Terry Gilliam (R) with Heath Ledger and Matt Damon (sans nose bump) on the set of The Brothers Grimm (Photo: Francois Duhamel/Miramax)

It was a relatively good weekend to be filmmaker Terry Gilliam, whom both the Times and the Daily News profiled at length ahead of The Brothers Grimm's release Aug. 19. As is the Times' wont, writer Charles McGrath took the high road in addressing the film's turbulent Gilliam vs. Weinstein backstory. The Daily News' Jack Mathews, on the other hand, was not leaving his interview without some quality dirt:

It was certainly a marriage without a honeymoon. Before the ink had dried on the Weinsteins' contract—which contains a clause prohibiting any member of the production from speaking ill of any employee of the studio—they were overriding Gilliam's creative decisions. … "I can't say anything about the fact that I can't say anything negative about the Weinsteins," he says with a laugh.

But, what the hell ...

There is the story about the bump that Gilliam wanted to put on Matt Damon's nose. Damon plays Will Grimm in the movie, the older, pragmatic brother who has always fought to protect the dreamer Jacob (Heath Ledger). The nose bump was meant to give Will some roughneck mileage, and Gilliam says that Damon looked great with it ("like a young Brando").

"The night before the first day of shooting, I got a call from Bob [Weinstein] saying, 'You put a bump on his nose, we close the movie down tomorrow,'" Gilliam says.

Gilliam says he was ready to let them close him down, but Damon talked him out of it. "Matt said, 'I really want to do this movie; let's just move on.' I agreed, but I felt like I'd compromised my very existence."

Five weeks later, the Weinsteins fired Gilliam's cinematographer, Nicola Pecorini, and at some point, they sent producer [Charles] Roven packing.

"My theory is that they were trying to eliminate my support system," Gilliam says. "When Nicola was fired, I said I will finish the film, but I will not pick up the phone. I won't talk to anybody. That's the only way I could do it. I just had to have them out of the equation to work."

Meanwhile, Bob Weinstein told Time Magazine's Richard Corliss: "Any film involves the making of 10,000 decisions. If you only concentrate on the few we had issues with, you ignore the 9,997 we left totally to Terry."

I mean, yeah, Jack! Jeez, why can't you do it like the Times, which spends the first two-thirds of its piece rhapsodizing over Gilliam's next film, Tideland? Sure, it doesn't have a distributor, and it will not screen anywhere until next month's Toronto Film Festival, but at least McGrath downplays all that yucky Grimm bitterness:

"I actually think we made it better without succumbing to other people's idea about what would make it better," [Gilliam] said, adding, with just a touch or irony: "Everybody's happy now. We're a big happy family." He also said: "There's a good side and a bad side about working with the Weinsteins. They're like old -fashioned studio heads, not bureaucrats." And, he added: "I told Harvey I really admire what they do. I like watching them work - from a long distance away."

When I asked Bob Weinstein about the disagreements between him and Mr. Gilliam - some of them previously reported in the press - he denied that there were any and said: "What's in the press isn't worth commenting on. We had a great relationship with Terry. It was standard operating procedure. He made a great movie, and now we're going to market it in a way that's true to what it is - a great story."

Translation: "Our marketing strategy consists of this interview and an ad on Craigslist. Speaking of which, I am moving. Do you need a coffee table?"