This coming week will see the Cannes Film Festival premiere of Terry Gilliam’s passion project The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, with the filmmaker and former Python finally achieving his ambition of bringing the movie to the big screen after almost 30 years of trying.
Giliam first began shooting The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in 2000, with Jean Rochefort and Johnny Depp starring, only for the production to encounter a host of setbacks which ultimately saw it shutting down. After several more failed attempts, Gilliam finally got things moving last year with Jonathan Pryce and Adam Driver, with the completed movie set to premiere this coming Saturday as the closing film at Cannes.
Gilliam’s troubles with his 2000 shoot were chronicled in 2002’s documentary Lost in La Mancha, and now Variety is reporting that filmmakers Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe are set to finish the story with the sequel He Dreams of Giants.
“We began to think this is more a film about an internal struggle in an artist’s mind,” said Fulton. “What is it like for an artist to be standing on the brink of actually finishing this project finally?”
“Even on the set we would say the conflicts raging around Terry right now of making the movie are not nearly as interesting as what’s going on inside his head,” added Pepe.
Although The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is finally complete, Gilliam is currently embroiled in a legal dispute over the film with former producer Paulo Branco, who claims the rights belong to him, while Amazon also recently pulled out of its agreement to distribute the film in the United States.
Perhaps we’ll get a trilogy of documentaries once all is said and done…
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote follows Toby, a jaded commercials director who travels to Spain for a shoot and comes across a gypsy who gives a copy of his student film — a lyrical re-working of the Don Quixote story set in a quaint old Spanish village. Moved by the discovery, Toby sets off on a bizarre road trip to find the little village where the student student film was shot and gets caught up in a series of catastrophies.
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote features a cast that includes Jonathan Pryce (Game of Thrones) as Quixote and Adam Driver (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) as Toby, while the rest of the cast includes Olga Kurylenko (Quantum of Solace), Stellan Skarsgård (Avengers: Age of Ultron), Joana Ribeiro (A Uma Hora Incerta), Eva Basteiro-Bertoli (Black Bread) and Rossy de Palma (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown).
