At this point, Sid Sheinberg was caught in a cleft stick. I don’t think he knew what to make of the original version of the film – he sensed there was something special about it, he just wanted a happy ending. They did actually bolt together their own happy-ending version, which ended up going out on syndicated TV (where it would be interrupted by adverts every five minutes). They called it the ‘Love Conquers All’ edit. This was doubly ironic, because Sid’s wife – who’d played Mrs Roy Scheider in Jaws, so she knew a thing about sharks – loved Brazil just the way it was, so inside the house he was having to deal with her, while outside I was pursuing him through the national media, the poor guy.
By now a certain amount of noise was being created. In the intervening years since we’d worked together in LA in the mid-1960s, my old friend Joel Siegel had progressed to being film critic on ABC’s Good Morning America. He was very aware of what was going on and said maybe they could get us on the show. The key to that happening was persuading Robert De Niro to give an interview – which was something he very rarely did, because he was incredibly uncomfortable being interviewed, and it was truly wonderful of him to support us under those circumstances.
As it turned out, his social awkwardness worked in our favour. The host of the show was Maria Shriver – one of the Kennedy family who a short while later married Arnold Schwarzenegger and eventually became (at least, on a temporary basis) the first lady of California – and after a while she got so desperate trying to get anything out of De Niro that she turned to the less famous guy sitting next to him.
Once she’d asked if it was true that I had a problem with the studio, that was it, I was away. ‘I don’t have a problem with the studio,’ I told the future Mrs Arnie, ‘I’ve got a problem with one man. His name is Sid Sheinberg, and he looks like this . . . ’ At that point, I whipped out the eight-by-ten glossy photo of Sid that I had presciently brought with me, ran up to the camera and showed it to millions of Americans.
Now it was all about keeping up the pressure. A couple of critics from the LA Times who had been at the USC event got behind us and started setting up clandestine screenings. Then someone looked up the rules for the LA Critics Awards and saw that there was nothing in them about films having to actually be released to be in competition, so they awarded us best film, best director and best screenplay, which was very sporting of them, especially as they had a reputation for being quite a conservative lot.
It’s not often critics get the chance to do something positive, and having taken the opportunity with both hands, I have no doubt that the LA pen-pushing fraternity look back upon this as one of their proudest moments.
By this time, as may have already become obvious, I was really enjoying myself. I am generally someone who likes to be liked – there’s no question about that – and the flipside of this generalised desire to get on with people is that when a conflict does arise, I am usually pretty good at reinventing my adversary as a horrible monster, which makes it easier for me to understand how a great guy like myself could have fallen out with them. I fondly imagine that the Good Morning America incident might also have proved to be a valuable resource for other directors – if they ever got caught up in a row with their studio, they could always say, ‘At least I’m not Terry Gilliam.’
These are my rough notebook drawings for a theme-park attraction to be called ‘The Body Ride’, planned as one of the big draws at ‘Wonder World’, an ambitions-to-the-point-of-sounding-fictional early eighties project to establish aVK Disneyland in the depressed former steel-town of Corby. Few places in Britain had been more cruelly affected by the process of accelerated de-industrialisation that formed the backdrop to the writing of Brazil than this hard-pressed Northamptonshire New Town. How better to compensate its denizens than with an American-style theme park?
I was asked to design a ride and came up with this plan, inspired by the human digestive process-alimentary, my dear Watson.
Sadly – although not surprisingly – WonderWorld never came to fruition. Perhaps not so sadly, my sketch of the ride’s final stage seems to be lost forever, so readers will have to guess through which orifice patrons would have made their exit.
One of the most thrilling things about the victory for free expression that Brazil did ultimately win (when poor old Sid threw in the towel and let us release it at just a few minutes shy of its original length) was how many different people had got behind us to make that happen – from the LA Critics, to the Cal Arts students organising screenings, to Robert De Niro breaking his vow of omertà to go on a chat show. I was disappointed, however, with Spielberg’s apparent use of imagery from a scene in Brazil. At least to my learned friend in the ways of movie-making, George Ayoub, and my paranoid, bloodshot eyes, he had drawn rather too heavily for my liking on the scene of Sam’s awakening for a scene in Back to the Future.
Obviously I’m the last person to be complaining about plagiarism, given the blatant debts I owe everyone from Breughel to Vanderbeek to Gustav Doré. I’ve always been fascinated by the sense that there is a zeitgeist out there, which everyone who is drawing or writing anything is feeding off, and that’s how very different people will often seem to be having strangely similar ideas at the same time. In a broader sense, I think that’s the way history works too – everyone wants to try and nail it down to this cause or that symptom, but I don’t actually think it necessarily can be nailed down. An idea will be floating around for a while and then all of a sudden something shifts and we’re all seeing things the same way – because it’s the same energy everyone’s plugged into.
