Terry Gilliam used magic to finish 'The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus'

CANNES, FRANCE — Terry Gilliam went to the movies the other night, and this is what he saw. "Trailers from 'Transformers,' 'G.I. Joe,' 'Harry Potter'; they all had the same explosions, the same sound mix, the same rhythms, it was all the same film," the director says, still not quite believing it. "Hollywood's been doing this for 20 years. When's it going to end?"

It ends right here and now at Cannes' Festival du Film, where Gilliam's "The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus," a work as exceptional and unusual as its title, premieres out of competition today. A tale of good and evil battling for souls that's made with Gilliam's fantastic and fantastical visual imagination, "Imaginarium" is the director's best, most entertaining film in years.

"Imaginarium" is also perhaps the most anticipated film of the festival because it's the one Heath Ledger was working on when he died in January 2008, the one that ends with the on-screen credit "A Film From Heath Ledger and Friends" because colleagues Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell pitched in to finish it.

More unusual still, the structure of "Imaginarium" and the nature of what was left to shoot when the actor died made the use of those substitute actors so seamless that, Gilliam said, "the postproduction sound guy assumed it had been written that way."

It's no wonder, then, that Gilliam feels that he "didn't make this film. Forces from above and below made it. It made itself. I don't panic anymore. It's got its own relentless momentum. It just needed some human sacrifice."

Gilliam means not just Ledger but producer William Vince, who died a few months after the actor, as well as the director himself, who was hit by a car and broke his back. "They were going for the trinity," he says with his trademark take-no-prisoners sense of humor. "That would have been a tidy end to the whole thing. But they didn't kill me. I'm stuck here to tell the tale."

Gilliam, who co-wrote the script with Charles McKeown, described the film as "my 'Fanny & Alexander,' my 'Amarcord.' I went back to the things I'm really good at."

And like Dr. Parnassus, the title character played by Christopher Plummer, Gilliam "was being frustrated, trying to amaze people and they're not paying attention. So the film became autobiographical in that sense."