This is a tale of unrealised dreams, the dreams of a fascinating and somewhat crazed individual - the director and former Monty Python cartoonist Terry Gilliam. Watch in disbelief as everything that could go wrong in a film production, does. Thanks to Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, two documentary makers and friends of Gilliam's who were afforded access to the production, something exceptional has arisen from this cursed project.
The project? - to make his own version of Cervantes' Don Quixote. Gilliam has a fraught relationship with Hollywood, and the dream was to make a film entirely with European money ($32 million of it) and on European soil. Initial forecasts are extremely promising, with the perfect casting of veteran French actor Jean Rochefort as Don Quixote - a sad, melancholic man. Johnny Depp agrees to play his sidekick Sancho Panza, although in Gilliam's wild interpretation Panza will in fact be an advertising executive from the future, deposited in 17th Century Spain.
Almost immediately into filming things start to go awry. Vanessa Paradis, the love interest, has not signed a contract and is nowhere to be seen. Jean Rochefort's health is beyond questionable, and he is flown back to Paris with an excruciating prostate infection. The sun-orange, rugged Spanish landscape is transformed into a marshland by a flash-flood of biblical proportions. To top it off, there is a Nato airbase nearby treating the bewildered crew to regular F16 fly-bys.
In the middle of all this chaos, surrounded by bemused producers and worried backers, is a grinning Gilliam, oblivious it seems to the impossibility of the film. However, let's hope he can one day buy the script back from the German insurers, because the scenes we are treated to that were somehow completed offer a tantalising taste of a film begging to be made - and watched.
So Terry Gilliam has been preparing for years to film Don Quixote, which is due to be the most expensive European film ever made. He has the perfect lead in Jean Rochefort, who has spent months learning English for the part, Johnny Depp is along to give star cred, he has had props and costumes lovingly crafted and the locations are perfect. What could possibly go wrong?
To call this film hilarious, as many professional critics have, is an act of schadenfreude. 'Lost In La Mancha' is heartbreaking. It includes a look at the side of fil... more >
To call this film hilarious, as many professional critics have, is an act of schadenfreude. 'Lost In La Mancha' is heartbreaking. It includes a look at the side of filmmaking we never see. The boring bureaucratic side that is necessary to get any film off the ground.
Subtly and (most likely) unintentionally the documentary is also a critique of the state of the British Film Industry. For Working Title, known for its works by Richard Curtis and The Coen Brothers among others, turned down 'The Man Who Killed Don Quixote' because the script was too rich. If you were a film producer and Terry Gilliam informed you of his latest product would you seriously turn down the director of 'Brazil'? < less
Les Enfants Du Paradis 
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Lost In La Mancha 
