SUBMITTED BY Lynnith

January 17, 2003 — Sci Fi Wire recently spoke to Terry Gilliam about his film adaptation of Good Omens, and it looks like the project isn't quite dead yet. Read on:

Terry Gilliam told SCI FI Wire that his proposed big-screen adaptation of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Armageddon comedy-fantasy novel Good Omens isn't entirely dead, but is currently on life support. "It's expensive is what it is," Gilliam (Time Bandits) said in an interview. "And we didn't get the money to do it."

Gilliam added, "Unfortunately, I think our timing was rather bad, because we turned up in Hollywood in November of 2001 talking about a comedy film about the apocalypse. That was just bad timing. At the moment it's languishing. Nobody's quite got their act together to get it financed right now."

Gilliam described the story as right up his alley. "Anything that has to do with good and evil, heaven and hell, the Antichrist, angels and devils and the apocalypse I've always found interesting," he said. "On top of that, to have a comic version of all that is great. It's a wonderful book, incredibly funny and it's actually full of too much stuff to put onto film. But the basic tale [is filmable]."

Gilliam said that the story deals with the representatives of good and evil, who exist side by side until the Antichrist is born. "Which means that in 11 or 12 years, that's the end of it all," he said. "But these representatives of good and evil have gone a little soft on Earth. They like the little things about humanity and the Earth, and they agree to work together for once and raise the kid, hoping that nurturing might overcome his nature. Come his 11th or 12th birthday they realize they've made a big mistake: They raised the wrong kid. The Antichrist somehow got swapped at birth and is somewhere out in England. So they've got to find it and stop Armageddon. It's very funny and full of great characters. I wrote the script with Tony Grisoni, who did (the abandoned) The Man Who Killed Don Quixote with me. Hopefully, we can get it done at some point."