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the brothers grimm
 Lena Headey as village girl Angelika. There were hidden benefits, too. “I’ve never seen anyone work as hard as Matt did to become a character so unlike who he really is, and also so unlike any character he’s played before,” chuckles Gilliam. “His entire bearing is completely different, and I hope the audience will respond with the same excitement to it that I did.” Ledger also reveals a new side in the film. “Heath is someone who the world is used to seeing as a more conventional hero,” says Gilliam. “But here, you see that he also has another kind of nervous, quiet side to him that’s very intriguing. Like Matt, he simply wouldn’t give up until he got the role right. They were both very impressive.” Even more impressive is the world that Gilliam, along with production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas (an art director on The Matrix Reloaded, who got his first full production-design credit on X-2), created for the film. Having scoured the Czech countryside in vain for the perfect village or villages to recreate the fictional Marbaden, they decided the only viable option was to build the whole thing on a soundstage and backlot at Prague’s Barrandov Studios. “We realised from the beginning that, in order to have the film truly look like a fairytale, we couldn’t shoot it in a real forest or a real village because nothing quite like it existed,” explains Gilliam. “We were going to have to build it all, so we created nearly everything from scratch: built castles and barns, brought an entire forest of trees into a soundstage, trained ravens and horses and crafted hundreds of models. It was by far the largest production I’ve ever done.” The 25-building village, complete with a church, bakery, bridges, stables, paths, a 700-tree enchanted forest and a stream - to which were added some exteriors shot at Krivoklat Castle in central Bohemia and in other historic Czech villages - created the world Gilliam was looking for. It also helped the actors understand the nature of the film. “When you walked onto Guy Dyas’ sets,” says Damon, “you were immediately pulled into an entirely alternate world. They were just massive in scope and amazing in their feeling; they transported you in wonderful ways.” Gilliam is, of course, aware that the lives of the real brothers Grimm was quite different from what happens in Kruger’s screenplay, but feels his film is very much in the spirit of their life and work. In the early days of the German romantic movement, the Grimms set out to rescue myths and legends that had been dismissed as crude and unsophisticated by the rational thinkers of the previous century. It was a period that saw the beginnings of Germany’s sense of national identity, making it doubly relevant that Gilliam’s film should be set during the Napoleonic era, and that Will and Jake’s chief adversary should be the dastardly French general, Delatombe, played by Jonathan Pryce, who starred in Gilliam’s Brazil. |
