Perdido em La Mancha

J.K. Rowling said that Director Terry Gilliam's `Time Bandits' was the inspiration for the Harry Potter series. Then who is better to fail than such a visionary-he already did with ` Adventures of Baron Munchausen.' But wait, he fails again with his incomplete `The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.'

In grand dramatic style, the mighty one falls, and in the process instructs us all about the difficulties of working outside Hollywood with shaky European financing and following a dream against all odds-and along the way endearing himself to us all.

Movies on movies abound by the hundreds, from the elegant `Day for Night' to the seedy `Boogie Nights.' None has shown, however, a filmmaker's pain and frustration the way this documentary, `Lost in La Mancha,' does. Directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, at Gilliam's request, document his failed attempt to screen the Quixote story. They create a cautionary tale about moviemaking, especially vain attempts at adapting great literature. In this case, Orson Welles spent 20 years grubbing for funding for `Quixote' and died without the picture; in 1972 Arthur Hiller directed Peter O'Toole in a tepid `Man of La Mancha.'

Gilliam's previous successes (`The Fisher King,' `12 Monkeys') were good enough for him to round up $30 million for this film (half of what was really needed), yet the ghost of `Munchausen' seems to visit every scene: If Gilliam is not talking about its flaws, everyone else seems to be referencing it as the disasters pile up in pre-production and mount during the first week of production.

Of Biblical proportions are the extraordinary desert rains and the NATO jets over the Spanish desert. Of human dimension are Jean Rochefort (Quixote) and his ailing 70-year old prostate. To spice it all further is the difficulty of getting Vanessa Paradis to the set. In the end, Rochefort's illness damns the project, but Gilliam, we are told in the end, will try to buy back the script from the insurance company!

No one who loves film should miss this inside story of a gifted director pursuing a losing cause just as his fictional subject fought windmills 400 years ago (or Welles a quarter a century ago). Although Cervantes regularly ridiculed Quixote, readers became fonder of him with each insult. The more idealistic Gilliam becomes in the face of failure, the more the audience will love the creative 61-year-old director, who believes enough in his vision to continue shooting `images' after everyone else has forsaken the project: `The movie already exists in here [his head]. I have visualized it so many times . . . .' As `Black Hawk Down' should make recruits think more carefully about the glory of war, aspiring filmmakers should see `Lost in La Mancha' before devoting a life to the windmills of Hollywood. However, the romance of the most influential art form in all of civilization will convert the Orson Welleses and Terry Gilliams regardless of the pain.

Even T.S. Eliot knew there was life in the images: `But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen . . ..'

I came to this after watching the finally finished Gilliam's Quijote. It probably works better to watch this one, the "sketch", the "failed attempt", after you saw the finished product.

That film, the finished one, is imperfect and chaotic. And that's good. It it as a film, what it was as a work in progress. It reveals Gilliam, and has a special place in his carrer. It's the final product of an obsession, and it follows the path of its very theme.

This one is nice, because we see in it some of the anchors that were kept in the later finished film, and that would probably have worked better in the original, at least from a cinematic point of view. It is clear that Gilliam had in mind the replacement of the "book layers" of the original Quijote by the layers of films in films. In other words, he wanted a world where several layers of paralel realities would affect each other, contaminate them, blur them. This is something he has been doing all his life as a filmmaker, and as such it is apt that he adapts Quijote.

In the book, at least in my reading, Sancho is the pivot, he is the articulation of all the layers, the one that keeps all the madness tolerable, and the one who places us, the "viewers" in the narrative. So having Johnny Depp play that role would have been magnificient. We can only imagine how it would have been, watching the few conversations between Gilliam and Depp in this documentary, watching the short bits of footage that were recorded (the fish fight is amazing) and trying to imagine Depp whenever we see Driver.

I got the impression that Depp was the one who suggested what is in fact the beginning of the new film. At least the breaking of the 4th wall in the matter of "la nuit américaine". That shows he understands the layers. He is a very fine actor.

Take this little film as a piece of a grander puzzle in the mind of an interesting guy. A Quijote film will probably always be better as a sum of bits and pieces, chaos and unreachable goals... This fits. I had a little too much of burocracy (whose fault, who's gonna pay, who should have done what...) and too little of Gilliam's mind. But these documentaries almost always fall on that trap.

"The Man Who Killed Quijote" was the first film in 2018 that completes a seamingly "lost project". We'll likely get Welles' The Other Side of the Wind later this year.. Year for completions, and probably for disappointments. Welles also had an ongoing Quijote project for half his life. Ah, those windmills...

I thought I had it bad on the set of my little student film in college.

Whew!

Watching this documentary was very difficult and very interesting at the same time. I enjoyed it, despite the tragedy that played out on the screen.

