Gilliamesque

by Terry Gilliam

  The IRA were bombing London on a regular basis, the right-wing dictatorships Reagan was supporting in South America were reviving that great innovation of the seventeenth century – witch-trials – whereby if you were found guilty, you had to pay for your own incarceration, and in Germany university professors were being obliged to sign loyalty oaths in the belief that this would somehow cut off the supply of new recruits to the Red Army Faction. Against this turbulent backdrop, every time I went out to LA, I’d be sitting in hotel rooms and airports, and there would be pages and pages of plastic surgery ads in all the magazines. At that time, LA and Miami were the centres of this dubious practice, but now it’s all around the world and someone who doesn’t have surgery excites more comment than someone who does.

  It’s the same with the Ministry of Information, which I was obsessed with at the time, as an old-school Orwellian twist on the kind of totalitarian excesses that America was at best turning a blind eye to, and at worst actively initiating, in Latin America. Now it looks like a satirical dry run for the US Department of Homeland Security or at the very least John Birt’s BBC – probably the ultimate manifestation of that most destructive of Thatcherite tendencies whereby public institutions suddenly started to run themselves like number-crunching corporations rather than as public institutions for the people who actually paid for them.

  Another preparatory collage - ‘Pipework through Bedroom’. One obvious influence on the ducts in BRAZIL was the famous external inwards of the Georges Pompidon Centre in Paris, but inspiration also came from closer to home. I’d started to notice all these beautiful Regency buildings in London, where people were just smashing through all the ornate cornice work to put plumbing pipes on the outside. I remember thinking ‘What is going on – does nobody have any aesthetics here any more?’ I suppose they just wanted stuff, a sensation not unknown to users of the Internet, which somehow becomes more ubiquitous and invasive as it continues to bring us all these great things that we really want.

  The film’s one tiny suspicion of prophetic content is delivered – like pretty much everything else in Brazil – by the ducts. I’d always been fascinated by pneumatic tubes in shops, wondering where do they lead and what is the person they deliver to up to. And I suppose now that people often refer to Internet service providers having digital content ‘in their pipes’, it can feel a bit like ‘Central Services: we do the work, you do the pleasure’, though of course one important difference is that in the film the ducts aren’t just bringing you everything you want, they’re also taking all the shit away. No one seems to have come up with a way of doing that via the Internet as yet.

  In terms of elements of Brazil that were prompted by my own personal experience, the most obvious was probably the Acid Man. In the late seventies, my dad had been through a nightmarish experience when a patch of skin cancer was discovered on his ear and a highly recommended surgeon applied acid to it, then put a compress over the top and advised him to go and sit outside in the park for an hour or two while the acid worked its magic. By the time my dad came back into the surgery, the very edge of his ear was still there, but the whole lobe had been eaten away.

  He was in terrible pain, but he seemed to have this amazing ability to cope with it. Dad was a quiet guy and very stoical – not always whingeing and moaning like me. There’d been another time when I was still a kid, when he’d been doing a chalk line on the ceiling, where you tap a big nail in and stretch the line that you’re going to run your stud-work up to. He was up on the ladder tightening the line when the nail came loose, flew straight at him and went deep into his eye. He just pulled it out and drove forty miles home. I know those were different times when people in general made less fuss, but still, my dad made the Black Knight look like a faint-heart.

  A few years later, he ended up having to have this operation where a tumour had grown behind his eye and they did a full-blown Python/Vanderbeek cartoon on him – lifted the top of his head off, went in there and took the tumour out, then stuck the top of his head back on again. It was after this that I became convinced that he was part lizard, because the optic nerve to that one eye had been severed – he was completely blind in it – yet when I asked him years later what that was like, he said, ‘Oh, I still see a bit with it.’ Devotee of the Enlightenment that I was (and am), I found this hard to accept, so Maggie and I did a test on him where we got him to cover his good eye while we hid a pea somewhere on the table, and of course he went straight to it. I suppose I’ve tried to emulate my dad’s stubborn refusal to give up in the way that I’ve made movies – struggling on with an arm or a leg or both tied behind my back and my balls in a vice operated by the bond company.

  As well as my dad’s horrendous aural mishap, Brazil’s expansive narrative also found room for the newest Gilliam arrival. The only scene we had to reshoot because it wasn’t quite working was the one where Jack Lint is at his office, spouting all these sinister details of the stuff he’s been up to. I realised that what this scene needed to give it another angle was to have one of his children there (not twins, triplets – ‘how time flies’), so drafted in my three-year-old daughter Holly. Having Michael Palin playing with this little girl while he’s wearing a blood-stained smock and talking about torturing people turned out to be chillingly effective, and best of all – we didn’t have to pay her!

  Preparing to entrust my innocent daughter Holly to the tender care of the torturer, Michael Palin...

