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ARCHIVES | 1986

HOW TERRY GILLIAM FOUND A HAPPY ENDING FOR 'BRAZIL'

By LESLIE BENNETTS JAN. 19, 1986
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The movie is a surrealistic, nightmarish comedy about a naive clerk who inadvertently defies a powerful but
incompetent bureaucracy and is destroyed by its relentless insistence on passive conformity.
When Terry Gilliam thought up the idea, he didn't see himself as the real-life counterpart to the hapless victim.
Then again, life is full of little surprises.
In the beginning, actually, signs seemed to augur well for the project's success. Mr. Gilliam had a successful track
record, both as a member of the Monty Python comedy troupe and as an independent film maker whose credits
include ''Time Bandits'' and ''Jabberwocky.'' When he set out to make his new movie, ''Brazil,'' it seemed a simple
enough assignment, as complicated movies go. Although it took him nine months to shoot the film, which required
elaborate special effects, he delivered it on time and under budget. Then the real problems started.
''Life began to imitate art perfectly,'' says Mr. Gilliam. ''It was a total reliving of the film. It was the worst
nightmare I've ever had.''
For the last year, Mr. Gilliam has been waging a bitter battle with Universal Pictures, which refused to release his
version of ''Brazil'' on the grounds that it was too long and too uncommercial. Mr. Gilliam cut the film's running time,
but refused to substitute the happy ending requested by the studio. The dispute became increasingly acrimonious, but
even such desperation measures as a full-page ad in Variety begging the studio to release the movie proved fruitless.
Mr. Gilliam finally lost hope that he would ever see his film distributed.
However, unlike the movie, Mr. Gilliam's own story does have a happy ending. Last month, in an upbeat plot twist he
himself would never approve for a script, a last-minute rescue was effected by the Los Angeles Film Critics
Association, which voted ''Brazil'' the best picture of the year and also awarded it honors for best screenplay and best
direction. Within days Universal opened the film for an emergency one-week run to qualify it for the Academy
Awards before the year ended. Now ''Brazil'' has reopened and is playing here at Loew's New York Twin and Loew's
84th Street Six. Not surprisingly, Mr. Gilliam's mood has improved markedly. In fact, he says, he has scarcely stopped
giggling ever since.
Of course, although many critics have liked it, the film's commercial potential remains to be proved. Mr. Gilliam
is the first to admit that ''Brazil'' is not an easy movie to sell - which he sees as a major factor in his troubles with
Universal. ''It doesn't fit into any neat categories,'' the director acknowledges. ''One of the primary reasons for making
the film was to make something that didn't fit into any of the existing genres of film or film marketing. But if it's not
categorizable, they don't have any way of perceiving it in Hollywood, so the way to approach it was, 'Let's make it
categorizable. Let's make the extraordinary ordinary.' ''
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That, in this case, proved hard to do; the studio's attempt to recut ''Brazil'' to fit a more commercial mold
foundered on the film's very oddity. ''Brazil'' is unusual, to say the least - but then, that was one of its goals. ''In
Hollywood, films are made backward,'' Mr. Gilliam observes. ''It's the high concept approach: you have a concept
about the way a film is going to be marketed, and then you make a film around that. I was being pressed to come up
with a one-sentence description of it, so I would say things like, 'Well, it's sort of like Walter Mitty meets Franz
Kafka.' I would say, 'It's a post-Orwellian view of a pre-Orwellian world.' '' He chuckles wickedly. ''Market that one,
sucker!''
The film, which stars Jonathan Pryce, features Robert De Niro in a cameo role, along with Mr. Gilliam's former
Monty Python colleague, Michael Palin. Mr. Gilliam shares screenplay credits with Tom Stoppard, the playwright,
and Charles McKeown.
Mr. Pryce plays Sam Lowry, a resolutely unambitious clerk in a mammoth government information agency that
routinely destroys innocent lives with the blip of an errant computer. The mild-mannered Lowry deals with the
depredations of a totalitarian state and a consumer culture run amok by escaping into his imagination, where he is an
airborne knight in silver armor flying to the rescue of a beautiful blonde maiden. One day Lowry's quiet life is
irretrievably altered when he actually glimpses the woman of his dreams, who turns out to be a truck driver in urban
terrorist gear.
Although ''Brazil'' ends with Lowry being destroyed by the heedlessly malign bureaucracy, Mr. Gilliam doesn't
view that choice as irredeemably bleak. ''He escapes into madness, which I've always considered a reasonable
approach to life in certain situations,'' says the 45-year-old film maker cheerfully. ''To me that's an optimistic ending.
Lowry's imagination is still free and alive; they haven't got that. They may have his body, but they don't have his
mind. The girl rescues him and takes him away and they live happily forever; it's only in his mind, but that's
sufficient, I think. It's better than nothing, folks!'' Mr. Gilliam admits that the studio may have been correct in its
insistence that audiences would prefer a sugar-coated ending, but that, to him, is beside the point. ''I'm more
interested in saying something than I am in pandering,'' he explains. ''There's a lot of pandering that goes on, and it's
