TORONTO - Director Terry Gilliam's latest script called for a vaudevillian take on Satan, a Prince of Darkness in a pencil-thin moustache.
When Tom Waits agreed to step into the role for "The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus," Gilliam was thrilled.
"If you're going to have a devil in your life, Tom is the man," he said.
Indeed, given Waits' technicolour performance in the film, it seems a role he was born to play - just don't say that to the woman who gave birth to him.
"Don't tell my mom," Waits told The Canadian Press earlier this year at the Toronto International Film Festival. "She's really upset. Pretty pissed off about the whole thing."
Why, exactly?
"My mom was raised in the church," explained the 60-year-old Waits. "If you just tell your mom, flat-out: 'I'm playing the devil, mom.' Then you just leave it there, (and) you don't explain anything, they imagine all kinds of things.
"Moms imagine terrible things - that I'm eating children, which is just not me. I'm not that kind of devil, mom."
In fact, Waits isn't that kind of devil. He plays Satan in "Parnassus," which opens Friday, as an incorrigibly mischievous scamp - more an angel of distraction than darkness.
Gilliam's film takes place in London, where Dr. Parnassus (Canadian Christopher Plummer) drags his old-fashioned travelling show on a horse-drawn carriage.
Within the decrepit cart lies a mysterious mirror that transports anyone who enters into a world of their imagination. There, they're offered a choice between good and evil, and those who choose the latter never re-emerge from the mirror.
The doctor acquired the powerful device in an ancient deal with Waits' devil. In a separate agreement, the devil granted the old man immortality in exchange for his first-born daughter's soul, which Satan comes to collect as her 16th birthday approaches.
Waits' beguiling Beelzebub carries himself with a sleazy charm. Clad in a bowler hat with a cigarette holder dangling from his mouth, Waits gives a winningly loose performance - particularly considering how anxious he was, especially for his scenes opposite the veteran Plummer.
"I was nervous as hell - god, he's Christopher Plummer," Waits said. "But they say that if you play pool with someone who's better than you, you play better pool. I think that's the case here, if you work with people who are the real thing. But I was shaking in my boots.
"But yeah, he's a total pro and you know he's really been around the block. I had a lot of confidence because he had so much experience. I bit off a piece of his experience because I had so little of it myself. Movies, I haven't done that many movies."
And especially movies like this. Waits says he's been a longtime fan of Gilliam's and was so eager to work with the director, he didn't need to read the script for "Parnassus" before signing on - "Who wouldn't want to do a film with Terry Gilliam? You kidding me?" Waits asked rhetorically.
But "Parnassus" was a difficult production. Heath Ledger, who portrays a shifty disgraced philanthropist who joins Parnassus's bunch, died midway through shooting. With relatively few changes, Gilliam and co-writer Charles McKeown reworked the script so that Jude Law, Johnny Depp and Colin Farrell could fill in for Ledger in his remaining scenes.
It's also one of Gilliam's more visually adventurous movies, with surreal imagination sequences in which ladders extend to the sky and flowing rivers are made of serpent tongues.
Gilliam said he revelled in creating the film's CG-aided visuals.
"It was a bit like doing 'Python' again," Gilliam said. "I just had the freedom to let my brain run wild over hillsides. It was as simple as that.
"Everything I do, people think it's kind of surprising. I think it's ordinary. I'm always amazed that people find this stuff imaginative - I just think it's common."
Count Waits among those who see something uncommon in Gilliam's visions.
He watched the film for the first time at home, calling it "wild."
"I loved it," said the personable Waits, whose affable, low-key demeanour is disarming when considered against his cult-hero status as a musician.
"But it's hard to watch yourself because you're waiting for your scenes to come up on a conveyor belt out of your stomach and into your mouth and out of your lips, you know?"
Having said that, he indulges in some tongue-in-cheek egomania.
"Of course, there's all these other scenes around in the movie - outside of my own scenes, I mean," he says with a wry smile.
"I guess they feel they have to create other scenes to hold the story together. They're kind of extraneous things that happen during it. I guess it's just part of making a movie."