  That’s how you learn to make films, really – just by doing it. Giving an actor something else to focus on often helps with passages they’re struggling with, because it takes their mind off the problem in hand. That’s why in the party scene you can see Michael is eating all the time. Because he is such a brilliant performer, I was shocked by how nervous he was to be working alongside Jonathan Pryce, Peter Vaughan and Ian Richardson – people he regarded as ‘proper actors’ – never mind Robert De Niro. But that very twitchiness was part of what made Michael so great in the film, along with a vague sense of him coming from the same kind of background that George Orwell did, so had he been born fifty years earlier, he might easily have ended up as a colonial administrator, writing about a Far East that was still under British control.

  It’s not fashionable now to imagine that the maintenance of empire could ever have been something people felt genuinely idealistic about, but no doubt for some in the generations before the whole thing fell apart, it was just the very important cause they were looking for – the Peace Corps of its day, even. My own very important cause, in terms of the shooting of Brazil at least, would be managing Robert De Niro.

  Obviously I was very excited when Arnon Milchan – who had been his producer on both Once Upon a Time in America and The King of Comedy – told me that De Niro, who was a Python fan, wanted a part in Brazil. He came over and we spent a day talking, and Bobby was gracious enough to accept the smaller role of Archibald ‘Harry’ Tuttle, as I’d already given the part he originally wanted to Michael Palin. From that point on, he started popping over to London quite a lot, and dealing with him became something of a full-time job.

  He was so utterly thorough in his preparation that he had a friend who was a brain surgeon whose operations he was sitting in on (because I’d described Harry’s precision as a repair-man as ‘surgical’). Imagine coming out from being under anaesthetic after brain surgery and the first person you see is Robert De Niro! You’re going to think you’ve crossed over to the other side . . . and then you’re going to ask him for his autograph. By the time we were having to build mock-ups of every scene he was going to be doing, it was starting to drive everyone a bit crazy. Not least because the presence of someone who required so much attention began to have an impact on the other actors.

  Kim Greist, a virtual newcomer who I had chosen to play the girl, in front of a long queue of better-known and possibly better-qualified candidates, started trying to behave in the same way – Robert De Niro was getting all that special attention, so why s
houldn’t she? In the end I had to tell her, ‘Wait a minute, you don’t actually deserve it, because you haven’t done anything in your career yet, whereas he has, which is why I will suck it up for him but not for you.’

  On the first day of shooting, I was told that he’d been in his room in full costume at four o’clock in the morning. It was funny, because later on, when I needed to edit in some extra surgical-style repair footage using my own hands (because Bobby had been so nervous on the day that we’d only been able to film him using a couple of tools) I had to put his costume on, and I remember thinking, ‘Jesus, it’s so hot and cumbersome. This must be why he does all that preparation, because it frees him up when he’s actually on camera. Thinking about everything else so intensely is his way of freeing himself up from over-thinking the lines – it’s the self-administered equivalent of giving Michael Palin party food.’

  I found that incredibly interesting. I’ve always tended to see actors as something of a species apart. Having never studied acting myself, I don’t really understand how their minds work, and I don’t actually think it’s my job to do that. In Monty Python we weren’t trained so we just went out and did things – and I did them badly – but when you see the really great actors at work, you realise they’ve got all these little tricks that either help them do what they do or conspire to make our lives miserable – or most often, both.

  At that point you just have to resign yourself to the fact that he is Robert De Niro or Sean Connery or Ralph Richardson or whoever he is, and we’ve somehow managed to get him in our film, so we’ve just got to make it possible for him to do whatever he does. Even if that means letting him have thirty-five takes. I just think people come in, and they kind of stake out their territory by putting their spoor down. Some of it’s conscious and some of it’s subconscious, but what the director has to do is to decide exactly how much of that behaviour you need to let them get away with.

  And if you get that call right, they will reward you by coming up with something great – like Harry’s thick glasses with the little lights on, which were totally De Niro’s idea.

  I think good actors will be willing to completely expose themselves so long as they’re confident they are in safe hands and feeling protected – i.e. that their failures will not be used. My experience is that once they trust me they will go beyond their career ‘health and safety’ limits. They aren’t called ‘players’ for nothing, and my job is to create a playground in which it’s safe for them to risk falling flat on their faces.

  he most dangerous part of the film-making process is the last stage of the edit. At that point, you obviously want what you’ve done to be successful – not so much because you’re counting the money, you just want it to get out there and have people like it. The kicker is that by this time you’re probably the worst judge of whether it’s any good or not, because you’ve seen the film so many more times than anyone else is ever going to and are probably vacillating between thinking it’s wonderful and an absolute piece of shit.

  On the one hand, you’re desperately holding on to what you’ve got, convinced that if you make one mistake at this stage, the whole thing will fall apart; on the other, you’re desperately looking for the one change that is going to make all the difference. With Brazil, the latter impulse prevailed. The day the film premiered in Leicester Square, I went in and cut a large part of one scene out of the show print myself – it was the moment where Jonathan and Kim wake up together, just before he gets arrested. You convince yourself that this particular scene is going on too long and if you can just get rid of it, everything will work much better. It’s a dumb trick to fall for, but I fell for it that time. Years later when the Criterion Collection released their restored version of the film I reassembled the severed scene.

