Cage Match: Terry Gilliam & Lily Cole

Terry Gilliam needs a muse. The 69-year-old director of Twelve Monkeys and Brazil came close to finding one back in 1988, when he cast a then-unknown Uma Thurman in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. But she left him for another rebel named Quentin and, according to Gilliam, “she never came back.” Two decades later, Gilliam’s latest film,The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, features another otherworldly acting novice with blue saucers for eyes: supermodel Lily Cole. The 21-year-old Brit plays the title character’s doomed daughter, who aches for a suit-and-tie husband and white picket fence, in a welcome return to surreal form for the director.

A collision of reality and ayahuasca, the film is pure Gilliam—and so were the difficulties involved in making it. On-set disasters flock to Gilliam like pigeons to breadcrumbs. His 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha chronicled the catastrophes that befell The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, with injury, flashfloods and NATO target practice all contributing to that film’s eventual eighty-sixing. A more heart-wrenching stroke of bad luck haunted Doctor Parnassus: the untimely death of leading man Heath Ledger. Out of respect for Ledger and Gilliam, Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell signed on to play various incarnations of Ledger’s character, salvaging a film that looked momentarily doomed. With Doctor Parnassus about to arrive in theaters, we sat down with Gilliam and Cole to discuss the redhead’s “alien beauty,” Ledger’s kindness and whether or not they’ll ever work together again.

Terry Gilliam: I think we should talk about how it all began. We wanted to cast somebody extraordinary as the daughter of Parnassus, and Irene Lamb, the casting director, said, “We need someone who looks 16, but is older so that we don’t have to worry about child labor laws.”
Lily Cole: I got the part because I was legal?
TG: Well, you’re extraordinary and legal. I had seen pictures of you and thought, Well, there’s somebody who looks different than the average woman.
LC: Alien beauty, I was told.
TG: It was like there was a doll face from some 19th-century porcelain factory staring back at me. Then we met at the screen test.