Tideland

[Kirkinson]

For his tenth feature, Terry Gilliam (Time Bandits, Twelve Monkeys) adapted Mitch Cullin’s celebrated cult novel Tideland, a work he once described as “Alice in Wonderland meets Psycho through the eyes of Amélie.”

To escape her unhappy life in a remote part of Texas, nine-year-old Jeliza-Rose dreams up an elaborate fantasy world. But the reality of having junkie parents – played by Jeff Bridges (The Big Lebowski) and Jennifer Tilly (Bound) – and the influence of her eccentric neighbours begins to encroach, turning her daydreams ever darker.

A rich slice of Southern Gothic blurring whimsical fantasy with unsettling reality, Tideland is among Gilliam’s most personal works – indeed, with its shifts between the amusing and the macabre, expressive camerawork and striking special effects, the film could be the very definition of Gilliamesque!

SPECIAL EDITION CONTENTS

• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) presentation
• DTS-HD MA 5.1 audio
• Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• Commentary by writer-director Terry Gilliam and co-writer Tony Grisoni
• Introduction by director Terry Gilliam
• Getting Gilliam, a 45-minute documentary on the making of Tideland by Vincenzo Natali (Cube, Splice)
• The Making of Tideland featurette
• Filming Green Screen featurette with commentary by Gilliam
• Interviews with Terry Gilliam, producer Jeremy Thomas and actors Jeff Bridges, Jodelle Ferland and Jennifer Tilly
• Deleted scenes with commentary by Gilliam
• B-roll footage
• Gallery
• Theatrical trailer
• Reversible sleeve featuring two choices of original artwork

FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Neil Mitchell

[analoguezombie]

Tideland premieres at Toronto in less than a day, and with that the web site has been dramatically revamped.

Synopsis:

Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland) is a young child in a very unusual situation - both parents are junkies. When her mother (Jennifer Tilly) dies, she embarks on a strange journey with her father, Noah (Jeff Bridges), a rock 'n' roll musician well past his time.

The film drifts between reality and fantasy as Jeliza-Rose escapes the vast loneliness of her new home into the fantasy world that exists in her imagination. In this world fireflies have names, bog-men awaken at dusk, and squirrels talk. The heads of four dolls, long since separated from their bodies, keep her company: Mystique, Baby Blonde, Glitter Gal and Sateen Lips, until she meets Dickens (Brendan Fletcher), a mentally damaged young man with the mind of a ten-year-old.

Dressed in a wet suit and speedo, he spends his days hiding out in a junk heaped wig-wam turned submarine, waiting to catch the monster shark that inhabits the railway tracks. Then there's his older sister Dell (Janet McTeer), a tall ghost-like figure dressed in black who hides behind a beekeeper's mesh hood.

As optimistic as it is surreal, as humorous as it is suspenseful - Tideland is a celebration of the power of a child's imagination.

Having read the novel, I'm not so sure how "optimistic" this is going to be, but as I have said in many other places, I really think it has the potential to be Gilliam's greatest film since Brazil...or possibly just his greatest film. I certainly can't think of anything to compare it to (although Gilliam's oft-quoted "Alice in Wonderland meets Psycho" description is pretty spot-on).

Wonderful set photos by Jeff Bridges (beware of spoilers from #25 and on).

Great interviews with Gilliam, Cullin, and DP Nicola Pecorini here.

Gilliam's take on the response so far (including Michael Palin's opinion):

How will audiences respond to Tideland?
I don't know. I just know what it is, and I think it's good. There was an early screening we had, a group came from Peerless, who have done the effects on my films. I just didn't know what they would make of it. Afterwards there was almost a fight between those who thought it was fantastic and one guy who was apparently the liberal in the group, who found it just offensive and outrageous. He was really outraged and the others who said no, no, you don't understand. It was great.

My wife Maggie's response was great she said it was shocking because it was innocent. I really don't know. To me it's a litmus test for people about who they are and how they perceive the world and how secure they are about themselves. I just feel that people… I can't predict what people are going to make of it. I know I've got a great response, and there are people who just think it's terrible.