  Once Brazil was finished, Fox released it in Europe without any problems, but Universal baulked in the States. I don’t know how other people have the confidence they seem to exude in these situations, because I’m always terrified. But one thing I do have an instinct for is who the enemy is – I always know when someone is trying to ‘fix’ things for the wrong reasons. In this case, the deluded fantasist Gilliam wanted the film to end with its feet on the ground, whereas the supposedly grownup and responsible studio executives wanted to cut it so what had originally been written as a fantasy sequence would now be presented as reality. I have no objection to sending the audience home whistling under the right circumstances, but the conclusion of a lapsed totalitarian dreamscape does not meet that criterion. Universal executives kept saying things like, ‘The depressing stuff is really interesting, Terry, but that doesn’t mean they can’t escape from it . . . You saw Blade Runner, didn’t you? They got away.’ The problem was that in Ridley Scott’s rose-tinted happy ending to Philip K Dick’s original story – which had been released a couple of years before – the director had given the studio just what they wanted by letting them change the ending.

  On the promo trail for BRAZIL with Jonathan Pryce in Copenhagen. It was actually just before shooting the film that I finally bought an Arriflex camera. The one in this picture wasn’t mine, through.

  Storyboard for BRAZIL‘s ‘Sea of Eyes’ fantasy sequence – one of several elaborate fantasy segments which had already been sliced (by me) from the script, long before Universal started trying to give us a fairy-tale ending. The scenes that have to go first are often the ones that are nearest to the director’s heart – it’s almost as if you’re in some Old Testament world where the first sacrifice has to be the thing you love the most. (It’s like Bob Dylan says, ‘God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son.” . . . Abe said, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”’ Fuck, that’s a great line.) The ones that go right at the end tend to be the ones which have cost loyal foot-soldiers the most – which is why it’s some consolation now they can at least have some kind of afterlife as ‘deleted scenes’ on DVD or Blu-Ray.

  I can see the logic that lay behind that decision, especially for a commercially minded director like Ridley. You want the studio to get behind your film, and maybe even let you make another one – so when push comes to shove, you give way. What made me crazy was that later on, he got to do a ‘director’s cut’ and put back in all the stuff that he’d collaborated on cutting out.

  I don’t know where my rebel streak comes from, but for some reason it tends to move to the fore whenever purity or truth or any of these other ridiculously simplistic ideas get violated. I know what you’re thinking: ‘And this from the man who helped make adverts for whatever terrible films Universal could throw at him!’ But don’t you see? That’s how I know . . . Because I was briefly caught up in that side of the business, I can smell that kind of bullshit a mile off. The problem for so many of the really good British directors who came out of advertising was that they’d been in that business for too long. Because I only did it for a year or so (and for at least half of that time I was in an active state of rebellion), I hadn’t had time to internalise the doctrines.

  The various battles I’ve had with studios and censors over the years have never been about resisting authority for its own sake, they’ve always (at least, from my end) been about protecting the work. With Python, for example, it was always very important to us that the programmes and books and records went out exactly the way we made them, and if anything I felt even more strongly about that once I was running my own cinematic show. I don’t want to change my films after they’re completed, because it’s their flaws which make them historical records of what we were capable of doing at a particular time. When I sign my name to everyone else’s work as the director, that’s basically what I’m taking responsibility for: ‘This is it, for better or worse, the best we could do.’ So to go back and re-do that I think is a real cheat. (If this is the director’s cut, why on earth did you put your name to it the first time?)

  Once Universal started trying to fiddle around and re-cut the film, I kept getting calls from this editor they’d put on it who couldn’t underst
and why I wasn’t co-operating. He kept asking me, ‘Don’t you want to protect your film?’ So I said, ‘But you’re disembowelling the thing . . . what am I supposed to protect – the bits of lifeless meat that are left? Fuck you!’ The minute you start to go along with that shit, you end up like Spielberg taking the guns out of the policemen’s hands in ET – in the original they had guns which they were about to shoot, and he airbrushed them out for the re-release. Maybe my appetite for the airbrush had been exhausted by using one to do cartoons with, but what the fuck was he doing? What was this – Stalin removing Trotsky from the Russian revolutionary photo-wall?

  We weren’t having that, even if it meant the ice-pick in the night. We tried to hire a PR firm to help us get our point across, but Universal then embargoed the film so it couldn’t be shown in America – even to a PR firm. At that point, it was guerrilla time. I took out a full-page ad in Variety asking Sid Sheinberg (who was the head of the studio) when he was going to release our film. That got a little buzz going, and then we offered to put any legitimate journalist who wanted to see the film on a bus to Mexico, where they could watch it legally.

  Draft version of one of the on-set posters for BRAZIL.

  It was around this time that the University of Southern California invited me to come and do a talk, so I brought the film with me, saying it was my audio-visual aid. But the operations manager of the school refused to show it, because that college is basically an extension of the studio system and they knew which side their bread was buttered. I was running back and forth on the phone to my lawyer who had Mr Middleman – (His real name! It might as well have been Mr Helpmann . . . ) – from Universal on the other line. Then a student from a less hide-bound seat of learning (in this case Cal Arts, the college Walt Disney created, which trained all the animators who are now Pixar) said, ‘We’ll show it.’