The Criterion Collection

Terry Gilliam’s dystopian fantasy Brazil (1985) touches on themes that run throughout the writer-director’s art: the struggle of an individual against a crushing, inhuman system; the dominance of technology; and the power of dreams. Gilliam began thinking about the concept of Brazil while in production on Jabberwocky (1977). The animator and director, who had worked for years as part of the Monty Python group, initially drafted the story on his own but eventually turned to some talented friends and colleagues to help shape his ideas and make them more dramatically astute. This piece tells the story of the evolution of the Brazil script over nearly a decade, accompanied by design sketches, storyboards, photographs of the production, and more.

In Gilliam’s earliest, eighty-nine-page draft of the script, from the late ’70s, there are long, extraordinarily elaborate descriptions of the environment, and little dialogue (though in a few scenes there is dialogue that survives intact in the final film). Many of the salient plot points already exist, but the characters’ personalities differ markedly from those in the film. The protagonist, the office functionary Sam Lowry, is more of a milquetoast when it comes to making advances toward a beautiful woman, for example, yet keener to express anger (he easily lets his boss, Kurtzmann, have it with both barrels). And unlike the film’s Kurtzmann, who can’t help but reveal his ineffectualness and lack of authority to his underling, the draft’s head of records puts on a noisy show of power for his staff, and does not expose his weakness or seediness—to Sam or anyone. He is overbearing, belligerent, and quick to castigate Sam for being late twice in four years (rather than commiserating with him about faulty electricity, as in the film). Among ideas appearing this early in the script process that made it into the final version: the payment of interrogation charges by victims, the plastic smoothness of Dr. Jaffe’s skin, and Jill Layton’s work as a truck driver.

A striking component of the film present in some form from the first draft is a series of elaborate dreams featuring Sam as a winged warrior rescuing a beautiful woman from a floating cage. In the evocative storyboards that Gilliam sketched out during preproduction (most of them for scenes that would never end up being filmed), we see Sam haul the woman to a vast landscape of eyeballs, where he loses her—and must combat the Forces of Darkness and a nine-foot-tall samurai warrior in his quest to rescue her and free hordes of gray-shrouded prisoners. In his waking life, Sam eventually comes face-to-face with the woman of his dreams in the form of Jill, who is ultimately revealed to be a terrorist (or rather, an agent provocateur in the employ of the Ministry of Information).

Gilliam next enlisted his longtime friend Charles Alverson, with whom he had also written Jabberwocky, to work with him on revisions to his first draft and on subsequent drafts. In their fifty-page second draft, the plot does not substantially change, and many scenes are merely summarized, with somewhat cheeky text stringing them together. (The writers even manage to quote a negative review of Jabberwocky from the Fort Worth Star-Gazette.) The dream sequences are left intact, more backstory is given on the government and its bureaucracy, and some of the weirder elements are toned down or replaced, making the story a bit more grounded.

Descriptive copy also gives a more formidable sense of the characters’ environment and how it shapes their lives: “It is neither future nor past, and yet a bit of each. It is neither East nor West, but could be Belgrade or Scunthorpe on a drizzly day in February. Or Cicero, Illinois, seen through the bottom of a beer bottle.” Place becomes even more of a character: “Ignore Mrs. Terrain. She’s just a gimmick, a cheap gag. It’s the restaurant that is the thing here.” Pictured here is production designer Norman Garwood’s sketch of the restaurant, intruded upon (as are all environments in the film) by massive air ducts.

Gilliam and Alverson’s next draft together—the first in standard screenplay format—contains a surprising amount of the dialogue that appears, in whole or in slight variation, in the final film. It takes major leaps forward in advancing the storyline; many of the pieces are now falling into place, and some scenes that before had only slight significance are developed more fully. Some new elements first mentioned in this draft: full-color menus for the posh restaurant scene; the “baggee” prisoner encased in a straitjacket bouncing off the walls as in a pinball machine; the brick incarnation of Kurtzmann; and the 27B/6 form (pictured).

As Gilliam became involved in the production of Time Bandits in 1980, he felt his work with Alverson on Brazil was at a standstill. He conferred with actor-writer Charles McKeown, who had appeared in Time Bandits (and who would go on to play Sam’s fellow expediter Harvey Lime in Brazil, as pictured here). McKeown contributed a collection of ideas in a thirty-seven-page scene breakdown titled “Brazil and a Bit,” some of which Gilliam incorporated into his next draft of the script. In McKeown’s take, the comedy is broader and the existence of terrorists—and Sam’s embrace of them—is less ambiguous. Insurgents undergo plastic surgery to hide their identities, resulting in their all resembling Humphrey Bogart or Marilyn Monroe. McKeown’s breakdown also features a more Pythonesque ending (which never made it into any version of the script itself): as Sam is brought to a torture room, the film stops and a narrator admits that, if this film were realistic, it would have a harrowing ending. “Nevertheless, the maker of the film knows that we’d all prefer a happy ending, and so in deference to the wishes of the audience, here it is.” The film then restarts and proceeds to depict Sam’s escape in a gun battle, concluding with his happily-ever-after reunion with Jill.

In late 1982, Gilliam took the Brazil script to Tom Stoppard, a playwright known for his linguistic alchemy; their collaboration changed the direction of the project to something fairly close to that of the final film. Stoppard helped Gilliam focus on the original treatment’s strengths, and brought a more consistent structure to disparate scenes, piecing them together to make the story more of a whole. He also created some characters and priceless dialogue, and turned some scenes that were already darkly comic even darker.

