The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

50 Richard Kelly
access passes to the film library, so I knew I was trying to get into the film
school, but I wasn’t there yet. I was more in that transitional period, where I
was trying to gain confidence and put together my vision and my voice as an
artist and a filmmaker. Having discovered Terry’s work and seeing that he
followed a similar course, beginning in the visual arts as a cartoonist working
with Monty Python, I felt a kinship to him and felt like he was someone I
wanted to emulate in my career. The visual design in Brazil is so astonishing,
my head almost exploded.
You have to give Terry, Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown credit for
explaining what was wrong with the world in very elegant strokes that are
alien to us because the world is not our own, but it is incredibly familiar
because it is absolutely our own.
Gilliam has said Brazil was a documentary. He said he made none of
it up.
Kelly: It is a documentary film with the brushstrokes of a profoundly mad
genius who can create a fantasy world, but he created a fantasy world literally
within—he re-created our world in a different visual language. I had
never seen that done in any other film. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is maybe the
closest approximation, but I think that Brazil certainly said many things that
Metropolis couldn’t, maybe because Lang didn’t have the benefit of sound.
Gilliam has an artist’s eye. He is someone who sees every frame as an oil
painting. He meticulously assembles every frame with so much detail as to
make that image worth watching dozens and dozens of times. You end up
with a film that is timeless. It becomes this essential viewing experience that
seems to ultimately get better with age because as one matures, the meaning
of the film matures. That meticulous attention to detail is something that
only the greatest directors are capable of.
I remember images of a bunch of nuns buying rifles. I remember a wealthy
dowager with a little dog with masking tape over its ass so it wouldn’t defecate
on the sidewalk. I remember Mrs. Ida Lowry (Katherine Helmond)
and her friends putting acid on their faces in plastic surgery. And the sight
gags you literally need to watch three or four times to catch all the jokes
hidden in every frame. They’re not just crass, empty, cheap laughs; there’s
profound irony invested in every frame, just an extraordinary amount of