Brazil is the film that Michael Radford;s 1984 should have been. It has all the atmosphere and preoccupations of Orwell's book, plus references to heavy metal comics, Eisenstein and Mad magazine. Gilliam said, when asked where the story takes place, 'Somewhere on the Los Angeles/Belfast border'.
Gilliam began his career as a cartoonist, but made his reputation as the inventor of the cutout animation on Monty Python's Flying Circus. He is a skilled visualist. (Batman was shot by Roger Pratt, who photographed Brazil for Gilliam; it looks almost identical, only not as good.) Gilliam is also a skilled director of actors. how can this be, in one who comes not from the theatre but from the drawing board? Gilliam's answer: You just cast it right and then all the actors do the work.
Gilliam's contract with the Large & Nameless Studio said that the film was to be a maximum of 2 hours and 5 minutes long. When Gilliam submitted a cut that ran to 2 hours and 11 minutes, the sensitive executives announced that they were going to re-edit the film, take out the nasty and the naughty bits, and release it at a length of 90 minutes. The same fate had befallen Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, George Cukor's 1954 version of A Star is Born, Jules Dassin's The Naked City, John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage, Don Siegel's Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and most of Sam Peckinpah's films.
Brazil didn't get a wide release in the United States, but Gilliam did manage to prevent the re-cutting of his film. By going to war with the studio executives in the pages of Variety, Gilliam made the executives look stupid and won a Los Angeles critics' award for himself and his film.