Terry Gilliam

A clerical error kills the wrong man and a bureaucrat spends Brazil trying to correct the paperwork, in a country where ducts run through every room and torture is billed to the victim's family. Retro-futurist clutter fills the frame: too much set, wide lenses, everything tilted. The dreamers get crushed by procedure with reliable consistency. Twelve Monkeys sends a prisoner back through time to a plague he cannot prevent and lets him be wrong about what he is remembering.

Signature

• Wide-angle distortion and frames crowded to the edges.
• Retro-futurist production design assembled from junk.
• Bureaucracy as the true antagonist.
• Fantasists whose imagination does not save them.