MOVIES : Grave New World : In Terry Gilliam’s ‘Twelve Monkeys,’ the future is a grim place of harsh technology and gloom. Can Bruce Willis save this universe?

On a chilly, darkened movie set that’s been decorated to look like Earth’s last Christmas, a figure lumbers in, festooned with clamps, canisters, hoses, gauges, bulbs, straps and wires. Both actor and hardware are enclosed in plastic. The plastic is inflated.

“The boy in the bubble,” someone announces.

“The human condom,” someone adds.

Bruce Willis is ready for his close-up.

The time? AD 2035. The character? A prisoner sent from the subterranean lair of humankind’s last surviving few. The task? To gather samples from the surface--including insects, one of which Willis has to pluck from a web made of spun glue, suspended in a wooden frame.

“Is it a real spider?” Willis asks of no one in particular. “Is it in the Screen Actors Guild?”

The suit is clearly making him uncomfortable. For one thing, it’s heavy.

“It’s pretty much found objects,” says prop master Doug Harlocker, eyeballing the cast iron. It’s also suffocating. Enter a representative of the city’s motion picture office.

“You look gorgeous,” she chirps.

“Can we go right away?” Willis asks. A bulb blows. It sounds like a gun. Cut.

“When you’re working with spiders,” Willis announces, “there are a few things you have to understand. One, spiders don’t understand you. When you say, ‘C’mon little spider . . . ‘ all the spider hears is ‘Blahblahblahblahblah. Spider. Blahblahblahblahblah. Spider. . . .’

“What is your name?” Willis asks the spider wrangler. “Aldo? Aldo has been in the spider business 48 years. Forty-eight years in the spider business.”

The camera rolls. Willis plucks the spider. Print. He throws his hands up, Rocky-style.

*

“Twelve Monkeys,” a dark, dramatic fantasy that stars Willis, Madeleine Stowe, Brad Pitt, Christopher Plummer and the city of Philadelphia, is inspired by--not based on--Chris Marker’s cult classic “La Jetee.” A sci-fi thriller set in a post-apocalyptic world, that 1962 film actually is a series of still photographs with narration, and a dissection of tyranny, memory, madness and, most of all, deja vu.

The protagonist, sent back to change history, finds himself reliving his own memory. His antagonist, the character who embodies fear and evil and twists reality to meet his own warped vision, is known, simply, as the Director.

On the real-life (and it’s a judgment call) set of “Twelve Monkeys,” the director wears a purple shirt, green pants, a leather cowboy hat and a toothy grin across the great plain of his face. Portrayed by cast members in terms of deep affection, or affectionate concern, he giggles--a bit maniacally, as he tends to--about the “irony after irony” that have led him here.

It is an early spring morning, in the late summer of his career, and Terry Gilliam is making a Hollywood movie about the nature of reality.

Acknowledged visionary, former Monty Python member, animator deluxe and cracked mirror of the modern condition, Gilliam also is, depending on who’s talking, either the enfant terrible or the guileless man-child of the movies. His films are visually intoxicating, wildly ambitious, personal and at times perplexing. And they have had something of a checkered history.

In 1975, he co-directed the celebrated “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” with fellow Python Terry Jones, and he made his solo directing debut with “Jabberwocky” (1977), an exercise in medieval nonsense that starred another Python, Michael Palin. It was decidedly uneven but did give a hint of Gilliam’s visual eccentricity, something more fully realized in the hallucinatory “Time Bandits” (1981), which was both outlandish and successful.

And then came “Brazil” (1985), the totalitarian dreamscape that started a war with Universal Pictures’ chief, Sidney Sheinberg. As chronicled in Jack Mathews’ book “The Battle of ‘Brazil,’ ” the fight ostensibly was over the length of the film, but in actuality, it was a conflict of vision--the artist’s vs. the studio’s. And when “Brazil” was chosen best picture of the year by the Los Angeles Film Critics without ever having been released, it established Gilliam as Hollywood’s giant-killer.

But this was followed by “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” (1989), which established him as an uncontrollable spendthrift. Which was followed by “The Fisher King” (1991), which redeemed him as a hired director who could work within the system.

Now he wrestles with “Twelve Monkeys” (the title refers to a mysterious set of symbols central to Willis’ mission), which is based on a screenplay by David Peoples (“Unforgiven”) and People’s wife, Janet, who have collaborated previously only on documentaries. It was executive producer Robert Kosberg who brought them together with Marker’s film, and with Marker. As everyone involved will tell you, the film is not a remake; it is not a “virus” film. And, if the producers have their way, it won’t be tagged an art film, either.

“ ‘La Jetee’ is a perfect film,” Janet Peoples said from their home in Northern California, “so the idea of messing with something perfect, we just don’t have that kind of ego. . . . So what we’ve done is completely different, and what they’re doing in Philadelphia is different still.”