I think the best thing was Mike Palin who saw it very early on, the film was probably half an hour longer than it is now, maybe more, maybe 35 minutes longer, and he didn't like it. And he woke up the next morning, and he couldn't get it out of his head. It was just in there and he began to think. In the end he said it's either the best thing I've ever done or the worst thing I've ever done - he doesn't know. And I think that's what people should be doing: making films that are more on the edge.

This has been one of my most anticipated films of the year. I just hope it makes it out to Landmark thetaters before mid-2006, cuz I will be forced to buy a bootleg. This will be a nice companion piece to The Borthers Grimm. A sort of "this is the director under movie studio boards of directors, and this is the director free to pursue his vision".

[justeleblanc]

I assume Landmark will get it by the end of the year, right? Why would we have to wait until 06 to see it?

[THX1378]

I'm hoping that this will be out by the end of the year. I saw Grimm tonight at last and wasn't that impressed with it, but thats for another post. I really hope that he can find distribution for the film *I don't think it will be a problem at all since he's got it made and in the can, unlike some of his projects or films that he's had problems with while filming*. Lets all just hope that this gets out by the end of the year.

[analoguezombie]

I assume Landmark will get it by the end of the year, right? Why would we have to wait until 06 to see it?

Well. the Landmark in Atlanta has a tendency to show films WAY, WAY after they've already been making their indie/art screen circuit, and just before they show up on dvd. I think the ATL is at the back of the line for prints in the chain or something, I dunno. Me You and Everyone We Know is a recent exception to this, though, so I guess there is hope.

[Kirkinson]

Just for the record:

TIDELAND outright SUCKED, and this time Gilliam has no Weinstein to blame either. A complete and utter disappointment.

Beaver is divided on it:

This is a much smaller film than Gilliam is accustomed to making, and I think it worked wonders for him. A Canadian production, this twisted little tale tells the heartbreaking story of a young girl (10 yr. old Jodelle Ferland, in brilliant performance) who is forced to take care of her drug addicted parents, even going so far as to help them shoot-up. She escapes this nightmarish home life by retreating into her imagination, and the film becomes a Gilliamesque “Alice in Wonderlandâ€

[Jeff]

Mike D'Angelo of Esquire and Noel Murray of The Onion were pretty underwhelmed too. You'll have to do some scrolling to find the Tideland stuff.

[rs98762001]

To be fair to Tideland, it seems it may be too strange a film for festival-type, first-impression reviews. All the critics linked seemed to find something interesting and troubling about it, even if their overall impressions were not positive. In the Gilliam interview above, he even mentions that Palin's reaction was similar: he initially hated the film, then found himself constantly thinking about it and revisiting it in the subsequent days. This is one of those films I'm going to keep looking forward to, until my expectations and hopes can be crushed first-hand.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

Mike D'Angelo of Esquire and Noel Murray of The Onion were pretty underwhelmed too. You'll have to do some scrolling to find the Tideland stuff.

David D'Arcy, a contributor to NPR gave it a nice thumbs up, here.

[Faux Hulot]

Mike D'Angelo of Esquire and Noel Murray of The Onion were pretty underwhelmed too.

Pffft. Murray's review concludes that Tideland is "no damn fun," which I suppose is relevant if you think of cinema as one big amusement park (and I'm not talking about you, Jeff, but rather Mr. Murray).

[analoguezombie]

Is Gilliam on your Fantasy Directors team?

Pretty much. And it's a case of just wanting to see great things from director's I like. sue me. The only film that totally blew me away this year was Mysterious Skin, and while I was hoping for it to be good, it completely surpassed my expectations.

[Kirkinson]

The official web site now has a trailer and three clips up. I would love to give you a direct link, but unfortunately it's a flash site. Click on "Access Map" and go from there.

So far the film looks exactly as I expected it to look: the most unadulterated Gilliam since Brazil. I was initially dismayed by the look of some of the effects in the third clip, but I came to enjoy the two-dimensionality of it as sort of a throwback to his old animations. Whether it'll actually feel the same on a movie screen I'll have to wait to find out.

The film has found distribution in pretty much every territory except for the UK and USA (though it is being released in Canada). Most places seem to be planning on a Spring release next year.

