If you watched the documentary Lost in La Mancha, you’re familiar with Terry Gilliam’s heartbreaking, ball-busting attempt to make a movie version of “Don Quixote”. If you didn’t, you’re probably most familiar with Quixote as a cartoon wolf with a sidekick named Sancho Panda. Come on, no one has actually read that book. I tried, but the book is daunting and I’m much too busy. Gone are the days when I can spend a fortnight on a single, slow paced, foreign language novel (though what I did read was quite good).
The really miserable thing about Gilliam’s failed attempt to adapt the classic Miguel Cervantes’ novel is that it looked like Gilliam’s movie might have been really good. Starring Johnny Depp as a modern day ad executive whipped back in time and ending up as sidekick to Don Quixote as he attacks fantastical windmills, the movie was doomed from the get go. Things only got worse when they actually started filming, God decided to get revenge for all those jabs Monty Python has taken at him. Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was a total failure and production shut down permanently as investors bailed and they ran out of money, eventually spawning the tragic and hilarious documentary Lost in La Mancha detailing the production’s meltdown.
Well, it’s not quite dead. According to the British magazine Time Out Gilliam is trying to revive the project with producer Jeremy Thomas. Gilliam, who has two completed films hitting theaters this year is feeling lucky and thinks its time to give Quixote another go. They’ve even got a backer in Peter Watson, who has this to say about Terry: “Having collaborated on 'Tideland' it was such a good experience that we want to be in the Terry Gilliam business. We are now attempting mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the corpse of Don Quixote.” From the sounds of it, Watson has worked with a very different Gilliam.
