Critics have noted that Waltz’s character, Alan (who has some of the best lines in the movie) seems like a mouthpiece for Polanski, the film’s famously misanthropic director. Waltz clearly enjoyed playing the sleazeball lawyer, and his performance is the standout of the movie.

I talked with Waltz over the phone about Polanski and the movie. Though he was extremely polite and genteel in an Old World sort of way, he was also maddeningly cagey.

Jonathan Crow: So how did you get involved in the production?

Christoph Waltz: People talked and intentions [were] voiced and blah, blah, blah, the usual thing. Someone said I could meet with Roman, but he was still under house arrest in Switzerland. I said, ‘Well, that’s curious because I happen to be in Switzerland right now.’ That’s how we met and started to talk.

JC: What was that meeting like?

CW: Wonderful! We both don’t believe in entourages, so it was just two of us. He made lunch. It was really very brief, but lovely; it was a real experience.

JC: And that meeting started the conversation about making this film?

CW: Exactly, exactly. The result of that conversation was that he agreed to work with me. There was never a shred of a doubt that I would want to work with him.

JC: You’ve worked with some major directors. What’s Polanski like and how is he different from, perhaps, Tarantino?

CW:Well, not only would it be unfair to compare, it would be completely ridiculous. How would you compare ‘Rosemary’s Baby‘ to ‘Pulp Fiction‘? Well, you wouldn’t, because it doesn’t make any sense. How would you compare a football game to a bottle of wine?

JC: Right. My point is that you have worked with a couple big-name directors…

Photos by Sony Pictures Classics

CW: I can tell you what I really liked about working with Roman: It’s his precision. He places the camera not exact to the inch, but to the millimeter, and that’s no exaggeration. He looks through the camera and if he’s not happy with it, he’ll place it again. To an outside observer he might end up in what seems like the same spot, yet it isn’t. It’s like half an inch over to the left or something like that, and it makes all the difference in the world.

JC: How do you see your character? In some ways, he’s the most honest character of the four.

CW: I don’t really talk about my characters too much. I am sorry to make this difficult for you, but I don’t want to interfere with the spectator. I have very clear intentions, but you have to have your own version of the character. I don’t want to interfere with that. So I never talk about my characters. I agree with you though that he is the most clear, straightforward, and down to earth of the four.

JC: What did you do to prepare for the role?

CW: What I did to prepare for my role was learn my lines. It’s not a great secret. I am not of the mystifying school of acting. I just think it should be a very straightforward thing to do and that’s how I try to keep it.

JC: So you wouldn’t call yourself a method actor then?

CW: Definitely not.

JC: We have four very, very strong actors in this movie. What was it like acting opposite Jodie Foster, John C. Reilly, or Kate Winslet?

CW: John and Jodie and Kate, they are not concerned with their stardom; they are concerned with doing their job, and getting to the core of their parts. I loved every day that I had to go to work, and it’s hard to come up with another movie where that is the case.

Helen Mirren being cast as Arthur’s long-suffering servant Hobson was also not especially surprising. The part was originally played by Sir John Gielgud, who won an Oscar for his effort. In this new version, the gender switch does add a little Oedipal frisson to Hobson’s relationship to her charge. Yet in many ways, Mirren is Gielgud’s later-day equivalent, tapped whenever Hollywood needs to evoke the British upper crust.

But the real surprise in the movie is Greta Gerwig, who fills in for Liza Minelli as Arthur’s love interest. Her performance in the movie is — and I mean this in the best possible way — so affectless that she comes off as bracingly real and utterly disarming. She provides a welcome counterpoint to Brand’s antics and ends up walking away with the movie.  Her performance turns what by all rights should be another anemic remake into a surprisingly charming film.

Gerwig got her start in movies in the 2006 micro-budget indie flick “LOL” while a senior at Barnard College. The movie was directed by Joe Swanberg, the dean of the so-called “mumblecore” movement, and, like other films of its ilk, “LOL” featured a youthful cast, an improvised meandering script, and an artless, matter-of-fact style of filmmaking. Gerwig went on to make several other movies with Swanberg, including “Nights and Weekend,” which she co-wrote and co-directed.

Her efforts caught the attention of director Noah Baumbach who cast her opposite Ben Stiller in last year’s indie hit “Greenberg.” Her off-hand acting style, honed by years in mumblecore flicks, earned raves.

“Ms. Gerwig, most likely without intending to be anything of the kind, may well be the definitive screen actress of her generation,” gushed the New York Times.

