After a faltering production period, Terry Gilliam’s latest film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, will finally be released in cinemas Friday 16 October.

The independently produced £45 million feature which stars Heath Ledger, Lily Cole, Christopher Plummer almost never saw the light of day due to the untimely death of the Australian actor in January 2008, halfway through shooting.

“We thought the film was lost,” Gilliam told The Journal.

Heath Ledger plays the part of Tony, a shady young man who experiences amnesia after being rescued from suicide by Parnassus’s strange but kind players.

Given his central role in the plot and involvement in securing finance, the filming crew, producers and Gilliam himself did not see the film continuing.

Gilliam has been plagued with challenging situations born from misfortunate and this was another opportunity for the director to show his creative intelligence and to prove that years of bad luck and bad studios had not worn him down.

Parnassus tells the story of the millennium-old eponymous doctor, the leader of a travelling theatre which offers people the irresistible opportunity to explore their imaginations firsthand through the use of a magic mirror.

“The mirror which Heath uses to get to the Imaginarium was the key,” Gilliam said.

After Heath Ledger’s death, he received a phone call from Johnny Depp, a close friend of the late actor, who offered to help in any way he could. This started Terry Gilliam thinking about a possible resolution to the problem.

“We just thought, ‘Why can’t the appearance of the person on the other side of the mirror change?’ But we didn’t want just one person to impersonate Heath’s character on the other side. It would have seemed too contrived. We decided to phone some of Heath’s close friends and Johnny [Depp], Jude [Law] and Colin [Farrell] got on board. By dying, Heath has forced us to make amazing changes to the film and he deserves credit for that.”

The American-born director is most famous for his involvement with Monty Python. Not only was he part of the crew, performing with them, but he also co-directed Holy Grail with Terry Jones and designed the cartoon sequences for the film.

As a professional cartoonist who had worked with several American magazines before turning to a directing career, it only seemed natural for him to include drawings and short cartoons in the movie. The film was the beginning of Gilliam’s cycle of bad luck. An infinitesimal budget, bad weather, technical difficulties, all these ingredients for disaster would plague every single one of the director’s subsequent shootings.

“The schedule was thrown out the window. Everything that could go wrong went wrong. On the first day the camera broke down. It was awful. But we got through it.”

Yet, the multi-faceted director learned to look on the bright side in every situation, despite pressure, monetary or otherwise.

When he found out that the Holy Grail budget would not allow them to afford horses for the shoot, the film project seemed to be hanging by a thread. Nevertheless, Gilliam made the best of it and came up with one of the much loved elements of the film – "knights" acting out a childish pastiche of horse riding followed by servants providing coconut-produced sound effects.

“Sometimes limitations are for the best,” said Gilliam.

“If I had always been given all the money I wanted to make a film, I would have been constantly experimenting, not making necessary decisions. I am just too curious. Having a limit forces you to make choices and be creative.”

The sexagenarian's obstinacy has often got him into trouble with producers on several occasions and tainted his name in Hollywood.

If European viewers applauded Brazil (1985), Gilliam’s dystopian tale starring Robert De Niro and Jonathan Pryce, his American producers refused to release the movie in the USA until he agreed to change its bleak ending. His stubborn refusal to cast Robert De Niro for the lead role in favour of an unknown actor, Jonathan Pryce, had already provoked an angry response from Hollywood and his "lack of cooperation" was seen as a direct insult.

“It was literally an embargo. Hollywood didn’t want to show the film. It was a public battle between me and these guys. But the critics loved it. I remember that Bobby De Niro, who had never liked interviews because he just doesn’t like to speak publicly, joined me on the ABC interview to advertise the film. He said nothing the whole time, of course. But it helped; everyone was so surprised he came on TV.”

True to himself, Terry Gilliam conducted private viewings of Brazil in Los Angeles and New York until Universal agreed to release it in the USA. His determination earned him two Oscars and the Best Picture award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

It is easy to see why not even the death of one of his protagonist would stop such a director. In 2000, his film project The Man who Killed Don Quixote was abandoned a week into filming after Jean Rochefort, who was to play the lead role, was injured and unable to continue filming. This was a blow to Gilliam who vowed to never let anything of the kind stop him again. It may seem strange that death should seem easier to get round than an injury but this time the script offered an easy way out of his predicament.

The director’s achievement is that he managed to create a dreamlike film whose originality speaks for itself. The stylistic trick of Parnassus was born out of Heath Ledger’s death and gave the movie a new direction but it would be diminishing its importance to see it as a mere homage to the late actor.

“Movies never turn out how you would expect, they always turn out better and Parnassus was no exception.”