The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

Brazil
49
worlds together, and really getting the meaning of the film. I believe the version
that I saw was the American version that was shown to the Los Angeles
film critics in 1985 and then was subsequently released mostly because of
their enthusiasm for the film.
I’ve since seen Terry’s longer assembled cut that appeared on the Criterion
Collection three-disc edition, and I’ve also seen the wretched Sid Sheinberg
love-conquers-all version, which is truly hilarious. I love Gilliam for the fact
that he included that on a separate disc on his three-disc Criterion set.
How did you first hear about the film?
Kelly: I grew up as a huge fan of Time Bandits. Time Bandits had always
affected me as a kid, and I had memories of that from when I was very
small, and it frightened me. I remembered when the dwarves came
into the little kid’s bedroom and started pushing his bedroom wall and
it opened up to this abyssal tunnel, and the image of them falling from
this light grid in the sky captured my imagination as a really young child.
Those images stayed with me—they burned themselves into the back of
my head. I started reading about Terry’s other films, having seen The Fisher
King prior to that. I was aware of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen but
I had never seen Brazil. I grew up in Midlothian, Virginia, where you’d be
lucky to find Brazil in a Blockbuster Video. It wasn’t a film that was jumping
off the shelves and available to someone in a town like Midlothian,
Virginia. When I arrived in film school, I suddenly found myself with this
gigantic library of LaserDiscs, and Brazil was one of the first ones I checked
out at the library.
Most people, when they say “the film that changed my life,” they mean
the film that made them want to be a director, propelled them to film
school. But you saw the film when you were already in film school. How
did it change your life?
Kelly: In my freshman year of college, I was in the school of fine arts and
hadn’t yet been accepted into the film program. I had gotten an art scholarship
for a lot of illustrations and drawings and paintings that I had done
in junior high and high school. I immediately started dropping art classes
and started taking the general film courses my freshman year and got guest