With that kind of press, you will likely see a lot more from her in the future. Later this year, Gerwig is slated to star opposite Adam Brody in Whit Stillman’s long anticipated directorial return, “Damsels in Distress.”

In the meantime, “Arthur” opens everywhere this weekend.

Of course, Jones is no stranger to the limelight. His father is David Bowie. Yes, Mr. Ziggy Stardust himself. Born Duncan Zowie Haywood Jones, he was the only child from Bowie’s first marriage with the American model Angela Barnett. His father famously dubbed him Zowie Bowie, a moniker that Jones quietly shed in his teens.

As a youth, Bowie, who made it a point of reading to his son two hours a night, turned him on science fiction novels. Soon Jones was devouring the works of such mind-bending authors as J.G. Ballard and Philip K. Dick. “My upbringing was pretty weird, anyway,” Jones told the New York Times, “so it was maybe less of a jump for me.”

The influence of these books clearly left their mark on Jones. Both of his feature films are the sort of smart philosophical sci-fi movies that Hollywood used to produce regularly but now sadly seem to get crowded out in favor of big dumb movies about alien robot cars.

“Source Code” centers on Colter Stevens (Gyllenhaal), a soldier who suddenly finds himself inhabiting the consciousness of a train passenger eight minutes before a terrorist attack. Stevens soon learns that he’s a part of a secret government program and his mission is to relive those same eight minutes over and over again until he finds and stops the bomber. Think of it as “Groundhog Day” meets “24.”

His previous movie, “Moon,” is similarly high-concept. Sam Rockwell plays a sole worker on a remote base on the moon. That is until he meets his replacement — himself.

It’s not surprising perhaps that Jones, prior to getting into film, was pursuing a PhD in philosophy from Vanderbilt University. But then, by his own admission, Jones hit a wall. “Vanderbilt was a fantastic school, but I realized, to take academia that seriously, that you actually want to end up being a teacher, you really have to know that that’s your calling in life,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “And I was not teacher material.”

He decided to make a leap when his visited his father on the set of the “Hunger” television series. After having a long talk with Tony Scott, who directed a couple episodes for the show, he knew that directing was what he wanted to do. Soon afterward, he enrolled in London Film School.

For his next project, Jones is reportedly working on a “Blade Runner“-esque companion piece to “Moon,” but there’s no word on when that will actually come out. In the meantime, “Source Code” opens on Friday.

As an artist, Schnabel is no stranger to controversy. His paintings — big, brash, imposing affairs — have elicited some wildly divergent opinions. Yet as a filmmaker, none of the handful of movies that he’s made, including the Oscar-nominated “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” has generated quite as much controversy as his latest movie, “Miral.”

When the film had its US premiere earlier this month at the United Nations building, David Harris of the American Jewish Committee slammed the movie, calling it “blatantly one-sided” arguing that it portrayed Israel in a “negative light.” And the AJC has not been shy about lambasting the movie on other occasions. During its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, the AJC wrote: “Without exception, the IDF [Israeli Defence Force] is stereotyped as an army of inhumane villains…. It is worthy to note that no one seems to be aware that civilians are simultaneously being blown up on Israeli streets by Palestinian ‘activists.’”

The Palestinian girl in question is author Rula Jebreal. Her novel on which the movie is based is a strongly autobiographical account of her youth in West Bank. She struggles between the indignation over the Israeli army’s actions against her people during the first Intifada and her longing for peace. Not surprisingly, Israel doesn’t come off looking good in the movie. But Schnabel, who is Jewish, is unapologetic.

“It’s not my job to make a balanced story. I’m not trying to get elected. I’m telling the story that’s in her book. I’m telling the story that she wrote…I think that people feel the threat of Palestinian people being considered as human beings, which is ridiculous. It’s a really a civil rights film.”

“Miral” first came to his attention in 2007 during an art show at Rome’s Palazzo Venezia. Jebreal, who looks uncannily like her on-screen alter ego played by Frieda Pinto, approached him with a script. “When I met her, I said to her, are you Indian?,” he recalled. “She said to me, no I’m Israeli.” “So you’re Jewish?” “No, I’m Palestinian.” At that moment, I must have had a strange look on my face, because she said “Are you scared?” I said, “Should I be?”

Schnabel wasn’t terribly fond of the script, which was written by somebody else, but he loved Jebreal’s book. He had her re-write the screenplay, which hewed much closer to the novel. The first hour of the movie details the life, not of the main character, Miral, but of Hind Husseini, the woman who founded the Dar Al-Tifel Institute, the all-girls orphanage where Jebreal was raised. Miral’s worldview is very much informed by Husseini. Schnabel felt that this inclusion was important for the movie.