[Dylan]

Wow, thanks for the update, that was beautiful! Such a lovely and shockingly unique combination of childhood fantasies and weird horror, handled in such an unflinchingly disturbing/twisted fashion. Gorgeous cinematography and music on top of that. I can't wait to see it.

Meanwhile, I didn't really notice the effects in the third clip being very dismal, though perhaps I was so taken with what I was seeing (and the music) that I didn't notice. I know next to nothing about this film's story (other than what the trailer tells us), but from the looks of it I'll be completely sucked into this world when I see it. With that said, I don't expect I'll have a chance for at least another four to six months unless someone distrubutes it sooner. Why doesn't Fox Searchlight pick it up? They've picked up a few Jeremy Thomas productions in the past (most notably the films he produced for Bernardo Bertolucci).

Dylan

[che-etienne]

That trailer looks spectacular. I think this just shot up my most anticipated movies of the year list.

[Fletch F. Fletch]

New Int'l trailer is online

A four-part podcast interview with Gilliam

[rs98762001]

So what's the deal? Is this movie getting a US release or not?

[chaddoli]

Yes. In August, I believe, through ThinkFilm.

[Antoine Doinel]

'Look at me, I'm a disaster!'

How did Terry Gilliam get his hands on £12m to make a film with stuffed corpses and a talking squirrel? Good question, admits the director to Stuart Jeffries

Friday August 4, 2006
The Guardian

A few minutes into Terry Gilliam's new film Tideland, a nine-year-old girl cooks some heroin for her dad, who is sitting expectantly in an armchair. "Daddy's going on a vacation," he explains, hunting a vein for the needle. As he blisses out, his daughter helpfully takes the lighted cigarette from his hands and stubs it out in the ashtray. Gilliam likes this scene so much that he repeats it as if to underscore how much daddy is addicted to figurative vacations and how his daughter's domestic chores will never be over until daddy ODs.

Article continues
The heroin cooking is one of the many scenes that have upset viewers. Typical was Gilliam's old Monty Python chum Michael Palin. "He saw it, and I don't think he liked it. He walked straight out of the screening without saying anything. When I spoke to him later he said: 'I can't get it out of my head. I'm still not sure whether it's the best or the worst thing you've ever done.' As a reaction, that's good enough."

For good measure, Tideland also includes a bedroom scene between a 20-year-old man with learning difficulties and a little girl; a rotting corpse that makes one relieved the film doesn't come in smell-o-vision; a harrowing train crash; the disturbing sequence in which a troubled taxidermist (played by Janet McTeer) guts and stuffs the corpse of a former lover and then lays out the mummified remains in a place of honour on the bed. There is even a talking squirrel, which for some is the most disturbing thing in the picture.

Gilliam describes the film as Alice in Wonderland meets Psycho, which is a nice line for the billboards. It's also a fair description of Tideland's dance between childhood innocence and the degrading tawdriness of adult desire. Like Lewis Carroll's novel, it features a little girl plummeting through a rabbit hole into an intensely imagined fantasy world; like Hitchcock's film, it includes footage of a bewigged parental corpse in a chair (an image that Gilliam lingers over longer than Hitchcock would have dared). But the line misses Gilliam's insistence that this is the most tender film he has ever made.

In recent years Gilliam has embarked on an infamous, abortive attempt to shoot Don Quixote and a game (but finally misguided) attempt at a bona-fide blockbuster with The Brothers Grimm. But Tideland is something completely different. It tells the story of young Jeliza-Rose, who holes up with her dad, Noah, in an abandoned Texas farmhouse. After Noah dies (heroin OD, natch), Jeliza-Rose seemingly disappears into a fantasy world in which she talks chiefly to her headless Barbie dolls, romances a disturbed adult and reports home to her dad's leathery corpse. The only light relief comes from Jeff Bridges, who plays Noah, a jaded rock'n'roller who we see at the film's outset playing a gig in LA, stoned out of his crust and wearing a leather suit as he belts out an improbable tune about Van Gogh visiting Hollywood. It's a reprise of Bridge's adorable performance as the stoner Dude in The Big Lebowski, and alone worth the price of admission. "I love Jeff," says Gilliam. "I wanted him for Twelve Monkeys, but the studios wouldn't touch him. I had to have Bruce Willis instead."

