Early in the documentary Lost in La Mancha, we see Terry Gilliam in pre-production on a film entitled The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. He has just cast a few local actors to portray giants in the film, and after costuming them he gives them all a screen test. We see him watching the footage of his three giants looming over the camera, and Gilliam wears a big grin. Much of the rest of the film will be about reality slapping that grin from his face.
A filmed version of Cervantes’ Don Quixote was Gilliam’s longtime dream project. He had been writing the screenplay and storyboarding shots for the film for over a decade, and after failing to secure American financing for this project, he was able to get $32 million in European funding. He cast French actor Jean Rochefort, an accomplished actor and horseman who was taking English lessons, as Quixote, and Johnny Depp, star of his previous film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, as the man who Quixote mistook for Sancho Panza.
Don Quixote is, according to moviemaking lore, a cursed project. Most notably, Orson Welles struggled to make the film for twenty years, even after the death of his leading man. Now Gilliam, whose work was often about dreamers and flights of fancy, was tackling the project. Gilliam knew of the superstitions, but wanted to make the film anyway. “If [directing a movie] isn’t a challenge for me,” says Gilliam in the film, “I don’t want to do it.”
On one level, Lost in La Mancha is about the troubles that befell the making of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Even during pre-production, Gilliam is seen fretting over small details in the costumes and props. He is anxious because his actors aren’t able to fly to the film’s production in Spain to do costume and makeup tests. He confesses to the camera that the film’s budget is about half what it should be. And then after shooting has started, filming is delayed for various reasons: a rainstorm that floods the set and destroys some gear, fighter planes that fly over the locations on a daily basis, and finally the deteriorating health of Jean Rochefort, who develops back and prostate problems that make it impossible for him to ride the horse.
Yet on another level, this film deals with the difficult relationship between the creative and the business sectors of filmmaking. Terry Gilliam is a director with a unique vision, but he also has a checkered history in Hollywood. His masterpiece Brazil was the subject of a court battle after Universal Studios took the film and re-cut it in a way that stole its meaning. His 1989 film The Adventures of Baron Munchausen is seen by many as a
textbook example of a production gone off the rails- its budget expanded to twice its original size, and its release date was postponed an entire year before it was released to general apathy.
On The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, Gilliam’s vision wasn’t merely compromised by “acts of God”, which though we can’t plan for them do happen from time to time. More painfully, Quixote is undone by the money people, whose job is to watch the bottom line and ensure that the investors lose as little as possible. Gilliam, who obviously has no mind for business, is frustrated when they take over the film. When there are setbacks during shooting, at least he can confer with the creative minds around him and work out a solution, but when shooting has been suspended he’s shut out of the process while the money men throw around Latin and legalese, and all he can do is wait and hope that something good can come of it.
Ultimately, I can’t muster up much enthusiasm for Lost in La Mancha as a film. The directors, Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, set out originally to make one of those making-of documentaries that would find its way onto the Quixote DVD, and once everything started going awry they maintained their access to Gilliam and the production. However, the film is little more than a simple re-telling of the events, when I was hoping for a little of the filmmakers’ perspective on what was happening. What are we left with? The story itself.
I don’t know about you, but I’m a bit depressed at the prospect of watching a visionary filmmaker like Terry Gilliam fail. As an aspiring director, I know that it’s necessary to realize that the road to creation is fraught with peril, but what does it say when hack directors like Jan De Bont and Joel Schumacher are repeatedly given $100 million projects they don’t care about which turn out to be junk, while Terry Gilliam has people breathing down his neck on every film he makes? Why should only vision-less yes-men be entrusted with studio money? Is it any wonder that the state of Hollywood moviemaking is as dire as it is when questions like this beg to be asked?
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