Two film-makers who worked with the late playwright recall a man of extraordinary wit, endless invention and innate elegance
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.