If those last two paragraphs were a pitch for Hollywood money, Tideland would surely have remained a twinkle in the 65-year-old film-maker's eye. Instead, it has been completed on time within a £12m budget (quite big for an independent film) raised largely by Jeremy Thomas, a veteran producer of left-field, even engagingly tonto, cinema. How on earth did Gilliam get money for this project, particularly given that his last but one project (The Man Who Killed Don Quixote) so far has only had one cinematic result - a documentary about how the filming went, in cinematic parlance, catastrophically tits up? And, furthermore, that the Minnesotan has such a wild reputation that Warner Bros nixed him as JK Rowling's first choice to direct Harry Potter in 2000?

"Good question," he laughs as we sit in his Notting Hill production office. Gilliam, with all due respect, looks a wreck. There are blood stains on his shirt, one of his feet is bandaged and his writing hand is still strapped up following a gardening accident in which he cut through a tendon while changing a lawnmower blade. "Look at me, I'm a disaster!" If you were a producer you would give Gilliam not money for a film, but the price of a cup of tea.

"Jeremy knew it would be difficult, particularly because the film is very, very weird. But he believed in it - it's about a girl in trouble and that's a universal theme that we can all identify with." Reviewers of the novel on which the film is based compared its heroine to Harper Lee's Scout or Carson McCuller's Frankie. Several found traces of William Faulkner's eccentrically peopled southern fictions. Nobody so far has found book or film cute.

Gilliam decided to make the film after finding Mitch Cullin's novel lying on a pile of unread books in his office. "Mitch had sent it to me asking for a quote. I happened to pick it up and read it straight off. My quote? You wanna know? 'Fucking brilliant!' (In fact it says just this on the back of the the film tie-in edition of the novel). What did you like about it? "It portrays childhood innocence in a recognisable way. Not in a Hollywood way." So she's not crushed by the twin traumas of her parents' deaths, but is more resilient than adults might expect? "That's the point. Adults don't understand children. They think of them exclusively as things that need to be protected from everything. My 12-year-old son is now afraid to go to the shops in Highgate [London] because he's raised by TV to believe it's filled with rapists, murderers and muggers. It isn't. Hunter Thompson described America as a panicky ship. Today everywhere is a panicky ship. If Lewis Carroll and Baden Powell were around today they would be strung up."

A few years ago, when preparing The Brothers Grimm, he met a German woman who refused to let her young daughter read Grimms' Fairy Tales because they were disturbing. "But they're not disturbing," counters Gilliam. "They prepare kids for life." Similarly, he contends that in his film Jeliza-Rose's fantastical imagination helps her carry on, despite being abandoned to the fates before she turns 10. "She's constantly re-imagining and reinventing the world, which for a crusty old man like me, is a wonderful thing. You steadily lose that imaginative strength as you get older."

Gilliam is too hard on himself. He has reinvented Mitch Cullin's imagined childhood world for the screen in a manner every bit as visually compelling as Brazil, Twelve Monkeys and those few beguiling rushes from his attempt to make a movie out of Cervantes. Gilliam, incidentally, still has high hopes of returning to the Quixote project: "We're trying to get the rights back. If we do, my first call will be to Johnny Depp [who played a time traveller in the original]." Will Jean Rochefort be prevailed upon to remount Rosinante and play Quixote? "Probably not."

Until then, Tideland provides more than enough food for thought. Was it really a good idea to get a nine-year-old girl (the compelling Jodelle Ferland) to play a scene cooking heroin for her dad? Did her mom mind? "Her mother was fantastic. She understood the film. And Jodelle was cool in the scene. That said, she didn't really know what she was supposed to be making. What does heroin mean to a kid? I know I'm pushing buttons but we're careful to push them in the right way."

That scene has some unlikely admirers, Giliam adds. "So many women have come up to me because the situations are like those they remember." Are you saying that these women all cooked heroin for their fathers too? "That's not what the scene is about. It's about the relationship between father and daughter and how she takes on the burden of looking after him." That's what resonates - the too-early responsibility of a child for their slacker parents? "Now you're getting there."

