Q: Are you almost typecast as director of this kind of material?
A: This one chased me for quite a while. After Quixote took a tumble I got involved in three different projects, all of which were going to be made but for various reasons they weren’t. During this time Chuck Roven, who produced 12 Monkeys, was chasing me with this script. I kept saying no to it because I was doing my own things. I succumbed, but I said if I was going to do it I was going to rewrite it because I didn’t like the original script so me and Toni Grisoni went away and rewrote it and we started production almost at the same time. I liked the original premise, I liked the idea of the brothers as con men, and I liked the idea of playing in this fairy tale world, but within a modern structure. The original script was a proper Hollywood script. It had two very smartass Hollywood-type guys who go to ye-olde Germany and basically get involved with a lot of special effects, fighting big armies and great creatures. It was a very, very expensive movie that was pretty much the same kind of structure you’d see on something like The Mummy or Scorpion King. We tried to bring it back into the world of enchantment and fairlytales and creating what we thought was a world redolent of all the potential of the stories.
Q: There was no suggestion of doing a traditional biopic?
A: No. We were making a fairytale about the men who gathered fairytales. We didn’t want to be tied down with a biopic. Jacob is the younger one, but he’s the elder in reality. The only thing we did do was stay within the realms of early 19th century German with the enlightenment and the French invasions and all those elements.
Q: Were there any reactions from any Brothers Grimm appreciation society?
A: No, there are so many inaccuracies it would be a hopeless cause on their part.
Q: What about the casting of Heath Ledger and Matt Damon?
A: It all happened quickly because of the momentum of the film, which is nice because you’re forced to make decisions quickly. Nicolo Pecorini was making a film that Brian Helgeland was directing, Sin Eater, with Heath and he called me up and said this kid is fantastic, he’s as good as Johnny Depp, you ought to meet. So I met him and I liked him and he was in. It was really quick. I think he’s an extraordinary actor. Then we needed another bigger name. Matt’s name came up and I’d met him while he was working in the West End. He’d said, ‘When are we gonna work together’ and I realised I’d better deal with him. So we went out, but he came in trying to convince me that he could play Will and I spent the whole evening trying to convince him that Heath would be better; he’s more of a leading man. I said to him “The character of Will is more of the Ben Affleck part and you are more introspective, you should play Jake. By the end of the evening he said he’d play whichever part I wanted him to play. Next morning Heath came in and Heath said I want to play Jake. So it was nice to reverse their roles, because this is not how you would normally cast this and it gives you much more to play with. It’s more of a challenge and more worrisome and more of a surprise to the audience I hope because it lets us see another side of these guys.
Q: What about the grimness of the material especially the rabbit skinning scene?
A: That’s what people do. You skin a rabbit because she’s a hunter. I think the problem [if you’re offended by that] is that you’re either too young or too old. This movie plays to kids brilliantly. I’ve been getting a lot of noise about how it’s too rough for children. That’s absolutely false. We were doing a lot of screenings for kids. Skinning of rabbits, that’s what you do in the 19th century. Horses swallowing children? Read your fairytales. Grimms fairy tales are dark and that was one of the things that was important to me, to not do some modern bland version of what fairytales should be. Farirytales scared the shit out of me when I was a kid and they also gave me some of the most pleasure in life because they went into dark places and you come out alive at the end. Those things are very much part of fairytales. Somehow we’ve gotten to a stage where we think fairy tales are full of twinkly music or little people in pink.
Q: What’s your gripe against the Enlightenment?
A: It’s not so much a gripe against the Enlightenment – it’s just that we seem to have let it take over so much that everything has to be rational as opposed to allowing for the mystery and wonderment of the world. The Grimms were collecting the fairly tales and preserving the oral tradition of Germany that they were terrified was going to be eliminated. Obviously with the Enlightenment sweeping in it was putting even more pressure on getting rid of the old prejudices and superstitions. It was an interesting world to base things in.
Q: Is there a parallel between your struggle to get your vision on screen and the conflict between the fantastic and the rational?
A: That’s probably why I do films like I do because it’s about reality; it’s certainly about my reality. It’s always a battle. Every film I’ve done has been difficult to get off the ground. The scripts are usually incomprehensible to people who sit on money. It’s very hard to write the visuals in scripts and I do feel there are ideas in my films that I’m trying to get across that often bother people. People that sit on the money are often conservative people and more and more they seem to be less informed about films. I won’t name names, but in half the conversations I have in films like this I have conversation like, “couldn’t we have a scene like in Butch Cassidy, or one like Leo on the front of that boat.” So you end up having these conversations that are all a series of clichés so you end up referring to other films, and only successful films. Immediately the whole dialogue shrinks and the vocabulary shrinks. What’s hard to get is medium priced films $40-50 million. You can get very small films or very large amounts of money. This film, because it appeared to be a big rollicking adventure in the normal tradition, got the money. To me it was all about the momentum. Once a thing gets going, it’s very hard to stop. I suppose that’s the trick. This is about $80 million, but it’s got 750 effects shots. It’s a complicated movie. It may not look as big and expansive, but that was part of the intention. But $80m now is low. The average cost in Hollywood is crazy numbers.
