Terry Gilliam: ‘He was an absolute magnet and his parties were joyous’

I was utterly knocked out by the way Tom Stoppard’s mind worked, his brilliance and by the fact he made Brazil out of a big lump of stone that I’d spent a year or two preparing. I gave that to him and out of that he carved a beautiful Michelangelo David.

How I came to him was this: I was walking down the street and suddenly it hit me, Tom Stoppard. Something just clicked and I thought, “God, with my visual skills and his verbal skills, we might make a decent movie.” I spent a year or two writing up what I was trying to say, the story I was trying to tell. And it was a million ideas; some of them worked, some didn’t, but it was 100 pages. When I met Tom, I said: “Here’s this pile, would you like to turn it into a decent script?” That’s basically it.

We made a deal for two or three script revisions. The very first revision he did was an extraordinary readjusting of everything and making sense of it all. The big example is where there were two completely disconnected characters, and now suddenly one was Buttle and one was Tuttle and we have confusion between them – and immediately things started being stitched together. He took everything to a greater height, he had a better approach to the paranoia and madness of bureaucracy. It was just exceptional.

Brazil. Photograph: Allstar Picture Library Ltd/Alamy

What was so brilliant about Tom’s mind was that he could stitch these things together so they all made perfect sense even though they had never been near each other before. He probably spent two or three weeks doing the first rewrite. I got it back and I thought, ‘This is extraordinary. This is unbelievably wonderful.” We talked through everything and then he took off to do another one and it came back even tighter.

The big loss, though, was the extraordinary opening scene he wrote. I really wanted to do it but we just couldn’t afford it. He had this idea of a beautiful beetle flying around in a tropical paradise, and suddenly we hear a terrible noise of machinery, and trees start collapsing as a monster machine drives into the forest, chewing up everything in its way. The chewed up trees are sent off to a paper factory and end up in paperwork in the ministry. All that’s left of the beetle is the scene with Ray Cooper with an annoying bug in the office – he kills it and the beetle falls into the machinery and boom, Tuttle becomes Buttle and Buttle is arrested and eventually murdered. On it goes.

We didn’t work on anything after Brazil, but we were still very good friends. That was one of the nice things: to have come through it without any serious arguments. It just worked. And I think he was very pleased with what I did with the film. So we both ended up happy campers.

We did keep bumping into each other, having coffee, talking. There’s this wonderful thing about two immigrants talking. One is a monosyllabic Minnesota farm boy and the other is this Czechoslovakian kid whose early childhood was in Singapore and India. And, as so often, a foreigner’s grasp of the English language is far greater than the average Englishman’s. That was Tom. For him, English was discovering this wonderful world that could be played with – and he played better with the language than anybody else, as far as I was concerned.

Stoppard during rehearsals for The Real Thing. Photograph: Ray Fisher/Getty Images

He would do these garden parties every year in the Chelsea Physic Garden. They were wonderful gatherings of people from so many different places and ways of doing things and thinking; he was an absolute magnet and those parties were just joyous. He was a cornerstone of British art in the 60s, 70s and 80s, all in one man.

I knew Sabrina [Guinness] long before I knew Tom, and them getting married was wonderful. Every time Tom and I met, we would often end up talking about Brazil. It was still beloved, and people talked about the film years after the event. I have come back from a bunch of film festivals and Brazil always comes up, and then to come back here and discover that Tom has died is just terrible, terrible.
As told to Andrew Pulver

John Boorman: ‘Even when destitute, Tom’s air suggested wealth and fame awaited him’

I would hesitate to sum Tom up. Loyal, generous, enigmatic, elusive, witty, his autodidact erudition worn lightly. I was sitting next to him on the first night of The Real Thing, which was a departure for him stylistically. I said: “It’s almost Shavian.” “Very close shavian,” he replied.

Stoppard and his then wife Miriam at the opening of the The Real Thing in New York, 1984. Photograph: Ron Galella/Getty Images

I made The Newcomers, a series of short documentary films about Anthony and Alison Smith: it was about their relationship to the city, their friends and fantasies. The Smiths lived in a romantic attic at the top of one of the crescents. We toiled up the five flights one morning, humping the camera equipment. As we were setting up, a pile of coats on the floor began to animate and Tom emerged – and managed to do so with that innate elegance he possessed.

That was 1964. He came and went in the series as the best friend, a fellow journalist and an aspiring writer. He featured as a Byronic presence. Even when he was destitute, he had an air that suggested wealth and fame awaited him, and that he would greet them with grace and panache.