The other sequence that, no doubt, will earn Gilliam his own little bit of tabloid controversy is the one in which Jeliza-Rose snogs a 20-year-old man called Dickens with the mind of a 10-year-old and they imagine she's pregnant as a result. "It's not a sexual scene, so any paedophile interpretations or Lolita interpretations are going to be wide of the mark," says Gilliam. What is it then? "What she wants is normalcy - Mrs and Mrs and baby. It's a fantasy she picked up from TV. Something her parents never gave her."

This is true. Infinitely more degraded and disturbing than Jeliza-Rose's fantasyland romance is the fate of the Janet McTeer character, a woman so traumatised by her disappointment in love that she cannot bear anyone or anything to leave ever again. As a result her home becomes a taxidermy, where every dead animal (her mother included) is rebuilt so they never leave her. Her existence, as a result, becomes a death in life.

By comparison, Jeliza-Rose, twice bereaved and living outside reality, seems positively well adjusted. Rarely has there been such an unsentimental, unflinching portrayal of a fraught childhood on screen. "The one thing about children you never really get is that even though they're innocent, they're selfish," says Gilliam. "Resilient and selfish. Resilient because selfish. The little buggers!" Indeed, the film's ending is a marvellous portrait of childish unconcern about proximate human tragedy. It is, then, not a Saturday night no-brainer. "Nah, I can't do those." For which, Mr Gilliam, much thanks.

· Tideland is released on August 11

[Fletch F. Fletch]

First part of a Q&A with Gilliam on the Dreams website.

CHUD interviews Gilliam.

interviewsThe Onion AV Club on Gilliam.

There is also an interview at Suicide Girls.com.

[exte]

Great info...

AVC: When we spoke in 2003, you were in the process of trying to get back the rights to The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and you thought it was just about to happen. Three years later, not much progress seems to have been made. What's the latest?

TG: It's just about to happen! [Laughs.] It looks like we've actually got it this time. I know I'm the boy who cried wolf, but apparently a deal has been done, and we're waiting for the lawyers to do the fine print. Jeremy Thomas, who produced Tideland, seems to have pulled this thing off. But again, the other side of me isn't going to even think about it until the thing is my hands, and I know we own it.

AVC: Why did you renounce your American citizenship earlier this year?

TG: I thought I'd just simplify my life. I'm getting old. I'm gonna die. I'm not at all happy with what America has been in the last 10 years. [Laughs.] The reality is, when I kick the bucket, American tax authorities assess everything I own in the world—everything I own is outside of America—and then tax me on it, and that would mean my wife would probably have to sell our house to pay the taxes. I didn't think that was fair on my wife and children.

[ka mai]

I just saw this tonight in Chicago and it's certainly a different one.

I thought the lead performance was pretty amazing (a ten year old girl who is in pretty much every shot of a disturbing and bizarre movie). The film looked gorgeous, and the creepy, innocent, grotesque, through-a child's-eyes atmosphere was extremely effective for pretty much the entire movie.

Overall, I was pretty disappointed, though. There are elements that are just taken too far for my tastes, and I really don't come away with any clear feeling of what the point of it all was.

It's not something I will watch again and not something I would recommend. I'd give it an A for style and a big question mark for substance, but there is too much unpleasantness to sit through for me to enjoy it as an excercise in style.

[Kirkinson]

I was there, too. Jodelle Ferland's performance is indeed astonishing. Kids are usually pretty good in Gilliam's films (Sarah Polley in Munchausen, whats-his-name in Time Bandits) but Ferland is something else. This would be a difficult film for any actor to carry, and for a 10-year-old to come through it all with a performance like this is pretty staggering. Agreed also on the film's gorgeous look (even as some rather ugly things are happening) and the atmosphere, which is at once fantastic, unpleasant, innocent, and at times suffocatingly horrific.

But I was not disappointed. Though I should take some time to think about it a little more and maybe see it again in a few days, I might be ready to call this Gilliam's best film. I'm still not sure, though. I think it definitely approaches Brazil's greatness, but they leave me with very different feelings. There were a couple moments in Tideland where I was actually moved to tears. Normally that's not saying much, as I cry rather readily at movies, but I think it's notable this time because that's never happened to me with a Gilliam film before, and I'm a big fan of his.