“As a storytelling device, I thought anybody who was human and sane and young that had been surrounded by this supportive environment created by Hind would try to help their own people. Anybody would try to help their own people.”

His collaboration with Jebreal soon extended beyond the movie: they are now in a relationship. “She’s very pretty,” he told me with a wry smile.

Schnabel has only made four feature films, but those movies have racked up a total of five Oscar nominations. His last movie, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” received near-universal acclaim and wound up on Yahoo! Movies’ Modern Classics list.

Yet he considers himself a painter, treating filmmaking as sideline to his main calling. He certainly didn’t have the slick veneer one usually encounters at a Hollywood press junket. He dressed in his trademark pajama bottoms and a flannel shirt. He has a restless charisma that brings to mind a wild animal. He doesn’t talk in sound bites; the last quarter of my interview with him consisted of a sustained five-minute, long run-on sentence. Yet his enthusiasm for the movie and art in general is contagious. Schnabel doesn’t plan to return to filmmaking any time soon. He’s booked up with exhibitions for the next two years. “I don’t make movies for the money. I don’t do it for a career or a job. I did it because I could.”

“Miral” opens in selected cities on March 25.

He followed that with the fake newsmagazine series, “The Brass Eye.” Taking the guise of a self-important TV reporter, Morris managed to inveigle gullible celebrities, including singer Phil Collins, into making PSAs about the dangers of a fictitious drug called Cake. He even managed to convince one hapless MP into making a speech on the Parliament about the fake substance. But Morris gained true notoriety with his show’s lacerating take on the media’s hysteria over pedophilia. Channel 4 received a record number of complaints about the episode and it caused the Daily Mail to dub him, “Most Hated Man in Britain.”

So for his debut feature, Morris, not surprisingly, goes where very few humorists have dared to tread. “Four Lions,” which comes out on DVD this week, is about a small hilariously blundering group of jihadists.

There have been a few flicks out there, like “Team America,” that have taken on the War on Terror but they have always done so from the point of view of the West. Morris’ movie japes from the point of view of the terrorists. In the hands of a lesser satirist, this would be a recipe for something shallow, cliched, and offensively stereotypic.

But Morris has always taken pains to thoroughly research his subjects — he took a news editing courses in preparation for “The Day Today.” The genesis of “Four Lions” came out of years of research — interviews, poring over government intelligence, and even attending the trials of London bombers — and the result gives a much more complicated view of jihadists than is given by the bloviators on cable news. “Four Lions” is also staggeringly funny.

Jonathan Crow: What inspired you to make a movie about jihadists?

Chris Morris: Real life. Basically, reading into the subject, not expecting to find funny incidents but finding them nonetheless. I reading an account of the evolution of Al Qaeda and how it came into being and I came across examples of people behaving in rather all too human, doltish, or even sheer incompetent ways. There was a bunch of Yemeni jihadis who wanted to blow up a warship that was moored out in the bay with an exploding boat and they duly assembled it at three in the morning. They put it in the sea. They loaded it with explosives. And it sank. And I thought that’s like a moment from a farce. I noted it and moved on but these moments kept coming up. There’s another story about an Algerian terrorist who was summoned over to see Bin Laden. Bin Laden said ‘I want you to work for me, brother.’ The Algerian terrorist said, ‘I have no intention to work with you, mate. I’m my own man. And if I ever hear from you again, I’m going to come here and cut your f**king head off.” And I thought, there’s a reaction shot of Bin Laden on a rug looking like a slapped child. All these kinds of things undermine the almost sacredly evil image that comes through the media.

JC: One thing I found interesting in your film, which is different from a lot of standard Hollywood movies, not that there are too many Hollywood movies made about jihadists…

CM: C’mon guys.

JC: [Laughing] …is that you manage to make the characters very human, even likeable, except you don’t ever really explain why they’re going through these incomprehensibly awful plans. A lot of the characters are doltish and clownish but the main character, Omar, is smart. He has a very likeable, middle class family. And there’s this tension, this irony, between that life he’s got and his stated intention. How did you construct your characters?

CM: Well, again, you take the clues from real life examples. You get to see the dynamics of the cell quite a lot from the government intelligence. They’re like tomes, a series of telephone directories full of surveillance material, and they’re full of conversations between the different members of the cell. So you can see how they interact with each other and how some are brighter than others. Some have the knowledge; some really don’t know what’s going on at all. Some have a very naïve sense of their religion and a very very undernourished sense of that religion; they’re basically following a sort of almost romantic dream in which they’re some kind of cosmic Jedi force against evil. It’s a very easily understood motivation because we all respond to stories about good and evil. Where would the film industry be without that? It’s just that with this one it just seems to be the wrong way around. But it is only a full 180 inversion because from their point of view, they’re doing the right thing. And if they’re doing the right thing, it’s not impossible to run a normal family life. I suspect that if I said to you, ‘Why do you think that Omar’s doing it’ what would you say?

