sequence.
Who should write it: I'm going to go with Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn. He might be able to ground the present day stuff and add some life to those lifeless characters, and when he's channeling Philip K. Dick, he does weird-and-fantastical quite well. Maybe it would all feel epic and personal, the way I think the film was supposed to.

The Brother From Another Planet. John Sayles' story of an escaped slave with weird feet who lands up in present-day New York is one of my favorite films, although I haven't seen it all the way through in a decade. Joe Morton is fantastic as the mute escapee, who has a strangely close relationship with technology.
Who should write it: Tobias Buckell, author of Sly Mongoose, has dealt with themes of slavery and alien cultures in a lot of his writing.

Sleeper. Wikipedia claims this film is loosely based on the H.G. Wells novel The Sleeper Awakes, but I would say "loosely" is the operative word. And this is such a crazy slapsticky subversive novel, complete with humans impersonating robots, Orgasmotrons, a fake utopia and nose-cloning. And so much more.
Who should write it: Douglas Adams, if he was still alive? Actually, I'm going to go with io9 contributor Austin Grossman (Soon I Will Be Invincible), just because I think he could nail the neurotic Woody Allen tone, while doing a lot to flesh out the absurdity of this freaky dystopia.

Possible Worlds This little-known film stars Tom McCamus as a man who keeps journeying through different alternate universes and having a relationship with the same woman (Tilda Swinton), which always seems to end badly. And then there's a twist, which I won't reveal here but which we gave away in a found footage.
Who should write it: Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife.

S1m0ne. Andrew Niccol's most disappointing film totally deserves a novel told from the point of view of Al Pacino's character, a third-rate movie director who creates a virtual actress to save his troubled movie - and then has to deal with her becoming a superstar. A novel might be able to make the movie's premise more believable and dispense with some of the VFX problems that dog the movie, and a tight focus on Pacino's POV would allow us to probe the psychology of a man who brings to life an irresistible virtual avatar, in a cross between Pygmalion and Cage Aux Folles.
Who should write it: Amy Thompson, author of Virtual Girl, who manages to make that novel's skeezy programmer who creates a gynoid and then tries to enslave her actually sympathetic.

The Matrix Trilogy. No, not just the first movie. I want to see the whole trilogy as one sprawling, insane novel about cyber-avatars. I want all of the lame discussions about free will in the second movie and all of the lame everything in the third movie to be beaten into submission, and the whole disappointing mess transformed into a seamless whole, the story of humans trapped in a virtual world rising up against their machine overlords, while a virtual man-in-black becomes a megalomaniac.
Who should write it: That's the hard part. There are so many cyberpunk authors I'd like to see try their hand at it. But in the end, I'm thinking Charles Stross.
He does sprawling post-human stories really amazingly well, and might add a whole extra conceptual layer to the Wachowskis' somewhat facile world-building.

Primer. This knotty time-travel movie actually stands on its own remarkably well, but I'd still like to see a smart, thoughtful novel that deals with all the of the intersecting timelines and unraveling protagonists.
Who should write it: David Gerrold, author of The Man Who Folded Himself, still possibly the weirdest time-travel novel of all time.

Slither. You might think this is just another over-the-top body horror movie, about alien parasites who infect a town's residents. But this movie goes so much further, showing how a woman can't escape her abusive husband. The parasite infects her husband first, and then all of the people whom it infects afterwards speak with the husband's voice, so she's constantly trapped. It's up there with Society and Dead/Alive in the disturbing horrific social commentary sweepstakes.
Who should write it: The great d.g.k. goldberg, if she was still alive. Otherwise, I would say Nalo Hopkinson, author of Brown Girl In The Ring.

Sunshine. The screenplay is available in book form, but there's no novelization. I loved this film, but many people don't seem to agree, and maybe a really strong novelization could help win over the doubters, especially if it made the slasher-movie third act feel like it grew naturally out of the rest of the story.
Who should write it: I'm thinking maybe Stephen Baxter, who's shown a talent for writing madness as well as planetary disasters and space exploits.

Note: I was going to include Galaxy Quest on this list - but realized it already has a novelization, by Terry Bisson. Who, by amazing coincidence, is probably exactly who I would have chosen to novelize that movie. Has anyone read Bisson's Galaxy Quest novel, and is it as good as it ought to be? It's only one cent on Amazon (plus a few bucks' shipping, of course.) Also, did you know that Christopher "The Prestige" Priest has novelized David Cronenberg's Existenz?