I don't know. It's too early for me to say too much about it. I have to let it kick around inside my head first and see what sort of nightmares it gives me.

I do have to say, however, that as great as I think Tideland may be, I wouldn't blame anyone for walking out on it. Nor do I think it's wrong of anyone to say they wouldn't watch it again or recommend to others. I can completely sympathize with that. I knew so many people were talking about how unpleasant the film made them feel, but "unpleasant" is something of an understatement. There were some voices of dissent even inside my own head telling me to leave during more than a few scenes. Had I been watching this at home it's conceivable that I might have paused the DVD to take a short break.

However, I can't sympathize with anyone who is ready to dismiss the film just because it made them feel that way. This is not directed at you, ka mai, but at the army of critics whose reviews have basically boiled down to "This film is bad because it made me feel icky." This is Gilliam's most uncompromising film, for sure; though he did somehow manage to wedge some effective humor in between all the ugliness, very few bright spots penetrate the darkness, and those that do generally turn into the most unsettling aspects of the film a few scenes later. However, there is no excuse, especially for a professional critic, for disregarding every idea the film is trying to present, or (as is the case with most of the negative reviews) even disregarding the very notion that there are any ideas here at all besides a sadistic desire to make the audience feel uncomfortable.

Is it some sort of defense mechanism? Is the unpleasantness easier to forget if you dismiss it as meaningless? Maybe. Or maybe it's just easier to review without bringing it up.

I really don't come away with any clear feeling of what the point of it all was.

I think there are several points, though I'm still sifting through them and working out how they fit together in my head. At least one of them is stated explicitly in Gilliam's comically grave introduction: the idea that children are resilient ("If you drop them, they tend to bounce"). All the other points in the film are connected to this in some way. The child's innocence is one of the things that bolsters her resilience; i.e., if she fully understood what was going on, she would be severely traumatized. The other main point is clearly the importance of fantasy and imagination, the notion that no matter how bad the world around you becomes, there is still a place inside your head that you can escape to where you make up the rules and you decide the outcome.

These are all themes that have been chasing Gilliam throughout his career. He has probably never made a clearer affirmation of a child's resilience than the ending of Time Bandits, and the idea of escaping into your imagination is something that crops up (and is usually front-and-center) in all of his work. Where Tideland gets interesting, I think, is that it continues a trend in Gilliam's films that can probably be traced to Twelve Monkeys that suggests he is growing increasingly troubled by the effectiveness of that sort of escapism.

Spoiler

While Sam Lowry's escape into his mind at the end of Brazil can still be read as a sort of minor triumph, by the end of Tideland the real world has grown so malignant to Jeliza-Rose that when something good finally does happen, her imagination threatens to impede that good because the fantasies she has thought up to cope with her world still carry the spectre of that world. I think the ending suggests Gilliam might be questioning his own outlook: Jeliza-Rose's imagination may have kept her safe in the grotesque, traumatizing world she lived in, but once she has escaped that world her imagination might keep her from setting foot inside the real one again.

At least that's the theory I've developed so far. I'm not sure it holds up yet. As I said, I need a lot more time to think about this film. After saying I shouldn't say too much about it, I've written an awful lot. And somehow I still feel like I've only scratched the surface.

[Kirkinson]

I must correct myself:

it continues a trend in Gilliam's films that can probably be traced to Twelve Monkeys

Actually, now that I think about it, it goes back to The Fisher King, and thematically that may in fact be Tideland's closest relative.

Spoiler

In that film, the fantasy Robin Williams created to cope with the death of his wife initially helps him to do so but eventually holds him captive and prevents him from re-entering the real world once he is given the opportunity. Of course, that film has a nice, big, "happily ever after" ending. Tideland's ending is menacingly ambiguous.

[ka mai]

There were some voices of dissent even inside my own head telling me to leave during more than a few scenes.

I had the same feeling, and I've never walked out on a movie in my life and couldn't really imagine doing so.

This movie is definitely still in my head and your post is very interesting and thought-provoking. While I still wouldn't recommend it to most people I know, I'm certainly revising some of my initial reactions. After a night's sleep I retract my statement that I don't see any point and that it is an excercise in style. The idea that her fantastic worldview was a vital neccesity for survival in the context she was in and may keep her from living any kind of normal healthy life in the "normal" social world is an extremely interesting one and one that the movie conveys very well.