JC: What would I say?

CM: Yeah.

JC: Um. Because he wants to create a purer society. One that’s free of all the decadence of Western culture, like sex shops and birth control.

CM: So you pulled one of the splinters of evidence through the film of what he might be thinking. What I absolutely didn’t want to do was to take the corny movie script movie on catapulting Omar on his course on the basis of one inciting incident that probably happened twelve minutes into the film. Because real life doesn’t work like that. And what I did, on the other hand, definitely want to do was to make him a plausible character with an understandable motivation that was presented to you but not as that single catapult move. As well as the one you mentioned, he does feel that society is not matching up, but he’s also strongly aware that Muslims, he says to his brother, Muslims are getting pasted all over the world and you’re just standing there measuring your beard. He wants to fight a resistance cause against what he sees as an attack on his people. There’s also an ego element. It pleases him to be leading the cell. When he’s left the cell and his wife says, ‘You used to be more fun when you were going to blow yourself up.’ She’s saying, “You’ve lost your mojo.”

JC: Yeah, that was a really surprising moment, because I was expecting the wife to say, “What are you nuts?”

CM: Exactly. It’s a complicated situation that’s difficult to sum up without sounding trite. You find situations where female members of a family, be they wives, sisters, or whatever, are supportive of this move because they buy the political reason, rightly or wrongly, they buy it as an act of resistance. I must fight on the right side on behalf of the oppressed. It’s “Braveheart.” She believes that and she also believes in the afterlife. So this goodbye is not the final goodbye.

JC: This movie is hilarious, but it really doesn’t pull any punches. This is a movie about terrorists. And bombs do go off…

CM: I think it would be foolish to pull any punches. It would be a desertion of duty. If you’re making a subject about a subject you got to stick to the subject. It would be like “MASH” without wounds. It would be like “Dog Day Afternoon” without any consequences at the end. When Sal gets shot in “Dog Day Afternoon” that’s quite sad. You’ve come to identify with these guys. They’re robbers and it’s a klutzy heist. And lives are in danger and people are scared and it’s a big siege. A man gets shot. But there’s a lot of comedy in that film too.

JC: More than any other comedian that I can think of, you really ride that line between funny and tragic…

CM: That’s where it comes from. I really can’t stand stuff that seems to come from a play room that doesn’t have any concept of reality at all. Comedy and tragedy are very very close. They’re just two very different ways of looking at the same thing. You want to contain the full range rather than just stick it in some safety zone where you’re giggling at cartoons you’ve drawn on yourself.

We talked to him about the pros and cons of getting an Oscar nod, creating the iconic blast at the heart of the “Inception” score, and Nolan’s uncanny musical memory.

Yahoo! Movies: You’ve been nominated nine times for an Oscar. Does it lose any of its luster?

Hans Zimmer: The thing to remember about the Oscars is that it’s your peers that vote for you. I don’t know about most people, but my self-esteem goes up and down like a yo-yo. So to have people who you admire actually nominating you is a big deal. And that feels really good. The negative side of it is that I’m most happy when I can just sit in my room and play music and work with other musicians. I’m not the most comfortable getting dressed up and going to big events. And I’m extremely uncomfortable making speeches in front of people. That’s just like the worst thing. It scares the living daylights out of me. The time I won before, I was so nervous I forgot to thank my mother. And that became a whole other story. So whichever way you look at it, you can’t quite really win. There’s a downside to everything.

But forget about me winning or losing or any of that stuff. I am genuinely excited about the composer nominations. I love that it’s so international this year. There’s not a single person from the same country. It’s great. The music is so diverse. There isn’t a single score in there that doesn’t deserve to win.

YM: Aside from “Inception,” what’s your favorite score?

HZ: “How to Train Your Dragon.” It does everything. It’s an epic modern score. That really isn’t easy, and I love what John did. But at the same time, I really like that Trent Reznor is in there with ‘The Social Network.’ I’m a huge Nine Inch Nails fan. The thing that I always hoped for is that film music would shake itself up and renew itself. That there would be new faces in there. And it’s really starting to happen.

YM: How did you approach a movie as complicated as ‘Inception’?

