By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Look at me, I'm a disaster!: Gilliam tips Tideland
“For good measure, Tideland also includes a bedroom scene between a 20-year-old man with learning difficulties and a little girl,” writes Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian; a rotting corpse that makes one relieved the film doesn’t come in smell-o-vision; a harrowing train crash; the disturbing sequence in which a troubled taxidermist… guts and stuffs the corpse of a former lover and then lays out the mummified remains in a place of honour on the bed. There is even a talking squirrel, which for some is the most disturbing thing… Like Lewis Carroll’s [“Alice in Wonderland], it features a little girl plummeting through a rabbit hole into an intensely imagined fantasy world; like Hitchcock’s film, it includes footage of a bewigged parental corpse in a chair (an image that Gilliam lingers over longer than Hitchcock would have dared)…” But “Gilliam [insists] that this is the most tender film he has ever made… How on earth did Gilliam get money for this project, particularly given that his last but one project… so far has only had one cinematic result – a documentary about how the filming went, in cinematic parlance, catastrophically tits up? And, furthermore, that the Minnesotan has such a wild reputation that Warner Bros nixed him as JK Rowling’s first choice to direct Harry Potter…? “Good question,” he laughs as we sit in his Notting Hill production office. Gilliam, with all due respect, looks a wreck. There are blood stains on his shirt, one of his feet is bandaged and his writing hand is still strapped up following a gardening accident in which he cut through a tendon while changing a lawnmower blade. “Look at me, I’m a disaster!” If you were a producer you would give Gilliam not money for a film, but the price of a cup of tea… Gilliam decided to make the film after finding Mitch [the] novel lying on a pile of unread books… “Mitch had sent it to me asking for a quote. I happened to pick it up and read it straight off. My quote? You wanna know? ‘Fucking brilliant!’ (In fact it says just this on the back of the the film tie-in edition…). What did you like about it? “It portrays childhood innocence in a recognisable way. Not in a Hollywood way.” So she’s not crushed by the twin traumas of her parents’ deaths…? “That’s the point. Adults don’t understand children. They think of them exclusively as things that need to be protected from everything. My 12-year-old son is now afraid to go to the shops in Highgate… because he’s raised by TV to believe it’s filled with rapists, murderers and muggers. It isn’t. Hunter Thompson described America as a panicky ship. Today everywhere is a panicky ship. If Lewis Carroll and Baden Powell were around today they would be strung up.” [More, of course, at the link; Gilliam talks to Tideland novelist Mitch Cullin in this MP3 download.]