Behind The Scenes Footage From The Imaginarium Of Dr. Parnassus
If you want to see Terry Gilliam on location, doing his thing, or Tom Waits in costume as Mr. Nick, Lily Cole or Andrew Garfield between takes and rehearsing, then Tout Le Cinema's video clip of B-roll footage from the shooting of The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is for you. It's most definitely for me. You can see it after the break.
The first section of the video shows location work. This is a real London film, featuring lots of real London locations. Thankfully, they don't seem to be the cliched ones to have been overplayed in countless other films, many of them somewhat lacking in imagination. Gilliam's New York in The Fisher King was never quite like anybody else's New York, so I'm very keen to sink deep into his London.
Then, later, there's some footage from the blue screen set – and it actually is blue, as opposed to green (how very novel). This is where the scenes within the Imaginarium itself were created, as well as other FX elements necessary for elsewhere in the film.
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Wait's character of Mr. Nick is to all intents and purposes the devil and the devil being what he is, he's quite obviously the villain of the piece. The particular threat he poses is slightly less obvious, however. On the off chance you don't recognise Waits right away, he's the one smoking and wearing the bowler hat.
The bigger geeks amongst you will probably also get a kick out of seeing cinematographer Nicola Pecorini in action. That's him in the 2-shot with Gilliam at 27 seconds. Pecorini also shot Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Tideland, as well as some sequences in The Brothers Grimm before being 'removed' by the Weinsteins and replaced with Newton Thomas Sigel.
There's no appearance by any of the Tony 'variants' in the clip, so no Ledger, no Depp, no Jude Law or Colin Farrell. I suppose these starry boys might well be getting held back for a harder promotional push closer to release, or there could have been a sanction on b-roll footage when they were on set.
While the film has recently been locking distribution deals all around the world, the USA deal is still pending. Despite the popular scaremongering, however, the deal is definitely coming soon and I'd imagine we'll know who's going to be putting the film out, and when, within just a couple of weeks.