HZ: The answer is really simple. Chris Nolan is not just a great director but a great writer. I read the script, and it read beautifully. Very often scripts can be like instruction manuals on how to build a model airplane. This read like a great novel. It was all there. Everything he needed to say to me was all there in that script.

Of course, I read script differently than if you just read it and didn’t have an involvement in the project. As I was reading it, I was already going, ‘OK what do I like here? What do I think is interesting? What can I do with this that Wally Pfister, the cinematographer, isn’t going to do? What the production designer isn’t going to do? Or the actors aren’t going to do?’

For me, the really interesting part of it was ideas of time and of dreams, which is, of course, something that music does really well. Music is not a linear language.

YM: How did you come up with that iconic blast that’s part of the score?

HZ: Let’s talk about this. Chris had the Edith Piaf song in the script. Right in the intro of it, there are these two little brass nubs. Just in the accompaniment. They’re not even the tune. They’re just lying in the corner of your vision, as it were. And it seemed like a good idea to take the rhythm of that and play it at something like 800th of its speed. Play it really slowly.

I put a piano in the middle of the room and put a brick on the sustain pedal. So when the brass section was blasting away, the strings on the piano would vibrate. That’s what I recorded. Then I slowed it down and did all of the stuff to it. But it’s the same rhythm as the notes in the beginning of Piaf’s song.

I actually had a conversation with Chris [about] if just slowing it down makes it too obvious. Everyone will know straightaway. Shouldn’t we make it a greater riddle? It did actually take people about four weeks to work it out. Well, actually, that’s untrue. People probably did work it out faster. It took someone four weeks to make a YouTube video.

YM: How is working with Nolan different from working with other directors?

HZ: One of the things with Chris is that I think he has a photographic memory for music. And I’m not saying that in a casual way. I had written over 900 bars for ‘Dark Knight.’ Just ideas. And Chris could literally go, ‘You know somewhere around bar 845 there was this really interesting thing.’ And I’d have to go and wind down to bar 845 and figure out what he was talking about. But he’d actually remember it.

He understands the importance of music. Like really understands. And not just music, but sound. I really think one of the things which we managed to do even from ‘Batman Begins’ is blur different categories between music and sound. Richard King, our sound designer, was like another band member. Rather than the music sitting on top in this sort of objectifying way, what we try to do is have the music ooze out of the pores of the film.

So film mavens everywhere were taken aback when it was announced last year that Joel and Ethan Coen would been making their own version of “True Grit.” But don’t expect a straight remake; this movie is based more closely on the Charles Portis novel. And Jeff Bridges, fresh off his Oscar win, was tapped to play Cogburn; that’s right, the Duke has been replaced by the Dude.

The movie will also star another Coens alum, Josh Brolin, along with Barry Pepper and Matt Damon.

“I’ve never even seen the original John Wayne movie” Matt Damon, who plays Glen Campbell’s old role of LaBeouf in this new version, told Entertainment Weekly. Unlike the old flick, this LaBeouf reportedly doesn’t sing. “Our movie is totally different.”

This week, the first photo of the Coen Brothers’ effort (see below) was released, hinting at other differences. The most obvious being is that Mattie Ross, who is a fourteen year-old girl in the book, is actually being played by a fourteen year-old girl — newcomer Haile Steinfeld. In the original, Kim Darby was 21.

But what fans of the original are all wondering is how the Dude’s Cogburn going to stack up next to the Duke’s. The photo shows Bridges, looking ornery and weathered, sporting a beard and that famous eye patch. Wayne, a staunch Republican during the height of the ’60s, was resolutely clean-shaven.

A quick comparison reveals that Wayne and Bridges sport their patches on opposite eyes. The Duke covered his left eye as a nod to his longtime collaborator John Ford, who lost vision in that eye when he removed bandages too soon after a cataract operation. No word on why Bridges decided to cover the other side.

When he was making his “True Grit,” John Wayne was 61 years old. He was too unhealthy to perform his own stunts and, thanks to having an entire lung removed years prior, could barely walk more than 30 feet before heavy breathing. You might be forgiven, when looking at side-by-side photos, for assuming that Bridges is five or ten years younger that Wayne when he shot his version. In fact, Jeff Bridges turns 61 in December.

Instead, the movie just disappeared.

Over the years, “Colin Fitz Lives!” developed into something of a legend in the indie world. Fans everywhere wondered when the “greatest film never released” — as it was dubbed by the San Francisco Chronicle — was ever going to hit their local theater. Fourteen years and three presidents later, the movie is finally about to get its theatrical due.

So what happened? As director Robert Bella describes in an essay that appeared in Indiewire.com, the short answer is crippling debt.