While I continue to think about the layers of depth there may be here, my appreciation for the childlike mood and visuals that Gilliam achieved continues to grow. Maybe I will end up seeing this one again, and knowing what kind of extremes to expect may be a big help in getting more out of it.

On a seperate subject, this film really made me think about roles for children in disturbing movies. I appreciated some of the advice in Gilliam's introduction and found its suggestion to keep a childlike perspective helpful in watching the movie. The meaning of things I was seeing and feeling definitlely changed when I tried to adopt the perspective of a child. However, at some of the more disturbing moments I couldn't help but be taken out of the movie by my concern for what the young actress was going through. For the character I could say "This is the situation she is in and she is coping with it and surviving in a resilient, effective way." For the actress I couldn't help but think "Why does she have to go through this? Is she going to be OK?" I will add that I have this feeling quite a bit with child actors in more disturbing films.

Am I just not giving the young actress enough credit? Being to paternalistic or puritanical? There should certainly be lines between what you would put an adult actor and a child actor through, right? As I think about it, this was really the main reason my immediate reaction to the film was "dislike" and the main reason why some scenes were so difficult. When I think about the film independent of that emotion I liked it quite a bit.

[John Cope]

On a seperate subject, this film really made me think about roles for children in disturbing movies. I appreciated some of the advice in Gilliam's introduction and found its suggestion to keep a childlike perspective helpful in watching the movie. The meaning of things I was seeing and feeling definitlely changed when I tried to adopt the perspective of a child. However, at some of the more disturbing moments I couldn't help but be taken out of the movie by my concern for what the young actress was going through. For the character I could say "This is the situation she is in and she is coping with it and surviving in a resilient, effective way." For the actress I couldn't help but think "Why does she have to go through this? Is she going to be OK?" I will add that I have this feeling quite a bit with child actors in more disturbing films. Am I just not giving the young actress enough credit? Being to paternalistic or puritanical? There should certainly be lines between what you would put an adult actor and a child actor through, right?

I wouldn't worry too much about Jodelle Ferland--or, perhaps I should say, the time to worry about her is past. She was featured prominently in the behind the scenes stuff on the Silent Hill DVD (as she should be as she plays several different characters) and the general consensus from Christophe Gans and everyone else was that she was an astonishingly sophisticated young actress who was not only able to handle all the darker elements but welcomed them, in fact. Now Silent Hill is a pretty repellant piece of trash despite its amazing cinematography (the triumph of raw aesthetics once again). I'm sure that the demands of Gilliam's film are much more justifiable and probably just as horrific in their implications.

Still, I have always found this declaration of "sophistication" to be a dubious one, generally employed by people like Gans who want to subject their child performers to viciousness and sadism and be able to say that the kids are smart (not desensitized) enough to be equally complicit, that no one could put their minds at risk as though this was something to be grateful for. I assume "sophisticated" is meant to suggest more than just the awareness that screen atrocities are false constructs. I assume it is meant to suggest that the kids have an awareness of the underlying thematic purposes. This is easier to believe when the kid happens to actually agree with your perspective. If Gans thinks that his screen atrocity has any actual merit, however, he's kidding himself on more than one level.

Of course I'm equally dubious about those who claim to tread carefully around their child stars' sensibilities, usually by keeping them in the dark as to the full context of their actions. This always feels like a half assed way to assuage any lingering moral doubts. Having said all that, the fact remains that there have been many films which have put children in positions of psychic peril and a few of them have been great, valuable works. Then there's the whole question of what constitutes "psychic peril" to begin with and this leads back to philosophical first principles. So it's an endless discussion. But then, I'm not enthused about the probable lives of most child stars anyway, no matter how innocuous their involvement in the business appears to be.

I have yet to see Tideland but I did read the book several years back when this property was being first considered for development. I remember disliking it but thinking that if anyone could bring out what was incipient in it it would be Gilliam. Also, I remember thinking that the final chapter, which is only a page or so if memory serves, was the best and most brutally powerful thing about it, the only moment that fully articulated what Cullin seemed to be going for throughout.