Terry Gilliam

How does Tideland compare to your other films?

I think this film is more tender than many of the others, even though I've likened it to Alice In Wonderland meets Psycho! And while I feel all my films are very different in tone, I think that they may all share an attitude towards life, and I suppose that innocence has been in almost all of my movies in some way.

What attracts you to investigating innocence?

There is something about innocence; in the modern world it's hard for innocence to flower, because you're bombarded day in and day out with imagery and ideas and shit - rapes, muggings, attacks. There's disaster out there; that was the world. But actually it's not the world, it's the mind that we're presented with. I mean, how many people get mugged? It's a very tiny percentage. The world out there can seem a dangerous place, rather than the place you walk into and discover as you go through. For Jeliza-Rose, it's a discovery of this world that she goes through; she has to deal with it, it's happening fast.

There's a lot of need in this film. It's people desperate for love, it seems to me; Jeliza-Rose wants love, her parents don't give much. But that's there, and when it's gone there are other people to fill the gap, and they all kind of want that. Dell is a really sad character, she was Noah's girlfriend when she was young, but then after he left she became this monster.

How do childhood dreams relate to Tideland?

To children, it strikes me, that every day they wake up they can see the world as a potentially different place. Until you get to a certain age, and then it seems to get repetitive, unfortunately. I love those moments, when Dickens says he'll kill the shark, and Jeliza-Rose says, "Yeah, then we'll be on television..." That's her dream, to be on television! But most of her dreams seem to be normalcy - family, Mr and Mrs and baby.

The way I get through life, you need both things, fantasy and reality. You need imagination - you've got to be able to recreate the world often, to get through it, and not get bogged down by the facts of life:they get pretty boring after a time. I resent the fact that I'm getting old, because it gets harder to do; when you see Jeliza-Rose she's constantly imagining and reinventing the world. Constantly. And that's what one gets to do when making films, it's probably what I do when I make a film; for that brief moment I am reinventing the world into a form that makes sense within itself.

There is a controversial romance between Jeliza-Rose, a 10 year old girl and Dickens a 20 year old man. Were you worried about how people would react to this?

I think the relationship is the thing that is most disturbing to people, a 10-year old with a 20-year-old's mind in a relationship with a 20-year-old with a 10-year old's mind. Putting them together and all the possibilities... that's dangerous, because one of our panic words these days is paedophilia, and child abuse. These are the things that sell newspapers these days.

I thought we walked that line really carefully, without going over the edge. I never felt we're being voyeuristic, salacious or manipulative. My wife thinks it's shocking because it's innocent, and it is
innocent. That was our feeling when making it: try and remain innocent, and what was interesting was that Jodelle was the one that always embarrassed us by going places that we felt uncomfortable with. Because she was the little girl with the innocence; that's what it's about - it's springtime for a little girl

Jeliza-Rose experiences great trauma in Tideland for someone so young. Do you think children can be as tough in real life?

I like to think that children are tough, they are resilient, and all sorts of things happen to them. Maybe it is because everyone has become so bourgeoisie, saying that the child must be protected from everything. A few years ago I bumped into a German lady with a young daughter and she wouldn't read her Grimm's Fairytales, because they were disturbing. But they're not disturbing, they prepare kids for life. Any good fairy tale is really just an old folktale that has been around for a long time so they're dealing with something that's lower and deeper...

Tideland is a very beautiful film, how important was the look for the film?

The visual fabric and the story, are not separate for me, and it seems to me that if you're going to be hiring really good actors then you've got to trust them; I mean Brendon was worried that he was going too far over the top too often, but I didn't feel that. He's an extreme character, and a lot of people won't like that.

If you look at paintings through the middle ages and Renaissance, they are full of information, other than just a guy or a girl, there are symbols there and things that mean things and I hope in my films that the visual side also has meaning. So in the case of Tideland it's very simple; we have the interior of a decaying rotting house, and you've got these beautiful experiences, one's open and free and beautiful and the other's dark and more disturbing. It's very simple in that sense, you have these two worlds that one is playing with, and there's not much action going on, other than a little girl running here and running there or standing there talking. So there's less distraction.

How did you go about getting that Alice in Wonderland feel for Tideland?

Shooting the scene when Jeliza-Rose falls down the hole with the dolls' heads, I tried to do it realistically, but I just failed... [laughs]. No, when you're dealing with dolls, or puppets, or cartoons, or theatre, the audience is willing to give much more of themselves, and to do a little work. I think that's the problem with technology now, and it's going to fail, we'll want to go back to the Punch show where we can believe that's Punch and that's Judy. With a lot of stuff I do, while some people find it confusing, others enjoy it because it doesn't give you all the answers.

Choosing the doll set, we had to become like kids, because even though Mitch Cullin had written the book, and we had written the screenplay, when it came to choosing the dolls a whole bunch of new ideas came up, and I realised which dolls were to represent which specific aspects of Jeliza-Rose. Neither the novel nor the screenplay had done that, so you've got to just get in there and play. The other thing was that looking at the pictures Lewis Carroll took of Alice Liddell, she looked just like Jodelle. And we tried to be like that; having Jodelle leading the way…

Where do you think the future lies for Jeliza-Rose in Tideland?

I don't think Jeliza-Rose does get what she wants; she would love Dickens and the baby, but she's not going to get that. She'll probably get something very safe, and life will become normal for her, but she'll never have anything as intense, as wonderful, or magical as this brief period, these few days she has. That's the other side of things, I feel you remember your childhood, you remember moments - think of what you did as a child, but I only remember a few moments, but they were intense ones. That's kind of what she'll go through, I think...