Back in the days before the Internet, Bella was a struggling actor with dreams of directing when he came across a script written by his friend Tom Morrissey — a tale about two clueless security guards posted at the grave of Colin Fitz, a dead rock star with a very obsessive fan base.

Even though he had never directed a thing, much less went to film school, Bella decided to make the movie.

At first, the stars seemed to align for the budding filmmaker. He managed to line up an impressive array of actors — including William H. Macy (“Fargo“), Martha Plimpton (“The Goonies“) and John C. McGinley (“Scrubs”) — provided that he shoot immediately.

Bella had $50,000 of his own cash he was willing to put into the project and managed to raise another $100K. With today’s cheap digital video cameras and editing software, that would be plenty to finish a feature film. But that wasn’t the case in the analog ’90s when it was commonly understood that shooting, cutting and printing a feature film would cost a half million dollars.

His plan was shoot first and raise money for post production later. Yet not long after production wrapped and with his coffers depleted, Bella received a call from Sundance with an offer he couldn’t refuse. “The good news: The film had been accepted into Dramatic Competition. The bad news: A 35mm print had to be in Park City, Utah. In eight weeks.”

So he did what every budding indie filmmaker would do in that situation: He maxed out 20 credit cards to raise the money needed to make a finished print of the film.

In spite of the warm reception “Colin Fitz Lives” got at Sundance, Bella soon discovered none of the distribution deals offered would cover his costs. When it was all added up, including music rights, lab fees, and deferred salaries, the filmmaker realized that he would owe about $250,000.

The amount proved to be crippling for the struggling filmmaker; he was financially wrecked and his movie was in hock. He even wound up on the street for a spell. “I had called in so many favors, crashed on so many couches, and borrowed so much money from friends and relatives that I simply could not bear to ask for yet one more favor. So, I slept in a storage space. Along with all my worldly possessions.”

It took six years for Bella to dig himself out of personal debt and another eight to buy back his movie from his creditors. Along the way, he managed to direct a few other low-budget movies and act in a handful of others. Then not long after managed to buy back his cut negatives from the lab, he was casually approached by Arianna Bocco of IFC Films.

“‘What ever happened with ‘Colin Fitz’?” [she asked.]  I told her, ‘It’s sitting in my closet. Wanna buy it?’ Lo and behold, she said: “Sure!’

I couldn’t believe it. After all those years – it was just that easy.”

“Colin Fitz Lives!” comes out on demand August 4 and then in a limited theatrical release August 6.

Based on an original script by director Christopher Nolan, “Inception” is a film that defies easy sound-bite descriptions. Its Russian nesting doll-like structure of a dream enclosed within a dream enclosed within another dream virtually demands multiple viewings. Think Philip K. Dick meets “The Italian Job.”

Nolan’s previous silver screen venture was a little movie called “The Dark Knight” — the highest grossing non-James Cameron movie in American history. So for this go-around, the director’s vast, ambitious vision seems to have been utterly unfettered by financial constraints. And it shows.

“Inception” was shot in Tokyo, Los Angeles, Morocco, London, Paris and the Canadian Rockies. It features shots of the French capital folding in on itself M.C. Escher-style, a zero-G fist fight, and a freight train blasting through the streets of downtown Los Angeles.

And in one sequence, Leo and the gang stage a raid on a snow-bound Alpine fortress — the aforementioned shoot in the blizzard.

Leo describes an exchange he had with an assistant director during production. “When we started shooting one of the ADs said, ‘Before you get to lunch we want to do some of the avalanche shots.’ ‘OK, how is that going to happen?’ ‘We’re going to blow up a couple mountains and we’re going to start a couple of avalanches and you’re going to get in there and be a part of it and then we’ll take you to lunch.’ And this is kind of what you expect on a Chris Nolan set.”

Co-star Ellen Page agreed. “It was definitely the most extreme environment I’ve ever filmed in.”

And if you thought that cast worked hard, try the production crew. That fortress had to be constructed out of wood and plaster — carried straight up the mountain — without the use of normal construction equipment. It was so cold up there that paint froze on the brush.

For a summer movie season that has proved to be easily the lamest in recent memory, filled with tepid adaptations and tired ’80s retreads, Christopher Nolan’s brand of cinematic insanity might just be what the doctor ordered. “Inception” opens this weekend.

Gilliam has a legendary track record for being utterly cursed during productions: Universal initially refused to release his masterpiece “Brazil” until critics dubbed it the best movie of the year; his next movie “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” was crippled by studio politics and a shiftless producer; and another project, the aborted movie “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,” which suffered one disaster after another until it was shut down after only a week of production, was immortalized in the documentary “Lost in La Mancha.”