We asked Hayter what he had coming up in the future...

"I'm working on a film right now called Lost Planet for Warner Brothers. It's a video game adaptation. And I've got a film that I've got set up to direct that I can't talk about."

Is it in your scifi wheelhouse?

"Ummm some fantasy, yeah. Everything I do is sort of fantasy. Magical realism, I'm a big fan of Terry Gilliam, so if I could follow in his footsteps, I'd be very happy."

So what could it be? Hayter's directing rumors have been pretty quiet, ever since the rumors of him directing Black Widow got crushed a few years ago. What about Crystal Lake's Werewolf... that's kind of magical realism, no? Oh and don't get too excited, since we've heard he's not directing Metal Gear Solid, because as of right now, they're still merely in talks, according to Collider.

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]

If anything, the retrospective nature of the 2:48 video is as depressing as it is comforting; it's one thing to say for Gilliam to say that the new movie "feels like the kind of films I made when I was younger," but the constant use of scenes from Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen throughout the piece - along with the generic trailer blurb about the movie taking you on a journey "beyond imagination" - also robs the viewer of any sense of newness or discovery. Or maybe I'm just being too picky. What do you think?

Teaser Trailer From Terry Gilliam’s THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS! [Quickstop Entertainment]

Thanks John

Time Bandits II initially started as something for Gilliam to do after directing 12 Monkeys, with the two drafts of an initial script written during 1996, but both versions failed to find favor with studios. Gilliam himself seemed to lose interest in the project, moving onto the movie version of Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, but when his directing career again went quiet, he went back to the idea of revisiting his 1981 classic — this time, as a TV show.

In late 2001, Gilliam announced that Time Bandits was set to go again, as a series of TV movies on the Hallmark Channel:

Actually, we've written Time Bandits for television. Charles McKeown and I have just finished the story (pause, with trepidation), 'cause Hallmark has bought Time Bandits... I've agreed to be in creative control of this thing. So we wrote Time Bandits, these two, two-hour specials. Kevin is now in his middle-thirties and he's got a couple kids. And life has never been as exciting as it was then. And that's where it starts.

Hallmark confirmed the project the following year, describing it as a four-hour miniseries... and then nothing was heard of it ever again.

Gilliam first talked about working with Virgin Comics in 2006, but Monday's Lying In The Gutters column from Johnston was the first mention of Time Bandits II being amongst the properties that he was working on for the publisher, just in time for the company to go under.

So where do the Time Bandits go from here? There are probably numerous companies who would love to publish a Time Bandits II comic (Boom! Studios, IDW and Oni all spring to mind as potentials), but it all depends on whether Gilliam wants to try to bring the story back to life for a fourth time. Perhaps this was just an idea whose time never came.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, potential distributors drawn in by the publicity aspect of releasing Ledger's last film quickly find themselves pushed away again by Gilliam's involvement. The director, famous for scifi great Brazil, hasn't had a successful movie since 1995's Twelve Monkeys. One distributor is quoted as saying, "In this market, unless I have a reason to think a movie like this is going to be a slam dunk I'm not going to take a flyer on it, even with Heath Ledger."

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus involves parallel worlds, regeneration and deals with the devil — and Ledger's role in the movie will likely be taken over by Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law. But even that isn't enough to guarantee the movie a deal, apparently:

The prospect of getting involved with three marketable stars makes for a relative bargain for a buyer, who might pay low-seven figures for domestic rights but get an eight-figure level of promotable talent.

But even that troika might not be enough.

Said one longtime distribution guru: "For all the elements in this film, it is a Terry Gilliam picture, and as much as you want a movie of his to be good, you have to be careful."

Heath Ledger's final movie a tough sell [Hollywood Reporter]

Famous names: Terry Gilliam, Jonathan Pryce, Michael Palin, Robert DeNiro

Crunchy goodness: 5

Design breakthrough: Directed by famed Monty Python animator Terry Gilliam, who has made a career out of dark, visually-arresting films, Brazil masterfully contrasts Sam's trippy, gorgeous dreamscapes with the claustrophobic, information-industrial urban space where he lives.

Stunt casting: Gilliam's Python pal Michael Palin plays a twitchy, unctuous torturer.

Spinoffs: 12 Monkeys, another Gilliam film, appears to take place in an even darker version of the world he invented for Brazil.

Brazil Frequently Asked Questions