What makes the film so heartbreaking is that you know that the film will inevitably fail. So the entire movie-watching experience is steeped in dramatic irony. We, the viewers, know the outcome of this ill-fated film project known as "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote." But the filmmakers themselves, at the time of the filming, obviously do not know that all their actions are essentially in vain.

A great film, and a powerful warning to those who thinking making movies is easy.

Thanks to DVD, we've all become accustomed to seeing `inside' documentaries about the making of some of our favorite films. But what of those films that – for whatever reason – never end up seeing the light of day? Are there any lessons to be learned from examining the making (or near making) of those works? This is the questioned posed by `Lost in La Mancha,' a behind-the-scenes chronicle of director Terry Gilliam's attempt to fulfill his decade-long dream of bringing Cervantes' `Don Quixote' to the big screen, a project that ended up in heartbreaking, catastrophic failure for both the filmmaker and the gifted crew with which he was working.

Directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe did not, of course, set out to record such a debacle. Like all the people involved in the making of `The Man Who Killed Don Quixote' – a film intended to star Jean Rochefort and Johnny Depp - the documentary filmmakers assumed that Gilliam and his crew would end up with an impressive finished product and that their own work would serve as little more than supplemental material on a future DVD release of the film, certainly not a theatrical release in its own right. What none of them foresaw was the series of almost Biblical disasters that would ultimately doom the film to a state of perpetual nonexistence. Flash floods, health problems, nervous investors and bottom line insurance agents all eventually conspired to prevent Gilliam's dream from becoming a reality. Thus, what became a bust for Terry Gilliam turned into a boon for Fulton and Pepe.

With the benefit of hindsight, the filmmakers ensure that the parallels between Don Quixote and Gilliam himself are never far from the viewer's mind. Gilliam, a maverick director whose movies have always tested the boundaries of the film medium, is clearly an artist and a visionary obsessed with impossible dreams of his own, but dreams that inspire those around him to strive for a greatness not always nurtured by the mundane realities of the everyday world. The fact that, in this particular case, those realities intervened to bring his vision crashing back to earth only completes the connection to the Quixote figure. Gilliam spends most of his time in this film tilting at his own windmills, only to find that the vagaries of fate are more terrifying than any giants Quixote might have imagined. The documentary also notes that Gilliam is not the only major director to have been stymied in his attempt to adapt this material; the great Orson Welles failed to complete his version of `Don Quixote' as well. The irony of these two innovative cinema giants both failing with THIS particular material pervades the film with an eerie sense of doom and foreboding.

`Lost in La Mancha' is an instructive film on a technical level, but also immensely sad on an emotional one. Because we know from the beginning that this venture is doomed to failure, even the moments of hope and optimism early on in the film carry with them an air of fatalistic melancholy. This pre-knowledge also turns the many admittedly humorous moments into genuine black comedy.

It is always painful to see genius and creativity choked off at the root, especially since the few glimpses we get of actual completed footage hint at what a fine production this `Don Quixote' might have been. As to Gilliam, one can only hope that he will continue to pursue his impossible dream despite all the roadblocks reality has set in his way. Don Quixote would have wanted it that way.

"Lost in LaMancha" is a fascinatingly brilliant documentary about the aborted film project "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote" and the problems faced by its writer/director Terry Gilliam. The two documentarians who followed Gilliam's "Twelve Monkeys" to produce "The Hamster Factor And Other Tales Of Twelve Monkeys" have done the same again here only this time there is no film to complement the documentary.

Gilliam is no stranger to controversy. Books, made for dvd documentaries and now this feature have been produced about his troubles in the tv and film industry. He has been labeled as a director who goes over budget though in this case the weather, the noise of overhead fighter planes and an ailing lead actor all come together to halt filming.

Gilliam's "The Fisher King" co-star Jeff Bridges narrates the doco which details pre-production through to its troubled shoot. "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote" was to be the most expensive independently produced film in Europe with an international cast including Johnny Depp. Filming only lasted about a week before the insurance company closed down production. The insurance company now own Gilliam and Tony Grisoni's screenplay plus the surviving footage from the shoot.

People believe that the story of "The Man Of LaMancha" is cursed and the documentary mentions in minor detail another troubled genius, Orson Welles, and his unfinished Don Quixote project.

There has been other documentaries of this type such as "Hearts Of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse" about the lengthy production of Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now" but in the case of this film there is no happy ending. No cultural masterpiece that rises from a problematic shoot. This film is the cinematic equivalent of a train wreak. You know things are going to get ugly but you can't take your eyes off it. You have to admire Gilliam for signing off on this doco. It's a constant reminder of a time in his life wasted with nothing to show for it. It's terribly depressing but the crew's sense of humor and commitment to the project shine through.

If you're a fan of Gilliam's or interested in film production then this entertaining documentary is for you.