Some good news for Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus: it will make its North American premiere as one of the Canadian Gala presentations at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Doctor Parnassus is a UK/Canadian co-production, and therefore counts as a Canadian film. Zone readers will recall that Doctor Parnassus was Heath Ledger’s final film, and that Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell stepped in to complete Ledger’s role.

In an interview with Film 4 conducted at ComicCon, Terry Gilliam had this to say about Johnny Depp and his work on The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus:

Q: You’re working again with Johnny Depp in Doctor Parnassus. What do you like about him?

Terry Gilliam: Johnny’s brilliant. What he does and what I do matches beautifully when we’re working together. In this instance he was the first person I called after Heath died because I didn’t really know what I was going to do. I asked if I could count on him, and he said sure, whatever you want I’ll be there. That’s what saved the film, Johnny’s involvement.

Q: Why do you work so well together?

Terry Gilliam: He’s so smart, so funny and his timing is brilliant. When we were filming, we were just laughing every day. I would come up with an idea, he would come up with another one, we were leapfrogging forward. I could throw him something and say why don’t you do this, and he would take the idea and just make it into something balletic almost. I always think Johnny wanted to be a Monty Python member.

The Zone thanks FANtasticJD for the Toronto Film Festival news, and Emma for the Film 4 interview. You can read more about the Toronto Film Festival on the News & Views forum; there are several ComicCon interviews with Terry Gilliam on the Porch forum. –Part-Time Poet