“We very much wanted Terry to direct it,” David Peoples said. “It very much required a visionary, a person of Terry’s magnitude. And there are few of them.”

“Terry just has a creative point of view,” Willis adds. “A very disturbed point of view. And I have an affinity for that, because I think he stays away from the sentimental.”

“He’s so sensitive about another person’s feelings that you’d almost wish he’d be more brutal at times,” says Stowe. “I haven’t heard him say an unkind word to another human being.”

So what’s the problem? Terry Gilliam makes people nervous.

No one is ever prepared for what he delivers. Like the horse bursting out of the wardrobe in “Time Bandits,” or the frequent-flier miles one collects traversing dreams and consciousness in “Brazil,” the line between fact and fiction is always amorphous. In an era in which slapstick stupidity thrives, his movies are reliably dark; no one has ever accused Gilliam of giddy optimism. In addition, he loses audiences--and gains devotees--by giving them no mooring to reality. The unexpected is expected. The result can be disorienting. And exhilarating.

In keeping with the other films, “Monkeys” is fantastic, albeit with a thread of reason. It begins in a future when most of the Earth’s human population has been wiped out by a mysterious disease. The survivors have fled underground. Democracy has disappeared. A prisoner named Cole (Willis) volunteers, in exchange for freedom, to surface and collect scientific data. Later, he’ll participate in a time-travel experiment to find the source of the genocidal virus, encounter a psychiatrist named Railly (Stowe) who seems to know him, a scientist (Christopher Plummer), his son (Pitt) and eventually meet his fate.

“The big mystery,” said producer Charles Roven, “is, ‘Is this real, or is it happening in Cole’s mind?’ ”

“It’s the same old stuff I keep playing with,” Gilliam says, sitting on the steps of Philadelphia’s Greek-revival Ridgeway Library, a gray hulk flanked by urban blight and a McDonald’s. “What is reality, its relationship to fantasy, time future, time past . . . I don’t know exactly what our perception of life is all about, so making these movies is a way to explore it.”

It’s reality he’s after. Adding to the sense of unreality is the fact that Roven’s wife and partner in Atlas Entertainment--Dawn Steel--was running Columbia Pictures when Gilliam experienced his “Munchausen” debacle. And that “Twelve Monkeys” is being made with Universal Pictures.

“The thing about Hollywood,” Gilliam says with a giggle, “is that it’s very hard to burn bridges.”

O nce upon a time, in the City of Brotherly Love, it was forbid den to build anything taller than the statue of William Penn perched atop its rococo City Hall. It was a quaint ideal, much like brotherly love.

Today, the Rouse Towers--enormous, mutated Art Deco spears of silvery glass--shine aquamarine against the cool morning. Viewed from uptown, from outside the library, they dominate the skyline, invoking an image that is strictly Emerald City, a surrealist’s Oz rising out of urban stasis. It’s a setting ripe for Gilliamization.

At the library itself, crew members cover the steps with snow, delivered fresh from Jim’s Ice Co. (a futile gesture; it’s about to become the warmest day of the year). The greensward of its lawn, sodden and scarred by tire tracks, is littered with oil drums, empty propane tanks, heaps of rags and shopping carts. A crowd of locals, intended to look like demented homeless, are doing a splendid job.

In a film about post-apocalyptic future, it all looks perfect--except that this is the present. The future waits inside.

If Gilliam wanted to question reality, and time, he has picked the right place: Philadelphia, in the words of Stowe, “seems to represent the best and worst of what we strive for.”

He may have the right cast, too, and not just because the project, according to Roven, “was very dependent on Bruce and Madeleine and Brad and Terry and myself making some financial sacrifices.”

No, in a film about time, time is of the essence: One star hears the clock ticking and is putting her career on hold (“I want to start a family,” Stowe says). Another will turn 40 in three days (“The warranty runs out,” Willis cracks). A third finds himself with a runaway career based on a handful of movies and his face--and faces are the playthings of time. Will talent prove out? Or is he just caught in the happy, violent maelstrom created by people who love People?

Outside the Gothic iron fence that girdles the library grounds, people are beginning to gather; bike-riding cops, kids skipping school, passersby stopping to gape. There are local news crews, and crews for syndicated tabloid shows impersonating local news crews.

Why?

Pitt.

“We came down from New York to see if we could do a story on what we dubbed the ‘female frenzy’ over the so-called Sexiest Man Alive,” said Tom Houghton of “American Journal,” a syndicated tabloid news show; “Hard Copy” has already been there, and even though Pitt isn’t shooting that day, Houghton is hungry.

Pitt’s throbbing fame may have captivated the tabloids, as well as the crowd outside the fence, but the show must go on. “He can’t help it, can he?” Stowe asks, maybe with a hint of compassion.

