“I want to know when we’re fucked in advance” says Terry Gilliam to one of his assistants on the set of his ill fated attempt to film Cervantes’ classic ‘Don Quixote’

If Gilliam’s ‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen’  has become a byeword for financial disaster, his attempt to film Don Quixote runs it a close second. At least Munchausen got finished even if ran well over budget and died at the box office.  All we have of Quixote is the 2002 documentary ‘Lost in La Mancha’ which  shows the events leading to the abandonment of the project after just 5 days of shooting and a huge insurance claim.

With hindsight, the disaster was forseeable so Gilliam should have known he was fucked . After all, when  he pitched the idea for the movie  he hadn’t even  read the novel!   Having read it and pronounced it ‘unfilmable’ he adopted the Quixote spirit and went ahead anyway.  In doing so he was embarking on a challenge that, as he well knew,  had already defeated another noted movie maverick, Orson Welles.

Although the budget of £32 million seems  high , on such an ambitious project it meant that everything had to go according to schedule to guarantee success.  The film’s two main stars – Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort agreed to appear on reduced salaries (still a decent income I would  hazard).

Depp turned up looking like a Rock God on holiday . Slim and hunky, he’s not anyone’s idea of perfect casting for the fat and unglamorous Sancho Panza. Gilliam has tweaked the original story to give Quixote a more handsome sidekick.  The film would have been called ‘The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’ with  Depp playing  Toby Grisoni, a twenty-first century marketing executive thrown back through time and mistaken by Quixote for Panza.

Rochefort looked perfect as Quixote and did a crash course in English to win the role. His heavy accent adds to his charm and vulnerability.

A massive set we see reminded me of the final scene in ‘8½’  and to prove the point Gilliam oversees proceedings wearing an F.Fellini sweatshirt. His dress sense in general sends the message ‘eccentric genius at work’.

Gilliam thrives on chaos and makes heavy demands on his crew’s ability and patience.  It is tempting to think that he’s one of those directors who needs a billionaire patron but I don’t think this would guarantee he’d continue to make such interesting movies. He needs difficulties to fuel his adrenaline and having unlimited cash at his disposal would probably be counterproductive.

The filming proved to be a disaster from the outset. A storm of King Lear type proportions struck on the second day of shooting. On the  Spanish  location,  4 hours north of Madrid,  equipment and props were washed away and the heavy rain  changed the whole look of the landscape they had chosen for its desolate aspect. As if this wasn’t bad enough, a herniated disc meant Rochefort had to pull out after just a few days of filming and made it impossible to imagine he would be able to perform any scenes on horseback.

Gilliam’s philosophy reminds me of the sign you see in many offices: ‘the difficult and improbable we do right away …. the impossible may take a little longer’. A colleague in this documentary describes Gilliam as someone who likes to be seen an  enfant terrible but one who is responsible with it.

What the documentary shows is that Gilliam is exasperating, stubborn and eccentric but at least he’s someone with the courage to fail and a director with the sort of  cinematic vision that sadly is in short supply.