Sting on 'The Adventures of Baron Munchausen'

On how he got involved...
"Terry [Gilliam] lives across the road. I knew all about the dramas going on behind the scenes. What a nightmare! He phoned me up and said "Look, we've run out of money, and there's a scene but I can't afford to pay an actor." I said, Terry - as you're my neighbour, I'll do it. I went to Rome for the day, did 10 minutes, and came home. Forty seven or 50 million dollars is a lot of money, and I was a bit resentful about how much his movie cost. I was thinking, God - how can you justify that amount of money? Then I saw it and I didn't want it to end. I felt like a 12 year-old. It's full of Terry's signatures. I'm glad I was in it."
Time Out, 01/89

Sting makes a cameo appearance as a heroic officer in Terry Gilliam's hyperbolic fantasy 'The Adventures of Baron Munchausen' (1989). The spirit of the Baron's tall tales is derived from one of Frederick the Great actual cavalry officers, Carl Friedrich Hieronymous Munchausen (1720-1797) and is translated into cinema with the same giddy inventiveness that marked such Gilliam projects as 'The Time Bandits' (1980), 'Brazil' (1985), 'The Fisher King' (1991) and Monty Python. Ostensibly fighting off an attack by the Turks Baron Munchausen (John Neville) is aided by a personal army that compensates for its lack of manpower with extraordinary gifts: Bertolt (Monty Python's Eric Idle) has supersonic speed, Albrecht (Winston Dennis) has preternatural strength, Adolphis (co-screenwriter Charles Mckeown) has transcontinentally sharp eyesight, and Gustavus (Jack Purvis) has hurricane force lungs. Still, young Sally Salt's (Sarah Polley) ability to refresh the ageing Baron's youthful sense of wonder is perhaps the gang's most invaluable asset of all. Indeed, the real war being fought in Baron Munchausen is the battle to defend the fires of imagination as embodied by the swashbuckling Baron and his cadre, from the dampening cold logic of the "ageing of reason", as personified by a comically joyless bureaucrat named Horatio Jackson (Jonathan Pryce). It is Jackson who sentences Sting to hang for his inability to still his beating heart for heroism too impassioned and daring, too illogical. Unfortunately, the scene which shows Sting on the gallows was left on the cutting room floor.
All This Time CD-ROM