Q: What problems did you have in making the film?
A: Technically this was tricky. We built an animatronic wolf that didn’t work so we had to do it in post. The most expensive scene in the film isn’t in the film. We built this huge, monstrous tree that didn’t work, we used lots of blue screen, but the film benefits from not having it. I showed it to Terry Jones and he said the film was broken-backed and it was because of that scene which makes the debate about whether it was real or not, whether it was really an enchanted forest, ludicrous, so we pulled it out.
Q: Didn’t you make another film almost simultaneously while you were doing Brothers Grimm?
A: Tideland is the other film. Jeremy Thomas and I got involved with this project, which was a book that I read which I thought was extraordinary. It was one of the projects I couldn’t get off the ground before Grimms. It’s a very divisive film, with subject matter that makes people squirm. Anyway, we made Grimms and we reached this point last June when we had a disagreement about what the film could be or would be or should be. Jeremy suddenly had the money available and I thought, rather than getting into a big fight about where we are, I’ll go away and do this other film. It ended up that in January I got the call to finish Grimms the way I made it, so I’ve been editing two films this year.
Q: What are your film influences?
A: Fellinin, Bergman, Bunuel, Stanley Donnen, Kubrick, Kurosawa. They just go on and on. I just grew up watching films like any punter; I just went to movies. It was Kubrick that woke me up with Paths of Glory. It was an epiphany. Now the Coen Brothers. I like Tim Burton’s visuals. Quentin is great; I really loved Jackie Brown. It was his first grown up movie. Rodriquez is interesting. Sin City as a new way of approaching cinema is bold but mostly I’m disappointed when I go to the cinema.
Q: How hard was it for Matt and Heath to do the accents?
A: It was very easy for Heath because he’s Australian. Matt was never confident, but I like it enormously because it isn’t a solid accent. It’s got more life. He’s a wide boy, he’s supposed to slip all over the place. They spent a month hanging out in Prague getting used to each others’ rhythms. that’s what it’s all about. I think they’re believable brothers, even though they don’t look like each other.
Q: What about the casting of Lena Headey?
A: Lena is a rather good actress who was very nervous through a lot of the shooting because her casting was slightly difficult. I won’t go into the details, because it’s not the way she would have liked to have been cast. But she worked very hard at it and she got into it. We were doing terrible things to her; she put up with a lot of difficult things to escape from being a modern girl. I think her most difficult thing was learning how to skin a rabbit. She’s a vegetarian, which was unfortunate.
Q: What can you tell about Tideland?
A: It’s a story of a nine-and-a-half year old girl. Her parents are rock ‘n’ roll junkies and the scene that gets people going early is a scene in which she’s working in the kitchen preparing what you think might be dinner for dad, but is preparation for a little vacation for dad. That image, when you see a little girl, you’re off and running at that point. It’s very Alice In Wonderland in a sense. She and her father, after the death of her mother, go out to this house and things start developing and she becomes more of a loner and she meets a retarded boy and starts fantasising about him and his rather peculiar taxidermist. It’s very Southern gothic in that sense, but it’s basically incredibly beautiful and it’s about the search for love and how a child can be put into a difficult situation and transform it into something beautiful. It pushes a lot of buttons in the audience and I can’t ever predict how they’re going to react. Michael Palin saw it, he really didn’t like it but it’s still in his head. He said ‘it’s either your best film or your worst.
Q: Were the Grimms the ultimate fairy tale gatherers?
A: I was always drawn to them because I preferred their darkness. But there is a bit of Anderson in this. There’s a lot of references. My favourite fairy tale is The Emperor’s New Clothes because only the child can see the reality of the situation.
Q: Do you think you will ever shake off Python?
A: It’s always going to be there. I love OTT performances and extreme characters. It’s very bizarre, we’ve just done a personal best show and it’s shocking how bad it is and how cheesy and cheap it is, but it’s still funny. Nobody’s really matched it. I guess The League Of Gentlemen captured some of the same grotesqueness. It will be on the gravestone no matter what we do.
Interview courtesy Consolidated Communications