Bertolucci, then thirty-one, recalls his first meeting with Brando at the Hotel Raphal in Paris in the spring of 1971. "He just sat and looked at me for fifteen minutes without speaking." The director felt shy and in awe of Brando; he had first seen him in the movies as Zapata when he was a kid. "And then Marlon began talking in sweet Tahitian French " Bertolucci would say he learned to speak English from Marlon Brando, who mumbles a lot, "which is why nobody understands me."

The following day, at Brando's request, Bertolucci screened his latest film, The Conformist, starring Dominique Sanda and Jean-Paul Trintignant (whom he had originally wanted for Tango). Set in 1930s Fascist Italy, the story is about an upper-class follower of Mussolini; the production had been highly praised for its sensuous texture and velvety operatic style. After it was over, Brando nodded in approval. He added that a friend whose judgment he really respected had insisted he see the film. Bertolucci learned that the friend was an elegant Chinese lady named Anita Kong, one of Brando's longtime lovers. She had seen it seven times.

Then Brando asked, "What's your idea for me?" and Bertolucci described the part he envisioned for him, that of Paul, an American expatriate living in Paris, middle-aged, despairing, whose French wife, Rose, has just inexplicably committed suicide in the fleabag hotel she owns. By chance Paul runs into a free-spirited young woman, Jeanne, in the empty apartment they're both thinking of renting. He abruptly seduces her, rents the apartment, and what follows is a doomed "sex-only" affair that lasts for three days. Together they experience sex constantly—taboo sex, sordid, dirty, obscene, violent sex—no questions asked. Sex is all that matters.

Brando said the idea was intriguing. Bertolucci told him what he really wanted him to agree to was to improvise on the material. "All my actors are co-authors of my movies," the director said. Brando said he still wanted to see a script.

By the summer of 1971 Bertolucci had completed a screenplay of Tango with Franco Arcalli in Rome, and he sent it to Brando. Then he flew out to Los Angeles to meet with him. For the next three weeks he spent most of his time at the actor's home at the top of Mulholland Drive, having long discussions on a variety of subjects: love, sex, girls, and their experiences with Freudian analysis.

At first Brando seemed moody shifting back and forth from emotional openness to cool detachment. By the end of the second week Bertolucci had broken down some of his defenses when he confided how he'd come up with the story of Tango: that it had been a secret fantasy of his to make love to an unknown woman over and over again in an isolated room and never need to know anything about her. He said he'd been influenced by Louis Ferdinand Celine, the half-crazed Parisian who believed that human beings are categorized as either voyeurs or exhibitionists. He'd also been influenced by Georges Bataille, who wrote highly charged, perverse short stories about lovers so obsessed with each other's bodies they wanted to "breathe in their farts and breathe in their comes....This is what I want Tango to suggest," he said.

The director said he wanted Brando to superimpose himself on the character of Paul, to confront the role completely from inside himself, inside his own guts.

"I had at my disposal a great actor, with all the technical experience any director would require. But I also had a mysterious man waiting to be discovered in all the richness of his personal material."