So when the star to his latest effort died after only a third or so through the shoot, “Parnassus” looked like yet another casualty to Gilliam’s freakishly bad luck. Yet he not only managed to pull it together and finish the movie, he managed to make it work.

The movie’s story is about the titular Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), a thousand-year-old traveling showman who invites audience members to venture into an alternate reality through his magical mirror. He got these unusual abilities through a bet with the devil (Tom Waits) and when he tries to collect, a mysterious figure named Tony comes to save the day. Tony is, of course, played by Heath Ledger. He’s also played by Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell.

As Gilliam describes below during my interview with him two weeks ago, the director conquered these seemingly insurmountable problems with a combination of luck, ingenuity, and with a little help from Heath’s friends.

Gilliam one stroke of luck was that he shot all of the “real world” scenes before Ledger died. His second stroke of luck was that the three A-list stars, all friends of the late actor, stepped up to help save Ledger’s final film. Thus, with some quick rejiggering of the script, Heath plays the real-world version of Tony while Depp and the gang play transformed dream-world versions of him.

Also in my interview, Gilliam talks about how he developed the film’s story and put together what he calls “One of the finest casts I’ve ever assembled.” He also expounds on the cravenness of Hollywood studios, the nature of God, and his time working with the legendary UK comedy troupe Monty Python.

Q: Movies like Imaginarium, with this level of creativity and invention, don’t usually get made unless they’re from adaptations of other works. Why do you think this is?

Q: How did you finance it?

TG: It was a UK /Canadian co-production. And then there was pre-sales to France, Germany, Italy, Japan — places like that. We were there in Hollywood trying to get their money but nobody came forward with any cash. So we went on and did it without them.

Q: You reunited with your former writing partner Charles McKeown for this project. Could you describe the process of how you developed the script?

TG: It’s very hard to actually remember, because the whole thing was so organic. I mean, we didn’t even have a plan at the beginning. I just wanted to write something original. Maybe…a compendium of the kind of things I’d played with before. And that was about it. The only image we started with was this ancient traveling theater arriving in modern London. And nobody pays any attention to it. And little by little we started throwing things at it. And some things stuck, and some didn’t, and little by little we discovered a plot, and story, and characters. It was a very organic process, and I’ve forgotten almost everything about how we did it. [laughs]

Q: One way to read this movie is as an extended metaphor of the power and the cost of creating. Parnassus is an immortal story teller. Tom Waits character feels more like the kind of devil that tempts artists away from creating, instead of the “Evil One.”

TG: It’s a funny relationship the two of them. They’re obviously opposing forces. And yet they’re probably the only friends they have in the world –the two of them. And their weakness for gambling is what intrigues me. It’s not so much winning, but it’s the game. I kind of like that as a construct for the way the world really works, rather than the nice, simple, monotheistic Judeo-Christian God.

Q: But do you see this movie as a metaphor of creativity?

TG: I think any creative person, any artist, will identify with Parnassus. You’re trying to say something, you’re trying to inspire the world, you’re trying to open their eyes to things and nobody’s paying attention. Nobody cares. But usually you’ve got to chop your ear off and die before they notice.

Q: What about the character of Tony? On the one hand, he helps Parnassus but on the other he comes at a terrific cost. How did you envision Tony?

TG: We were quite inspired by Tony Blair. Here’s somebody who seemed to believe everything he said, who felt he was doing God’s work, good work. And basically he conned himself as much as he conned the British public, and ended up probably doing far worse things than the good work that he did. I thought he was really “modern man” — very chameleon-like — basically an ego in action who will charm, seduce, do whatever and then justify it. And that’s why I like the fact that Mr. Nick, the devil, was unable to deal with this “new man” who is even more slippery than he himself. The devil had certain principles.

Q: What was the process you went about to cast the film?

TG: Once you’ve got something written you just start looking. Parnassus — that’s the essential. Where do you start? You look around and there are not that many great actors at that age who I think could handle the breadth of this character. And I’d worked with Chris Plummer before, and I just sent it to him, and he liked it immediately. So that was very easy.

Tom was interesting because he never even saw the script. I was being the middle man for a Dutch animator friend of mine who wanted to get to Tom. And I sent Tom his material, and Tom wasn’t interested. And he said, “Got anything for me?” And I said, “Well, we’ve just written the part of the devil.” And he said, “I’m in!” He didn’t bother to read the script. And we’d worked together on Fisher King, and I love Tom — I love his music. I keep saying he writes songs for the angels, and sings them with the voice of Beelzebub. [chuckle] So that was easy.