Amid the hubbub, a scene actually has to be shot. Stowe and Willis are lying under cardboard and blankets on the porch of the library, while a police car, looking for Willis’ character, has happened by. Stowe has to wake him up so they can sneak away. Take after take, the car cruises, they rise and then run along the top of the library steps. Willis keeps mugging for the crew members standing just outside the shot, who laugh as the assistant director bellows, “Cut!”

Gilliam’s art has been compared (he acknowledges the influence) to Brueghel. He paints large, complicated canvases on which the focus doesn’t always fall on what’s important. You can see it here. The front of the library is alive with action each time the shoot commences, with kids doing flips across mattresses set up on the grass, two of the homeless fighting beside a flaming oil drum, others milling about, retracing identical patterns on the grass. It’s a complex choreography, and somewhere in the midst of it Stowe and Willis are slinking away.

It’s clear there is method behind Gilliam’s madness, a compulsion to fill up the frame with activity. And it’s intriguing to imagine the results, after Gilliam applies his post-production talents to what is already richly visual.

“We’ve had that conversation already,” Willis says. “Each individual part is really fascinating, the story takes big left turns, you have to pay attention. Yet, when it’s all together, it’s going to have some kind of gestalt larger than life.

“I’ve only felt like that about one other film,” he says. “I remember watching little cut scenes of the first ‘Die Hard,’ and I would say, ‘Wow, that’s a good scene,’ ‘Whoa, that’s exciting,’ and when they all came together into one big film it took on a larger value. I mean, who knows? I’ve picked as many bad films as good films. Before you start, they’re all good films. . . .”

Gilliam walks by, pointing at himself and mouthing words (“Don’t believe him. Listen only to me.”).

“I kept most of our secrets secret,” Willis tells the director. “I’m telling him it’s a remake of ‘Ryan’s Daughter.’ ”

“I just saw a trailer for ‘Pecos Bill,’ ” Gilliam responds. “I think we have an audience for this one. . . .”

“It’s about a family of monkeys,” Willis says, in mock-publicist tones, “that leaves Africa in search of fame and fortune in New York City. Macaulay Culkin’s in it. . . .”

Gilliam laughs and heads off. Willis watches the sun set. He grew up not so far from here, in Carneys Point, N.J. “It’s as close to my hometown as I’ve ever worked, I guess,” he says. “But you know what’s funny? I spent a lot of these springs here, and it smells like that today. It smells like my youth. These days, when the ground is wet, the sun setting. . . .”

He has a bar code tattooed on his neck. His head is shaved. If he and Cole have anything in common, it’s a sense of adventure: Bruce Willis will deny there’s any pattern, but he keeps making risky movies he doesn’t need to make.

“There’s not very much money on this film,” said Jeffrey Beecroft, the Oscar-nominated (“Dances With Wolves”) production designer. “So we’re trying to take real environments and make big changes to them and make it all slightly strange.”

For the prison in which Cole is held--in the future? the present?--they’re using Eastern State Penitentiary, which was built by Quakers in the 1820s and has been derelict for years. “I built all the cages on curves, and it goes up quite high,” Beecroft says. “Then, in post-production, we’ll matte more cages so it will go up 30 stories.” For other sets, he is using mostly old power plants, converting them into grotesque representations of societal madness.

“I had this concept of the future taking place in the great cathedrals of power that had made America what it was in the ‘20s and ‘30s,” Beecroft said, “except it would be as if you’d taken a hammer and smashed it all down under the ground. And Terry bought into that. . . . Where a lot of directors would say, ‘You can’t do that,’ if I bring Terry an idea he’ll say, ‘Yeah, let’s try it!’ ”

Gilliam has been accused of sacrificing narrative or reason for his optic muse. “You know, it’s funny, I actually spend a lot of time on the narrative. I fail miserably, clearly,” the director laughs. “But movies are a visual thing. I like to be able to do in films what people achieve in literature and poetry and beautiful writing, to be able to find a grammar and vocabulary that does the same thing, and I tend to use visuals for that more than not.”

Inside the library, civilization appears disintegrated. Intended to represent the long-abandoned Wanamaker’s department store in the year 2035, the cavernous room looks like a cross between Miss Havisham’s house in “Great Expectations” and what happens when you never--ever--clean your room.

Downstairs, rubble and glass are everywhere; the smell of decay and moist cement mix in the nostrils. The clamminess is undisturbed by a dram of sunshine leaching in through a hole in the ceiling--which, after Gilliam gets through, will reach up eight stories, where snow will drift through the light.

It’s beautiful, and it’s haunted. And then the spider wrangler arrives.

He carries several species of insects, one of which Willis, as the specimen-retrieving Cole, is supposed to pluck off a web and preserve. “What’s your name?” Willis asks. “Aldo. . . ?”