- A Lost Scene
As posted at Trond Frittz's Brazil
"One of the dream sequences that were cut out of Brazil involved Sam pushing his way through
some darkness, finding an opening, pushing out and discovering that he is in fact on a face
of a great cliff, like a cliff face of filing cabinet drawers.
"It really was an image that came from looking at skyscrapers in New York, which all have the
same identical pattern. They seem to be these huge inhuman boxes for storing people in. So I
just wanted to have Sam on the face of this huge cliff with thousands, millions of filing
cabinets, and they all were human size. Up and down were going men in the kind of platforms
that window washers use, and they were putting people in and out of these filing cabinets, they
were filing people. People were kept in different areas; an artist would be filed away there,
a philosopher would be filed away there. It was this whole idea that everything could be put
into boxes and contained.
"Sam is looking for Jill, and one way to find her is to be taken down by the guys that come down
on the platform. He gets on the platform and they take him down to the correct area that she
would be filed under and then insert him into one of those filing cabinets. The feeling of
those filing cabinets was supposed to be very much like in a morgue where bodies are stored.
So you open them up and you see those stiff dead bodies in there. Sam has to get in to
something and effectively allow himself to die to find the girl of his dreams. He's filed
away and goes to darkness."
Terry Gilliam
iWave no. 1 - 1996
It seems to be bisected by a dividing wall, from which a thin sliver of light is escaping. Pushing
on the wall in the area of the slit, SAM is able to move a section. More light shaftes into the tiny
space from around the edges of what appears to be a small hatch. SAM scrunches down and really puts
his shoulder to the hatch. with a metallic rasp it gives way and SAM crashes through. CUT to other
side of opening as SAM topples through. He catches himself in the nick of time as the camera zooms
back revealing his close call with disaster. He is high on a vast wall of what looks like filing
cabinets. The hatch he came through was the front of one of the millions of files-drawers
composing this wall. As he scrambles back into the opening we can see that the wall drops away for
hundreds of feet, disappear into a steaming mist. Other walls of files enclose this vast space. From
where SAM is it looks like the view from the 50th storey of the Time Life building in NYC. These
millions of files are being tended by MEN arising themselves up and down, as well as sideways, on
modern skyscraper window-cleaners' platforms. The attendants are seen putting PEOPLE in different
period costumes into drawers. SAM's attention is distracted by a sound overhead. Looking up he sees
a window washer platform being lowered in his direction.