In film-making terms, a lot of directors I’ve been friendly with – from John Landis to Martin Scorsese – have tended to shoot with a trailer full of reference videos (now it would probably be Netflix) so they can study various classic templates of the scene they’ve got in mind. But being one of those guys who sits in the National Gallery trying to get a perfect copy of the Rembrandt has never been what it’s about for me. I’m much more interested in using what I think I remember of something as a template, rather than going back to check the actuality, because that way I know it’s been through my alembic (the alembic being the distiller that alchemists use for turning base metal into gold, although in my case it does tend to work the opposite way round).
I’ve often spoken of the way the making of the film becomes the story of the film, but in this case, the releasing of the film became the story of the film. And the very existence of Brazil in its completed form came to represent exactly the kind of unlikely triumph over a malevolent monolithic adversary that the film’s protagonists had hoped for. I think this was one reason why it came to resonate so strongly for those who had inhabited the real-life totalitarian landscapes to which the film was an imaginative response.
Palin and I were dragged off to Moscow and St Petersburg for a couple of screenings in the midst of glasnost and perestroika, and the film seemed to be going down a treat. If anything the audiences felt our fantasy version of bureaucratic centralism worked a little better than theirs had. One of the highlights of that trip came when I was offered the chance to visit Eisenstein’s apartment. Well, as the curator explained, it wasn’t Sergei’s actual apartment, but they’d laid it out as an exact replica and filled it with all his stuff. I was already thinking about Baron Munchausen by this time, so when I saw a copy of one of the Munchausen books up on a high shelf, I reached up to have a look at it and clumsily knocked off a framed picture.
Early drawings of John Neville as Baron Munchausen. His physical resemblance to Jean Rochefort’s Later Don Quixote was not coincidental – first because both emerged from the illustrations of Gustave Doré, secondly because these long gaunt dreamers are opposing sides of the same coin, the difference between them being that Munchausen is a liar, but Quixote believes.
‘I’m tried and the world is tired of me,’ was Baron Munchausen’s line. And to be honest, I was feeling the same at this time. As often happened I found that it was actually my ow
n children (by now Maggie and I had added Harry to the list) who ended up giving me a reason to carry on. I think the key to survival is trying to keep alive the ‘inner child’, whatever that is. We’ve all got that sense of wonder and the ability to be surprised but it’s beaten out of people as they go through life. I’ve just been lucky to be able to find work that allows me to keep that little brat inside alive.
What should that picture be but an original drawing of Mickey Mouse signed by Walt Disney himself. I had already been considering the idea of doing Munchausen as a live-action Disney cartoon, and now the Soviet author of the only book I’d ever studied on the practicalities of cinema was conspiring from beyond the grave with arch venture capitalist Uncle Walt to give that ambitious plan the thumbs-up. How much more encouragement did I need?
The various existing versions of the Munchausen stories already seemed to be coalescing in those strange moments of synchronicity which always come into play in the formative stages of any film project. I had previously become very interested in Baron Pràsil – the Czech director Karel Zeman’s 1961 version, which is a mixture of live action and animation, with real people walking through these amazing flat engraved sets. Then once when I was visiting George Harrison at Friar Park he showed me a film – the UFA version of the story, bizarrely produced by Joseph Goebbels.
That’s how these things always come together. Something is floating around in the ether and then someone else comes at it from another angle and off you go. The money side of things was – inevitably – a little more tortuous. In fact, this was the first film of mine where the fiscal provenance went horribly skewiff. It started with Arnon having done a deal with Fox that I didn’t know about and never saw a penny of. We only found out that they owned a chunk of the film once we were preparing to sign up with David Puttnam’s number two at Columbia.
The other people I work with will often be telling me that my producer is a bit of an operator, and my reply to them is generally, ‘Well, that may very well be true, but I’m only interested in one thing, and that’s getting the film done – whether or not I get screwed in the process is an issue of secondary importance.’ In this case, the discovery that both Arnon and 20th Century Fox would now own a chunk of the finished film obviously meant the end of my relationship with the man who has recently revealed himself to have been working as an Israeli intelligence agent throughout this period (Robert De Niro has said he knew, and I know even more). So in one sense, the people who warned me against Milchan were right, but at the same time, we got two films made together, and no amount of documentaries about his pivotal role in the Israeli nuclear weapons programme can change that.
Once Arnon was out of the picture, his German line producer Thomas Schühly stepped up to the plate. He’d previously worked on The Name of the Rose, and his first contribution was to keep firing accountants until they got the notional (perhaps fictional would be a better word) budget down to the amount of money we actually had, which was about £23.5 million. Our next challenge (no one could accuse us of starting small) was to try to get Marlon Brando to play the role of Vulcan.
This is one of my Munchausen sketch books, which I filled with fast and furious drawings of the same Roman architecture I’d photographed on my first trip to the External City more than twenty years before. I loved doing these sketches, just sitting out in the street – on the day I did this one, I’d discovered that in the presepi – which are Roman nativity tableaux that come out around Christmas – the holy child is referred to as ‘Il Bimbo Dio’.
