Time on their hands

NEW YORK -- Recalling the shooting of 12 Monkeys, the new fantasy in which he plays a man who believes he is a time traveler from the future, Bruce Willis says, "Every day was a lot like the film, crazy, disjointed, and not knowing where we were. I used that a lot. I liked coming in and not knowing what we were going to do that day." Not that he found it hard to act insane. "Madeleine Stowe [who plays the shrink who befriends Willis's character] had the hardest job in the film. Her character had many more rules than mine did. I don't think it was as much fun as my part. I just got to go nuts. I got to do whatever came into my head, slobber, drool."

Stowe doesn't think her job was so hard, but she agrees that "there was a whole feeling of unreality which pervaded the shooting of the movie. I didn't really know what was happening. It was very floaty. The only thing that kept it real was that Terry giggles a lot."

Director Terry Gilliam is known for his elaborate fantasy worlds, but Stowe says they are not as meticulously planned as they appear. "He likes accidents. There was a scene where I'm having this crisis of faith, and just as we turned around to look out the window, a truck went by that said `G.O.D.' [the moving company]. He just flipped out. That's his nirvana."

Gilliam says he always worries that his grandiose production design will swallow the story. "Chuck [producer Charles Roven] keeps the budget low, so I can't spend, spend, spend," as Gilliam did on the notoriously over-budget The Adventures of Baron Münchausen. Given the cast and the glossy production values, the $29 million budget of 12 Monkeys is modest. "All my films have been restricted visions, and they've benefitted from that because I don't know when to stop."

In fact, as a hobby, Gilliam is building a house in Italy. "I'm no longer a frustrated architect, because I make movies," says the former Monty Python animator. "I can invent and build all this stuff, and there are no building codes to worry about."

The near-future world in the film is just a slight update on our own, he points out. "Ridley [Scott] and I, with Blade Runner and Brazil, created a world that keeps being repeated. My concern on this one was, how do you build a future that's not going to be compared to Brazil? And I've failed. There, you had all the technology of the 20th century mixed around. Here, you have all the technology of the 20th century, and it's been saved and reassembled.

"When I did The Fisher King, New Yorkers were astounded. They'd say, `I didn't know the city looked like that.' It's been around them the whole time. Nobody looked. Fellini's been one of my gods for years. When I went to Rome, I realized he's a documentary filmmaker. It's all there. He just happens to choose. Things are always there, and that's the artist's function, to show you another view of the world.

"It's just reality. That's why in Jabberwocky and Monty Python and the Holy Grail, everything was dirty, and everybody had dirty teeth. I'd grown up with Rock Hudson and Doris Day, where every hair was in place, and every tooth was shining. This is not real, this is not what the world looks like, and yet everybody accepted that as reality."

Reality often beats a filmmaker's imagination to the punch, notes Willis, who was accused of bad taste for releasing Die Hard with a Vengeance so soon after last spring's Oklahoma City bombing. "While we were shooting this film, someone in Japan opened up a jar of poison gas. Now if someone had gotten on a plane and opened a jar in 15 cities around the world [as in 12 Monkeys], it would have been a lot worse. But those people didn't open that jar because they heard about the 12 Monkeys script."

Such coincidences help explain the resonance of the movie's premise of going back in time to correct one's mistakes. Says Stowe. "I'm not one of these people who says, `There are no regrets.' There are lots of them. There are always things you don't understand about yourself. Maybe that's why we have children, to discover these things again." Stowe and her husband, Brian Benben of HBO's Dream On, are expecting their first child in June.

If she could travel to the distant past, Stowe would visit the late 1800s. "It was a period when women were just starting to have an awareness that how they were living was not necessarily the right choices for them. Repression's a fascinating thing to me." It's appropriate, then, that her next starring role will be in an adaptation of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth.

As for Willis, if he could revisit his past, he quips, "I'd like to go back to about three weeks before I said yes to Hudson Hawk."

-- Gary Susman