Tony Grisoni on Tideland

Terry Gilliam's right-hand man on the film that brought the pair back from the brink after a very Grimm experience

"Thank you for not killing me," laughs Tony Grisoni. It's not a sentence you hear every day, but then again it's not everybody who'd try and conduct an interview while hurtling through the London traffic. Fortunately, common sense prevails and the top screenwriter decides this conversation would be better conducted from the safety of his home rather than the seat of his bicycle. Still, you can't blame Grisoni for feeling bullet-proof. During his decade-long partnership with Python-turned-movie visionary Terry Gilliam, the writer has had to deal with everything from a movie collapsing mid-shoot to provoking the wrath of Harvey Weinstein.

"Tideland was a great shoot," laughs Grisoni, a man whose amiability eclipses his sense of relief. "Things went so well in fact that I wasn't even on set. I had another film, Brothers Of The Head, shooting in the UK, and since I'd been at the Tideland rehearsals and everything seemed to be going swimmingly, I turned down the chance to visit rural Canada in favour of a few weeks in Suffolk. An odd decision I know, but it felt like the right thing to do."

Though the making of Tideland was relatively incident free, it wouldn't be a Terry Gilliam film if there weren't a few snags during development. "Tideland's an amazing book," says Grisoni with reference to Mitch Cullin's novel about a child, Jerliza-Rose, who's left to fend for herself in the wilds of Texas. "In writing from the viewpoint of a young girl in the most appalling of situations, Mitch manages to climb into the mind of Jerliza-Rose. It's an amazing feat of writing - he gets everything about children right from their lack of sentimentality to the way they talk when they play. But when you're writing about a kid who makes up syringes for her junkie parents, you know the execs aren't going to be entirely enthusiastic - even when the parents are big stars like Jeff Bridges and Jennifer Tilly. So, yes, there was the odd conversation but nothing that couldn't be resolved."

Next page • "On this film we had the happy Terry, not the Grimm Terry"