Terry Gilliam’s ‘Brazil’ made a huge impression on me when I first saw it back when I was still in School, and it has remained one of my favourite films, but I hadn’t watched it in a while. As the film is set at Christmas time, what better time to revisit it?

I approached it a little nervous that my memory of it would outshine the film itself, and that I woud come away disappointed, but my fears were soon put to rest. OK, it’s not a perfect film, but it’s damn good and if you haven’t seen it check it out imediately!!

First released in 1985, it’s one of those films that you wish wasn’t just as relevant today - but it is. Gilliam called it “The Nineteen Eighty-Four for 1984″ and his working title for the film was 1984½. The film is certainly influenced by Orwell, and also comes across fairly Kafka-esque.

The film was written by Terry Gilliam, Charles McKeown (who appears in the film as Harvey Lime) and Tom Stoppard, and it stars Jonathon Pryce as Sam Lowry, the unfortunate bureaucrat who becomes elbroiled in a bizarre series of events as he struggles to help rectify an administrative error for his boss, while he dreams of heroicly escaping the drudgery and entanglements of modern society and flying free with the woman of his dreams.

The film also features Robert De Niro, in a slightly bizarre bit of casting, as Harry Tuttle the rogue engineer branded a terrorist by the authorities. Slightly bizarre in that the film is very British in most aspects, so it’s curious that Harry Tuttle is an American - but perhaps De Niro was cast in order to dilute the Britishness of the film, to widen it’s anti-bureaucracy message.

The film starts with a typographical error which leads to a wrongful arrest which starts a chain reaction of incorrect paperwork which Sam Lowry attempts to rectify to keep his Boss (played excellently by Ian Holm) out of trouble. As Sam struggles to rectify the mistakes he becomes obsessed with a woman involved and gets sucked into a bureaucratic mess which results in his slowly but surely ending up on the wrong side of the authorities.

As well as it’s anti-bureaucracy theme the film also features a terrorist theme which has only become more relevant since it was originally released, and made it interesting to watch again. For example, is De Niro a terrorist in the way the administration portray terrorists? Certainly he operates outside the law, and perpetrates some rather unsavoury acts, but his primary objective is to help people. He continues servicing peoples electrics, he just prefers to do so without the reams of paperwork and delays that the administration would force upon him.

But as for real honest-to-god terrorist acts such as killing or bombing? If you haven’t seen the film, I don’t want to spoil anything for you but I think the administration may be blackening Tuttle’s name for it’s own ends.

Kim Greist’s character Jill Layton asks Sam Lowry whether, in his job at ‘Information Retrieval’ he has ever actually seen a real terrorist, in such a way that seems to imply that the frequent terrorist bombings may not be all they seem to be - and at the start of the film we see Peter Vaughan, as the bureaucrat Mr Helpman, being asked what is behind the current spate of bombings, he replies:

Bad sportsmanship. A ruthless minority of people seem to have forgotten good old-fashioned virtues. They just can’t stand seeing the other fellow win. If these people would just play the game…

In fact, many of the themes around terrorism in the film reminded me of the more recent documentary ‘The Power of Nightmares’ which both myself and Bif have mentioned before - Bif even found the three part documentary on YouTube.

When i was having a quick look around to see what others made of the terrorist themes I found a somewhat similar view from a techie viewpoint on Slashdot.

There are so many interesting aspects to Brazil that I would be here all day if I was to try to highlight them all. Better that you go and watch it really… when asked about the complexity of the film Gilliam replied:

I find that most films are a little bit like fast food. I mean you have them and it’s fine and it’s over and done with and that’s the end of it. And I like the idea of going back and rediscovering, or discovering new things all the time. It’s partly this thing of trying to create a world, certainly a world within some logic, and you’ve gotta have all the things in there.

Interestingly, it seems Gilliam had his own battle with bureaucracy in order to get the film released with it’s rather black ending - the details of his problems are rather entertaining in their own right, and Gilliam professes that the only thing that kept him sane was that you had to laugh at the insanity of it and the way it mirorred the themes of the film.

It seems that the fight between Gilliam and Universal became rather personal when it became obvious that it was Sid Sheinberg trying to show Gilliam just who was in control. Gilliam, very cleverly realising he couldn’t compete with the studio in a lengthy and expensive legal battle, brought the fight right to Sheinberg, and in a way Giliam became a real life Harry Tuttle!

It seems Gilliam appeared on TV - with De Niro, which was very unusual for De Niro to get involved like that - the interviewer asked “I hear your having trouble with the studio, is this correct?” Gilliam responded with “No, I’m having trouble with Sid Sheinberg, here is an 8×10 photo of him,” and showed the photograph on television.

According to IMDB,

During his trouble with a studio, Terry Gilliam asked daily variety for a full page ad, which cost around $1,500 at the time. He had it bordered like a funeral invitation and it said: “Dear Sid Sheinberg, when are you going to release my film? Signed: Terry Gilliam.”

These kinds of tactics were something that Sheinberg and the studio didn’t know how to deal with - Gilliam went on to get his film seen as much as possible without the studio’s permission so that he would have public opinion of the film on his side in the battle, but you should read this great interview with Gilliam for more details.

This FAQ I found also has some interesting facts, including where the odd title for the film came from:

Gilliam explains where the inspiration stemmed from, while he was in Port Talbot, Wales:
“Port Talbot is a steel town, where everything is covered with gray iron ore dust. Even the beach is completely littered with dust, its just black. The sun was setting, and it was quite beautiful. The contrast was extraordinary, I had this image of a guy sitting there on this dingy beach with a portable radio, tuning in these strange Latin escapist songs like ‘Brazil.’ The music transported him somehow and made his world less gray.”

And remember: “Suspicion Breeds Confidence”