I was out in LA staying at the Chateau Marmont hotel when his agent and friend Jay Kantor (who’d been a humble mail-room employee before the young Brando decided he liked the cut of his jib) informed us that Marlon would be paying us a visit. The call comes up from downstairs saying Marlon has arrived, so I tell them to send him up, wait the amount of time you’d allow for Brando to come up the stairs and open the door to see him coming down the corridor in this great white linen suit and shades – boom, boom, boom. He’d put on a lot of weight. He comes in and we spend forty-five minutes or so having a very good time – relaxed and laughing, albeit in the awareness that there’s a little game going on here. Having been trained to recognise this situation quite quickly by my experiences with Ralph Richardson – and others – I was intrigued to discover the exact nature of the game that was being played.
At this point I get a call from an anxious-sounding Thomas, saying that Marlon hasn’t turned up. The way the Chateau Marmont is set out is that there’s the main entrance higher up and the garage entrance down below, which is the way everyone normally comes in, but Marlon has had himself dropped off up at the front, and has thereby bypassed Thomas’ welcoming committee. Unfortunately, the minute we relocate to Schühly’s suite – where he’s got a buffet set up and everything – Marlon suddenly becomes a very different creature. This isn’t fun any more, it’s business.
So I’m sitting next to this huge Mount Rushmore profile (Marlon’s head is massive – even bigger than Richard Nixon’s) and it seems to be carved out of marble with a brow that never ends. All the bullshit small-talk is kind of faltering, so I decide to stir things up a bit by saying, ‘I’ve got to ask you about A Countess from Hong Kong,’ which was a film Chaplin directed with Brando and Sophia Loren in. It’s not a good movie and Brando is clearly not having a good time in it – turns out he just hated Chaplin, and being one of those guys who is very definitely either on or off, he gave a very uncomfortable performance.
The more I absorbed the place, the more I began to think of Munchausen as a baroque film – and how better to express my fascination for Rome than to make the film at the Cinecittà studios – the home of Halian cinema?
As soon as that film is mentioned, Marlon starts being very disdainful and dismissive about Sophia Loren – going on about how she was a terrible actress who’d made her career on her back. He launches into this story about a time when they were waiting for a shot, and he said, ‘I bet you can’t touch your toes.’ He did it first, then as she bent down to do it, he grabbed her from behind and mimed as if he was fucking her doggie fashion. It’s like a game within a game, though, because he’s acting out this whole slightly grim story for us in turn, and I suddenly realise that the whole point of it was not about how it felt so good that he’d humiliated Sophia Loren in front of the whole crew, it was all about creating an opportunity for him to show us that Marlon Brando could still touch his toes.
Rome’s allure has been so strong for me over the years that it’s been suggested that I might be a closest catholic . . . and there could be something in that, if it were only possible to get rid of the priests and just have the architecture.
As he shifted his huge bulk to pull off this improbable physical coup, you could almost see Marlon thinking, ‘You think I’m a fat old fuck, but I can still touch my toes.’ At this point, I started to think we had some chance of persuading him to be in our film – what fascinated me was the realisation that Marlon Brando actually cared what we thought of him. After he left, Thomas told me that we’d all been invited to Jay Kantor’s birthday party later on, but that even though Brando had been alright with me, he’d been making life difficult for everyone else.
By this time I thought I’d sussed out how to deal with Marlon, so I got his number in the literal as well as the metaphorical sense and called him up. When the phone stopped ringing, it just clicked, so I didn’t know if it was an answering machine or Brando was there, but on balance it felt like the latter, so I left him a long message saying how I’d enjoyed meeting him very much but I didn’t know why he was giving our producer Thomas such a hard time – ‘He’s a huge fan, but you’re shitting all over him. Why would you do this when you don’t need to?’
Later that night, we went to Kantor’s party, and when Brando saw me across the room, his curious gaze just fixed on me in a ‘What’s this guy’s game?’ sort of way. I never got to find out how far my pro-active strategy would have taken us, becau
se I said to Thomas that the only way to get him was to call his bluff with the whole getting-a-squaw-to-come-out-and-pick-up-his-Academy-Award thing and tell him we’d pay him $2 million, but only if we could give the money directly to the American Indians. I think we would’ve got him that way, because his own moral scheme would have left him no option but to accept. Unfortunately, Thomas didn’t have the balls to do it, and insisted on a more conventional approach, which didn’t work.
It all worked out for the best in the end, though, because we got Oliver Reed instead, and he was an absolute joy. I loved working with Ollie. A lot of people were a bit nervous about him, but he only went crazy once. It was during the scene where he throws the Baron and all the others into a whirlpool, and I don’t quite know what was going wrong, but suddenly he just decided to go for the assistant director – he didn’t actually punch him, but the physicality was definitely there as a back-up to the verbal assault.
I was lucky enough to be on the other side of the maelstrom at the time (in both senses) so by the time I got there, it was just a question of trying to calm down this terrifyingly Vulcan-like figure. Almost the next minute it seemed like Ollie felt embarrassed by what had happened – maybe he’d just got himself in the place he needed to be in, and all it took was the trigger of someone doing the wrong thing to make him explode more or less in character.
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