Lost in La Mancha

Filmmaker & Monty Python alumni Terry Gilliam has dreamed for years of making a movie about Don Quixote. He finally got the chance to make his dream movie, "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote," in 2000, starring Johnny Depp and, in the title role of Don Quixote, French actor Jean Rochefort. But due to budget problems, shooting schedule problems, horrible weather problems, and the unfortunate ill health of actor Rochefort, the production was a disaster from the word go. After only 6 days of troubled shooting, "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote" was completely abandoned.

Fortunately, out of the wreckage of Terry Gilliam's never-finished film comes "Lost In La Mancha," a brilliant documentary that captures everything that went wrong with the movie, from the first eight weeks of pre-production (which wasn't smooth sailing either) to the disastrous six-day shoot that followed. We see both sides to Gilliam throughout the movie---one minute he's giddy with delight at making his dream movie, the next minute he's blowing his obscenity-laden top over his project collapsing all around him. And it's not just Gilliam who suffers, as *everyone* involved with the movie, both in front of & behind the camera, gets dragged down right along with him as all hell breaks loose on the doomed production.

Watching "Lost In La Mancha" is not only fascinating, but it's also very educational, giving the viewer a first-hand look at what goes on behind the scenes of mounting a movie, including all of the business aspects involved such as financing & other professional agreements that have to be made before a single frame is shot. It's also a sad documentary to watch, too. Looking at all the terrific hardware, costumes and set pieces that were created for the movie (including marvelous life-size marionette puppets that can march in perfect synchronicity), plus the widescreen footage of the scant few scenes Gilliam shot before the production was shut down, the viewer is given a genuine glimpse of the movie that *might* have been, and is all the more saddened---and sympathetic with Gilliam & his team---because of it.

Happily, though, all is not lost for "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote" just yet. Terry Gilliam is reportedly preparing for a second attempt at shooting the movie, and, having seen the movie's potential in this excellent documentary, I wish Gilliam all the best in the world in finally bringing his Don Quixote movie to the big screen. Judging by the glimpses of it in "Lost In La Mancha," I definitely believe it will be a truly great movie. :-)

"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.

Lost in La Mancha was not the sour, totally unfortunate documentary I expected. I knew before I saw the film about a year and a half ago that Terry Gilliam (maverick writer/director/animator/actor from the Monty Python clan) attempted an ambitious film from Don Quixote and it became one of the most notorious stories of a production under a black cloud of bad luck. But what I didn't expect was that the film would really be just an exemplary, honest account of what it takes to make a film. Make no mistake about it, film-making is just difficult work a lot of the time, and a completely collaborative effort where everything has to look right, sound right, be pre-planned to death, and of course the production team (when not in a studio, and out in the wilderness) is at the mercy of nature. Take a look at Orson Welles' career if one should doubt that (a director who, by the way, also attempted his own personal, avant-garde take on Don Quixote, and couldn't finish the film after working on it over the course of almost thirty years).

That The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was (err, is, so to speak) a Gilliam film, the artistic desires are bold and visionary, and a challenge in and of itself. There is the constant factor of money and financing the production that comes into play. All of these factors are explored in this film, and it's actually bitter-sweet, going back and forth until the last twenty minutes or so of the film. One can say that this is one of the most important films about film ever made, the kind of documentary that should be seen by all film students (whether or not you like Gilliam's other films or Johnny Depp or whoever) to see what the film-making process entails once a script is finished.

As the audience, we're taken through the pre-production first, as one learns about what Gilliam and his co-writer Tony Grisoni changed around with the classic Cervantes story. This time, a commercial director, played by Depp, gets sent back in time or to some sort of odd time where Don Quixote, played by Jean Rochefort, mistakes Depp for Sancho Panza, his dwarfish sidekick, then the rest of the film mostly features their adventures through parts of the book's wild stories of Quixote's imagination. Then one learns at what lengths he had to go through to get the film made, on his third try in ten years (no money in America sent him to Europe, where his budget of 32 million was tremendous for European standards). While casting and set/prop/costume designs go fine, one is informed about Gilliam's past ventures in film-making in a brilliant little animated scene (of Gilliam's design perhaps), as a director who's films, aside from the supposed shame that was Baron Munchausen, have been risky artistic gambles by mostly Hollywood studios that have made money and critical acclaim.

So there is that one factor of Lost in La Mancha that works very well- Gilliam is shown as a man of wild, but cool demands, with a specific vision and a compatible crew. "He's a responsible infant terrible, if that makes sense," one producer remarks. After the pre-production gets under-way (with one particularly funny scene where a camera test goes on with a group of bulky giants), the production team starts off their first week of filming. This is when, as one might say, the plot thickens. In the first week Gilliam and his crew get all of perhaps less than a minute of usable footage, as a series of catastrophes come down on them: The extras haven't been rehearsed. The location has been, unwittingly, placed close to a air force base where the planes make terrible noise up above. There is what Gilliam calls almost a 'biblical' thunderstorm that halts production as parts of yhe equipment are flooded, and the nearby locales and mountains have been changed of their original, striking color (not to mention, no sun). Then, the biggest blow, with seventy year old Rochefort, as a tragedy slowly becomes evident with his health.

It is a depressing last twenty minutes of film, but it is still fascinating how it becomes clear that the production will not go on. Certain things are sometimes just not as simple as one might figure with making a film. You got to have the money. You have to follow the contracts. An insurance company comes into play. The assistant director Phil Patterson, who has attempted to make damage control throughout the production, decides to quit instead of being fired. And when it seems as if the film will not get made, Gilliam's rights to the script are out of his hands (in that time, which has likely changed in five years).

But what finally becomes the captivating center of the film is Gilliam and (not to make it sound overtly pretentious) the director as a kind of metaphor for the human condition. Is it better to be someone who takes chances and tries to reach for heights that are sometimes un-attainable (like the film within this film's subject, Don Quixote), or be an average, hack of a director that listens more to producers demands than ones own? This in an underlying theme in Lost in La Mancha, and it makes for the kind of story that could have never been written.

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.

Terry Gilliam's had a controversial career. His "Brazil" in 1985 upset Universal because it had a "sad" ending, so they cut it apart and replaced the finale with a "happier" version. Gilliam hated their hack job of his work, and illegally screened his original version for a critics' circle -- they voted it one of the best films of the year. Soon Gilliam got his way and the film was released as he had originally intended, and it's now considered a classic.

A few years later he released "The Adventures of Baron Manchusen," a fantasy flop that went some $20 million over budget and collapsed at the box office. He quit directing for a while and, when he returned, started work on "Twelve Monkeys." It wasn't the best of shoots and his perfectionism resulted in eccentric, intolerable shooting schedules.

In 1998 "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" was released and the MPAA hated it, threatening to give it an X rating for its drug content. Released alongside "Godzilla," it flopped, but to this day remains a cult classic.

So it's reasonable to say Gilliam is quite an eccentric personality and has had a tumultuous career.

"The Man Who Killed Don Quixote" was going to be his new film until it crashed. The production was halted because Gilliam couldn't find an actor to play Quixote, flash floods destroyed equipment and one of his shooting locations was in fact a NATO airfield which created quite a problem for the filmmakers.

Gilliam's film probably would have been a great twist on the classic tale and I'm sure his eccentric vision would have suited it well. He also had a cameo by Johnny Depp in the movie and it's quite funny as shown in this documentary detailing the events of the production.

Gilliam recently said he's going to start production on this again and finish it up. I hope so, it really does look like a promising film.

In terms of this documentary itself, it's very insightful and a must-see for any Gilliam fan or aspiring director -- it's entertaining and important, and a great guide on how NOT to make a movie.