bad for society, because people aren't being encouraged to think. I do think there's a terrible lack of responsibility out
there. You can't talk about artistic values or social values or philosophical values; economic values are the only ones
that count. This is a divisive film; people have quite strong reactions to it, and they argue about it, but at least it gets
them talking.''
Mr. Palin claims that Mr. Gilliam did the film because it allowed him ''the chance to make what he's always
wanted - really big explosions.'' Certainly ''Brazil,'' whose $15 million budget purchased a lavish array of special
effects, offers enough fireworks to keep even the most rabid movie technology freak happy. But despite its fantastical
elements, Mr. Gilliam sees ''Brazil'' as all too realistic.
''I don't think it's as much a prediction as an observation,'' he says. ''I think it's like a very elaborate documentary,
done in a Lewis Carroll way - seen through the looking glass. It's all recognizable things you see around you, but it's
been transformed. I wanted to do a cautionary tale about where we are and where we're going.''
The idea for the film was born years ago, when Mr. Gilliam was scouting locations for ''Jabberwocky'' in Wales.
''We were in this steel town on the coast, Port Talbot, a really awful place,'' he recalls. ''The beach was completely
covered with iron ore, black and awful, and I was there at sunset, seeing these strange industrial shapes all over the
place.''
At that moment an odd image floated into his mind. ''All I could see was this guy at sunset, sitting on the beach,
fidding with his radio,'' Mr. Gilliam says. ''He's tuning in the radio and getting this wonderful Latin escapist romantic
music that has nothing to do with the world he's in. As it turned out, that's not in the film, but it's still what the film is
about.''
Indeed, although the country of Brazil plays no role in the movie, the jaunty popular song of the same name is a
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else to call it,'' although he did toy with ''1984 1/2'' as a possibility.
The process of making ''Brazil'' served as ''a catharsis,'' Mr. Gilliam says. ''There were a lot of frustrations that
had been building up about the world we live in, and I just wanted to get them out of my system: the over-
complication and over-organization of life, the loss of humanity, things about dreams - your own dreams, the dreams
you're sold, other people's dreams of you. That's one of the reasons I left America: I couldn't distinguish my dreams
from the dreams that had been processed for me. Walking down a beach at sunset, I couldn't tell whether I was
enjoying it because it was enjoyable, or because I'd seen it on too many commercials.''
The only American member of the Monty Python team, Mr. Gilliam was born in Minneapolis and grew up in
California. He began his career as a cartoonist, working for nothing at an animation studio in his spare time to learn
stop-action techniques. He went to Europe on a trip in the late 1960's, and he never came back.
Monty Python aficionados who know Mr. Gilliam's work through such films as ''And Now for Something
Completely Different,'' ''Monty Python and the Holy Grail'' and ''The Meaning of Life'' may be somewhat nonplused
by ''Brazil,'' but Mr. Gilliam sees it as a logical extension of his earlier work rather than a departure.
''A lot of the cartoons I did for 'Python' were very disturbing,'' he notes. ''There's a lot of anger, anarchy and
nihilism along with the bright colors and silly pictures. It's sort of like this film; you hope you can reach people on
different levels. There's the odd dodo out there who just likes color and noise, and if people want to look at the
surface, it's an entertaining surface, but if they want to look deeper there are other things going on. I've taken to
describing 'Brazil' as a form of cinematic mugging. It starts rather funny, and it lures people around the corner with a
lollipop - and once you get around the corner, pow! It's too late to escape. It's claustrophobic - you're trapped, and it
won't end; it ends again and again and again and again. People get resentful, but that's what nightmares are like.''
As for his Monty Python colleagues, Mr. Gilliam reports, ''We're just good friends. We still work in different
combinations, and basically stay in touch, but everyone's doing their own thing at the moment. We're talking about
another film together, but everybody seems to be directing or writing their own films right now, so I can't see it
happening for another two or three years.''
Although he has lived in England for 18 years now, Mr. Gilliam says that his native land still plays a major role in
his work. ''All the films I do are messages in bottles for America,'' he observes. ''Everything in them is about me and
America, tempered by my experience in Europe.''
Now that ''Brazil'' is finally launched, Mr. Gilliam is beginning to think about his next project, which will be
called ''The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.'' ''It's about the world's greatest liar,'' he says. ''I'm looking for a 75-
year-old unknown to star in it.''
He grins, his round face crinkling merrily like that of a naughty child. ''I love being as perverse as you can be
when I make films,'' he confides. ''I think that's my function - trying to provide things that are unlike anything else
out there. There are enough people doing it the other way.''
A version of this interview appears in print on January 19, 1986, on Page 2002015 of the National edition with the headline: HOW TERRY
GILLIAM FOUND A HAPPY ENDING FOR 'BRAZIL'.

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