The Imaginarium of Heath Ledger

We saw Terry Gilliam’s “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus” on Saturday night. Very enjoyable. I didn’t find the themes I’ve found common to his other two works I know best, “12 Monkeys” and “Brazil,” primarily surreal ultra-bureaucracy, but there was more of the Monty Python in this, including a startling but hilarious dance number.

This, the last work we’ll ever see from Heath Ledger, made me mourn his passing all over again. He really was a tremendous actor with great breadth of skill and immense promise.

This bit of an interview with Gilliam added to the sense of loss, knowing that the possibility of many more collaborations between Ledger and Gilliam can now never come to pass:

You’d worked with Heath before. How good was he?

Heath was a brilliant actor and he was getting better every day. And just watching him rise, was incredible. And I think that’s the thing, as well as losing a close friend, it’s just the waste of this incredible potential. I just think there was nothing stopping him; he was going to be the best, just the best. He was already right up there but he had learned to play more. And just the stuff that came out of him daily on the set. Nicola and I and the first AD, with every take we were like ‘what the **** is he doing now? Look at that!’ It was just this constant surprise. And that’s what is so awful, the loss of that talent. And I could see that he and I were going to be doing a lot of films together because he just got it, he got what I was about, I got what he was about. And suddenly, that’s it, he’s gone and I lost a partner. I think we would have done a lot of films together but I’m on my own again. Every day I think about what would have done here? What about that? And with the film, I would have loved to see the film that he would have made had he lived. I don’t know what it would have been like, everybody is now in love with what we got, but I still think about what we were going to do. Read the rest of the interview (it’s worth it) »