Director Terry Gilliam thought Heath Ledger’s death meant the end of ‘The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.’

The actor died suddenly in the middle of shooting the movie, which opens Christmas day. It was, of course, a terrible shock to Gilliam, who told MTV, “we had finished shooting in London on a Saturday night, and that morning Heath goes to New York and I was in Vancouver and then two days later he was dead, which makes no sense. It’s not possible. When you hear that you just don’t know how to deal with it. He was so full of life and vitality and energy, and — it stops. I laid down on the floor for a couple days and didn’t move, and my immediate reaction is, “The film is over.” The middle of the film, the star dies, you don’t finish. I didn’t want to finish.”

But Gilliam’s colleagues wouldn’t allow him to give up. He went on to say, “My daughter was one of the producers and also Nicola (Pecorini, director of photography) and they kept kicking me on the floor until I got up. They said, “You cannot let Heath’s last work disappear. You have to find a solution.”

Ultimately, Gilliam decided to continue shooting and fill Ledger’s role with an ensemble cast of Jude Law, Colin Farrell and Johnny Depp. Even while shooting the scenes with the three other actors, however, the director was convinced it wouldn’t work.

He told MTV, “I thought it was going to be impossible. And we did all the shooting with Johnny and Colin and Jude with no real confidence that this was going to work. It was only when we got back to London and did a rough assembly and showed it to people and they just assumed that it had been written like that — to have four people playing the same character. I mean, it works brilliantly. It’s seamless, everybody says. When I try to think what would it have been like to have Heath playing all the way through, we’ll never know. There are so many possibilities.”

(Photo by PR Photos)

Story provided by the Dish Information Corporation