FOR A DIRECTOR who rose to fame as part of Monty Python, there's something appropriately surreal in the fact that Terry Gilliam's first movie for seven years was almost scuppered by a prosthetic nose.
The eccentric filmmaker, whose distinct cinematographic style defies easy categorisation, returns to the screen with an US$80 million reworking of the Grimm brothers' fairytales.
Yet The Brothers Grimm, a visual feast shot in the Czech Republic, went into production only after the resolution of a dispute between Gilliam and Miramax producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein that might have been dreamed up by Messrs Cleese, Palin and Idle. 'It was unbelievably absurd,' says Gilliam at a Los Angeles hotel. 'But it was a fight to the death. They were seriously going to close the movie down - and that was the night before the first day of shooting.'
The artificial proboscis at the centre of the dispute belonged to Matt Damon. He and Heath Ledger play the film's eponymous heroes, Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm.
Gilliam says he'd given Damon's beak a 'tiny bump' in order to accentuate the angular lines of the actor's face. 'I thought if we gave him a stronger nose, he'd look amazing. And he did. He actually looked like a young Marlon Brando. It transformed him. It was like Dumbo discovering he could fly.'
Not everyone was impressed though, least of all Harvey 'Scissorhands' Weinstein, who wanted Damon's face to be easily recognisable in promotional material for the movie. 'The same thing happened with Finding Neverland,' Gilliam says. 'Johnny Depp was supposed to have a great big handlebar moustache and Harvey talked Johnny out of having that moustache because he wanted Johnny's pretty face on the movie poster.'