Stoppard introduced scenes in which the power of computers and the manipulation of information became important plot mechanisms; this corresponded with his interest in investigating how the system of the ministry operated and how it subverted human relationships. It helped demonstrate Sam’s mastery of the tools within his environment, and how he could use those very tools to subvert the system (such as when he uses computers to uncover Jill’s identity and, later, save her from capture). But it also made Sam’s development as a character colder, and seemed to mimic other films of the period in which the computer had been discovered as a plot device.

Stoppard’s biggest contribution structurally was the Tuttle/Buttle link, in which a beetle falling into a machine printing arrest warrants leads to the mistaken arrest of Archibald Buttle. In no previous draft was the innocent arrest victim at the beginning of the story in any way linked to the “obsessive heating engineer” Harry Tuttle. This neat narrative tweak humorously demonstrated the efficiency (or lack thereof) of the Ministry of Information and increased the sense of danger regarding Tuttle (who was he, that the government wanted him?) and his fate (if the police or Central Services didn’t get him at the beginning, when would they?). Gilliam and Stoppard worked through several drafts, incorporating changes like the cutting of Stoppard’s nine-page scene about computer modeling in favor of one in which Sam and Jill both go up to Helpmann’s office to “delete” her (later dropped for being dramatically implausible).

Gilliam felt some of Stoppard’s revisions took the story too far from his original intentions, so he collaborated with McKeown again over several months to rework it. While the project’s structure did not change, some scenes were fleshed out and some characterizations slightly reoriented. For instance, Sam’s mother, Mrs. Ida Lowry (shown here in a sketch by costume designer James Acheson), became a more commanding figure over him, a driving force in his professional life. (One could more clearly see how Sam’s passive, escapist personality would have developed growing up in a household run by such a woman.) Other memorable elements that made their first appearance here include Tuttle’s departures via rope; the messy deaths of Central Services operatives Spoor and Dowser; Sam’s escape from the funeral chapel through a coffin; and the paper blizzard in the corridors of Expediting. Also, Sam’s computer scenes were reduced to the bare essentials.

Once filming of Brazil started in November 1983, it was determined that the fantasy sequences as originally planned would be too time-consuming and costly to produce and would make the finished film too long, so they were cut back and restructured. Test footage had been shot of the landscape of eyeballs, but the sequence was scrapped, as were others featuring a transparent cube containing the sky, a mammoth Storeroom of Knowledge, a mile-long stone ship, and a “flapping black thing.”

Although 20th Century Fox had released a two-hour-twenty-two-minute version of Brazil in Europe in February 1985, Gilliam and producer Arnon Milchan met with resistance from Universal Pictures in the U.S., which had put up more than half of the film’s budget in exchange for North American distribution rights. One sticking point for the studio: running time. The contract had specified a film no longer than 2:05; the studio was willing to accept a 2:10 version, so editor Julian Doyle and the director managed to trim eleven minutes. Most cuts were trivial—e.g., Sam plugs one cable into his phone instead of two, dialogue is also trimmed from several sections. There were deeper cuts too, including to the restaurant scene’s opening; Sam and Jill’s bedroom idyll before his arrest; Sam’s processing as a detainee; and the “Father Christmas” scene between Sam and Helpmann.

Gilliam also made two changes suggested by Universal head Sidney Sheinberg: the addition of the “Aquarela do Brasil” theme music to the opening, to reinforce the source of the title, and the superimposition of clouds over the torture room at the end, to alleviate the film’s bleak closing image, if only a little. Above are the final shots of the international (left) and U.S. versions.

The biggest narrative change in the U.S. theatrical version, however, involved Sam’s duel with the samurai (shown here in a preproduction costume design sketch). In the international version, Sam wages a single lengthy battle before killing the samurai, removing the warrior’s mask and finding himself within, only to be awakened by the singing telegram girl. The story then continues through Sam’s mother’s party and Sam’s acceptance there of Helpmann’s offer of a job at Information Retrieval. The samurai later makes a second appearance in the lingerie area of the department store, where Sam assumes a battle stance and is knocked out by security forces. In the U.S. version, the fight is stopped midway through when Sam is awakened by the telegram girl. He leaves for the party, where he accepts the promotion. Later, he sees the samurai at the department store, where in his fantasy he kills his opponent but in reality is knocked unconscious.

By incorporating the fight (and Sam’s victory) in this fashion instead of the way the original does, the U.S. version depicts Sam as failing to succeed until he has accepted the post at Information Retrieval—becoming part of that system—which both enables him to track down Jill and exposes him to mortal peril. This makes more dramatic sense than Sam defeating the samurai before he has accepted the promotion. But the alternative carries an intriguing message: that while Sam may defeat the samurai—the system—it cannot be destroyed. It is unconquerable.

David Morgan, author of Monty Python Speaks and Knowing the Score, coproduced the Criterion Collection’s special edition releases of Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. He is a senior producer at CBSNews.com.

Film stills by David Appleby, courtesy of Universal Studios Home Entertainment LLC. © Embassy International Pictures N.V. MCMLXXXV. Other images courtesy of Terry Gilliam’s personal archive and the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University.