The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

52 Richard Kelly
Kelly: It makes it more demanding for the viewer. There are plenty of villains
in history, but what you don’t realize is that behind that villain lays an
infrastructure, and it is the infrastructure that empowers that villain. And I
think Terry and his collaborators were being very ahead of their time and
looking less at a figurehead and more at an infrastructure that can be manipulated
to create a figurehead, like . . . I don’t want to mention any names here.
The great thing about the Monty Python experience is that it allowed him
to hone his skills and really develop his voice as a filmmaker. I think those
sketches and those short films and those pieces that they all put together gave
Terry the vision to make something like Brazil, to go and apply his skills as
a comedian and a satirist to a really bold and innovative narrative story that
lasts well over two hours. The ability to get an honest, worthy laugh out of
your audience is something that is incredibly difficult to do, and very few
people know how to do it properly and very few people have earned the right
to do it. I think that’s something Terry developed early in life, and thank God
that he did, because there are a lot of filmmakers out there who lack a sense
of humor and others who think they have a sense of humor, and it is really
forced, or it’s cheap, or it’s pandering to the lowest common denominator.
Thank God Terry has such a great sense of humor because that’s where his
voices come from, ultimately. Aside from his humanity or his sense of moral
anarchy or his visionary visual imagination, it is his sense of humor that
ultimately keeps him alive.
Brazil is also famous for Gilliam’s fight with producer Sidney Sheinberg,
when he delivered a movie seventeen minutes longer than was
contracted, so he took the film away from him and it was a yearlong
battle before they released it here. Were you aware of this when you
saw it?
Kelly: No, I wasn’t and that’s why, in subsequent years, I have become so
obsessed with the film, because having to observe those battles on my first
film and seeing and reading the history—there’s a great book called The
Battle of Brazil—and reading about the fight he put up gave me a lot of
confidence. I never had to go to the lengths with Donnie Darko that he had
to, but I had to fight like hell and I didn’t win every battle. They gave me a
director’s cut later, so that was an indication that if you know you’ve done a