Even visitors are confused by Pinewood

By Peter Biskind

It’s nine in the morning, and I am in a cab threading its way through a tangle of narrow country lanes toward Pinewood Studios, in Iver Heath, about 20 miles west of London, where I am to see Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, or, as it is more popularly known, “Heath Ledger’s last movie.” As everyone who hasn’t been hiding under a rock is well aware, Ledger died in January 2008, after accidentally taking a toxic combination of prescription drugs, while Doctor Parnassus was still in production. After a mad scramble to pick up the pieces, the film was finished with a little help from his friends Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell.

Built in 1935 on the grounds of a historic country home, Heatherden Hall, Pinewood is a storied production facility that has hosted a sparkling array of pictures, from early Alfred Hitchcock and David Lean to the James Bond series, not to mention recent blockbusters such as The Da Vinci Code (2006), The Bourne Ultimatum (2007), and The Dark Knight (2008). But I’ve never had the pleasure and am eager to see the studio.

As the hedgerows bounce past, I glimpse solitary cows grazing in absurdly green meadows, and look in vain for the kind of garish movie billboards that herald arrival at a Hollywood lot. There are none, not even a signpost, and just as I begin to suspect that I’m being taken for a different kind of ride than I anticipated, we heave to at the front gate, a modern affair of steel girders and glass that replaced an old, Tudor-style gatehouse when the studio changed hands, in 2001.

Behind the gate lies the back lot, looking like any other back lot, save for the magnificent Victorian gardens that surround it.