Heath came to the project. I was working in my special effects company’s office, working on a music video, when he was only part-time being the Joker. And I was showing my storyboards to the effects guys, and talking through these sequences. And he slipped me a note saying, “Can I play Tony?” And I said, “Are you serious?” And that was as simple as that.

I find that the films become their own magnets. Vern Troyer I’d work with briefly on “Fear and Loathing,” and on a traveling show you’ve gotta have the tallest and the shortest. And there was Vern. I showed him one page of the script where Parnassus says, “What would I ever do without you. Percy?” And Percy’s line is, “Get a midget.” And Vern says, “I’m in!”

And then Lily Cole. I wanted an extraordinary girl to be the daughter. I was introduced to her. I’d seen her face. It’s this extraordinary nineteenth century porcelain doll head, on this very tall body with bumps in all the right places. And I liked her. And she had next to no experience. But I thought as a character she was great. I thought she was smart rounded. And so I said, “Yeah, that’s Lily.” She was the biggest gamble of all, and she played it brilliantly. I remember Andrew Garfield sent a tape in of three different scenes we had sent him. And he did each scene three different ways, in three different characters. And I thought, “My god! The guy is just incredible, unlimited in what he can do.” And there it is. One of the finest casts I’ve ever assembled.

Q: Let me ask you my obligatory Heath Ledger question. When you learned that he died, how did you decide to continue with the movie? Under most circumstances, wouldn’t that have derailed the film?

TG: My initial response to his death was, “It’s over.” I didn’t see any way to continue the film. I didn’t want to continue the film. He was too close a friend, too central to the thing. I just basically wanted to abandon the whole project. But I was surrounded by people like my daughter, who’s one of the producers, and Nicola Pecorini, the cinematographer, and they just said, “You’re gonna have to do this. You’re going to have to find a solution to this thing.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know how.” And they kept beating me up, until I finally got my head into some kind of shape. And I decided to move forward. Decided that I’d try three actors to carry on the part. The script kind of rewrote itself very quickly. Because there was very little one could do. And certain scenes had to be cut out. And a few little twists and turns we put in. And it just played.

Then it was just a matter of calling friends of Health until I had three people that were ready and right for the job. And off we went.

Q: So getting Johnny Depp and Colin Farrell and all those guys, you just called and said, “This is Heath’s final film”?

TG: Yeah. I know they were all close friends of Heath, which is why I was calling them, because I wanted to keep this thing very much in the family. And they all just were there. And basically it’s a credit to how much people loved and respected Heath. How important he was. And this just doesn’t happen. I think was extraordinary. And it’s really all about Heath.

Q: So getting Johnny Depp and Colin Farrell and all those guys, you just called and said “this is Heath’s final film”?

TG: I’ve gotten more and more a feeling that films make themselves. There’s some kind of film god up there that decided they’re going to make a movie. And we just work for them. And this one kind of felt like that. This is a film very much about mortality. I mean some of those speeches — Johnny’s speech about “you will die young instead of old and fat.” All that stuff was in the script. And then Heath dies in the midst of this thing. So much that was written seemed to be what was happening around us. It was terrifying.

Q: How much of this movie do you think is based in autobiography?

TG: It’s easy to become self-pitying. Figure yourself as an old guy that nobody’s bothering to go see your movies anymore. [laughs] So, it’s a trap you can fall into. There’s all of that. There’s father-daughter relationship, and strange enough there we are with my daughter one of the producers of the film and me. There’s just a lot of stuff… I mean partly, when you sit down and write something that’s quote “original,” you’re gonna be feeding off your own thoughts, and your own view of the world. So, yeah, all of that’s in there.

Q: This year is marks the 40th anniversary of Monty Python. How do you view its legacy in relation to your career?

TG: You wouldn’t be talking to me if it hadn’t been around. It’s as simple as that! [laughs]Python was critical. It was a great time. We had freedom that people seldom get. We learned our craft. And then we went on to start making movies. And that’s extraordinary. On one hand it seems like it was only yesterday. And then you look and it was forty years ago we started. Certainly gave me confidence that what we did was more interesting than all the people who, later on in life, start advising you about what you should and shouldn’t do. So you learn to ignore all those people.

But I think it was extraordinary that it continues to find new audiences. There’s some kind of magic age, which is about eleven, for smart kids, and that’s when they discover Python. And it just seems to be a continuation of new generations falling for that crap.

Q: What’s next for you?

TG: That would be Don Quixote. We’re going again. That’s the plan for next year.