Cynical Cinema

In 2002, there was a wonderful documentary called Lost In La Mancha, that chronicled Terry Gilliam’s disastrous attempt to make the movie he’s always wanted to make, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.  It’s a fascinting and poignant documentary about a movie shoot where everything that can go wrong does go wrong.  There are many disasters in Lost In La Mancha.  The star of the film, the fantastic French actor Jean Rochefort, suffers a serious back injury and can’t continue.  There are unsigned contracts, disputes, and the Spanish Air Force ruins a whole day of shooting by performing manouevers overhead.  Then the entire set, and all the equipment, gets washed away in a flash flood.

Of course, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote never got made.  The project was shut down after five days of production and shelved in 2001.  Gilliam has re-acquired the rights to the script, however, and he is going to make another run at it.  He still has his Big Star on board, Johnny Depp, and that is apparently the biggest reason the film is going ahead.  Depp, you see, was just not big enough a star in 2001 to convince the financiers to stay on board when all hell broke loose.  Although in fact it was his other commitments, and the fact that he couldn’t stay on with the film behind schedule, that led to the film losing it’s backing in the end.  But now, since Pirates of the Caribbean, the opportunity to make a film starring Depp is too lucrative an idea to pass up.  So The Man Who Killed Don Quixote will move forward.

Gilliam has re-acquired the script rights from the insurers who took control after the failed attempt at making the film.  The filming of a Don Quixote-themed movie has come to be sort of a cinema-world equivalent of staging a production of Macbeth, in that it seems to carry with it a substantial amount of bad luck.  As we see toward the end of Lost In La Mancha, Gilliam has become basically a Quixote figure himself.

The plot of Don Quixote, one of my favourite books of all time, basically concerns an old man who imagines himself to be something he isn’t - that is, a knight-errant.  One of those fictional characters that rides around on a horse, defeating evil, rescuing damsels, and fighting giants and dragons.  But he lives about 100 years too late.  The days of the knight-errant are long past, but that does not stop him.  He carries out his delusions to the fullest, and in the most famous scene in the book, he attacks a series of windmills, imagining them to be some kind of evil giants.

Since the novel was written, “tilting at windmills” has come to mean something a little different than just plain old-fashioned hilarious lunacy.  The phrase is now used to describe people who wholeheartedly pursue impossible dreams, and in this way Gilliam certainly fits the bill.  The Monty Python alum has created some of the most bizarre but fantastic films of the last twenty years, including Twelve Monkeys and Brazil. 

But he has also participated in some of the least successful movie projects of all time.  Not just the one chronicled in Lost In La Mancha, but also the uber-bomb The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which was a terrific film that no one wanted to see.  It cost 45 million dollars and made virtually no money.  But it really was great.  People should see it.  In fact, go out and rent Baron Munchausen right now.  And rent Lost In La Mancha too.  And go read Don Quixote.  Then you will be as excited for The Man Who Killed Don Quixote as I am.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 4:33 am and is filed under Administrative stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.