Film - Terry Gilliam Seeks Harmony With the Gods of Cinema - NYTimes.com TERRY GILLIAM, whose new movie, "The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus" opens Dec. 25, talks a lot these days about the "film gods" - otherworldly creatures, sometimes benign, more often malicious, who have taken over his life and run it at their whim. Sometimes he sounds half-serious, and who can blame him? His career has been singularly jinxed by natural disasters, runaway budgets, stubborn and uncomprehending studio heads. In 1999, trying to make a movie version of "Don Quixote," he endured so many Job-like travails that his failures became the subject of an award-winning documentary, "Lost in La Mancha" (2002). At times "The Imaginarium" seemed similarly ill-fated. Halfway through, Heath Ledger, one of the stars, died of an accidental overdose. William Vince, the producer, died, after a long illness, just as the principal photography was finished. And while the movie was in postproduction and just about out of money, Mr. Gilliam was run over by a car outside a London restaurant and broke his back. "The film gods were going for the triple," he said over lunch in New York last month. They got Heath, they got Vince, and they were coming after me. He broke into a gleeful, high-pitched laugh, something he does with great regularity. Turning serious, he added that after Mr. Ledger's death he didn't want to go on with the picture and more or less gave up until his daughter Amy, one of the producers, and Nicola Pecorini, a longtime friend and the director of photography on the film, badgered him into continuing. "They just keep kicking me as I lay there on the ground," he said. But to me this really felt final. I thought, "The movie gods really don't want me to continue." They were saying, "Stop, before you kill again." " It took Mr. Gilliam five weeks to scrounge up some additional backing and get the movie up and running. The hardest part, he said, was just summoning the mental energy to go to the set every day. Almost right away he realized that merely substituting a double for Mr. Ledger's unshot scenes wasn't going to work and hit on the idea of using three stand-ins. For that breakthrough he credits the film gods again: "I didn't make this film, remember. They did, and they knew what they were doing. The actual rewriting took only a day or so, he said, and was mostly a matter of building some clues and plot elements back into the story. "I started to realize that almost everything I was doing made the movie better," he recalled. That's what's so terrifying when you're in the hands of these mysterious creatures. The three replacements - Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell - came out of loyalty to Mr. Ledger, and not at the film gods" bidding, though Mr. Depp was able to appear only because the filming of "Public Enemies," to which he was already committed, was providentially delayed for a week. He was on the set for just one day and three and a half hours the next, and Mr. Gilliam recalled of his performance: "He was just so still and wonderful, one of his finest moments. He saves the movie. He steals the show and then is gone before we know it. So many people who have watched it think it's still Heath there. That Heath Ledger turns into Johnny Depp, who turns into Jude Law, who turns into Colin Farrell is actually one of the least startling things that happen in "The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus." The transformations happen on the other side of a magic mirror, in a phantasmagorical world that is a cinematic representation of the inside of Terry Gilliam's teeming brain. There are monsters and cartoon characters, fantasy landscapes that look like the paintings of Grant Wood and Maxfield Parrish. The title character (played by Christopher Plummer) - an ageless tale teller, part genius, part con artist, who wanders the world in an old-fashioned circus wagon, spinning yarns for an audience that's not much interested - is probably a projection of Mr. Gilliam himself, and the movie is full of images and details that evoke practically all his earlier films, especially "Brazil," "Time Bandits," "Twelve Monkeys" and "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen." There are even some cartoon sequences and a chorus line of bare-legged policeman that come right out of "Monty Python," where Mr. Gilliam got his start. It's as if he were worried that he might never get to make another movie and decided to dump in all his best stuff. "I was thinking more of "Amarcord" and "Fanny and Alexander," " he said. Movies where people reach a certain point in their careers and just relax and make something joyful. He laughed and added: "It's better that I rip myself off than somebody else does. I just wanted to play with all the things I've been pretty good at. "The Imaginarium," which he wrote with Charles McKeown, is Mr. Gilliam's first wholly original project since "Time Bandits," and it started with a single image: that ancient, horse-drawn wagon arriving in present-day London. From there the two writers free-associated for a while. "It was like going back to the beginning," Mr. Gilliam said. Let's see if we can make it up from scratch. We'll start from nothing and see where it goes. He added: "In some weird way it was like putting together a Python show. I had lots of leftover bits in my drawer, all these ideas and sketches, and so how do you blend them into something?