Terry Gilliam

I should start how I mean to go on, I suppose. Let's have some movie news and let's have it be movie news pertaining specifically to Terry Gilliam. Stick around here for a while and you'll see me come back to Gilliam often enough. Hit the link on the right to check out my previous blog to find out what kind of presence he maintained there. He is the world's greatest filmmaker, after all.

Gilliam, Zombies, Animation... as much as might I protest that I love all styles, eras and genres of movies and moviemaking equally, those biases keep getting called. I suppose theres no reason to deny it.

Jodelle Ferland in Gilliam's Tideland

Screendaily have reported that Anything For Billy, Gilliam's collaboration with Larry McMurtry (The Last Picture Show, Brokeback Mountain) is galloping closer to production with Gilliam now signed officially to direct. Even more excitingly, they also broke the news that the top three unrealised Gilliam projects - Good Omens, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote and The Defective Detective, in escalating order of my anticipation - are, incredibly, all also on track for production at some point in the future. Life should always be this good.

Set partly in a young child's dreamworld, The Defective Detective would require an enormous amount of visual effects trickery and as such, has always been budgeted very extravagantly - prohibitively so, in fact. More recently, however, films like Sin City and, particularly, Mirrormask have shown the very successful creation of complete, elaborate, and involving artificial worlds on smaller budgets. Hopefully this means that Gilliam's enormously epic vision will seem far less frightening to 'The Studios' and somebody will, at last, flash the green light. It can only help that Dave McKean, director of Mirrormask, is now touted as a collaborator on the project, mentoring the effects and design teams and ensuring that the fantasy images are achieved efficiently and, frankly, very cheaply.

In the meantime, while we're waiting for this abundance of cinematic riches, lets not forget that Tideland, Gilliam's latest - and quite possibly greatest, so do the math: that would make it the best of all films, of all time - is still without cinema distribution in most of the world, including the UK and the US. Simply put, that's a crime against cinema.