Every­thing we know about Ter­ry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote

The direc­tor of Twelve Mon­keys and Brazil has resumed work on his long-ges­tat­ing ​‘Don Quixote’ project. Ter­ry Gilliam recent­ly revealed that he has been scour­ing Spain for film­ing loca­tions pri­or to pro­duc­tion get­ting back under­way in October.

John­ny Depp was orig­i­nal­ly set to play the lead back in 2000, but fund­ing issues and on-set dif­fi­cul­ties, name­ly a flash flood which washed away equip­ment and changed the colour of the bar­ren cliffs, ren­der­ing all the pre­vi­ous days’ footage unus­able, appeared to doom the film. An award-win­ning 2002 doc­u­men­tary called Lost in La Man­cha cap­tured the pro­duc­tion spi­ral into disarray.

Then, in 2010, it was announced that Ewan McGre­gor and Roberts Duvall had joined the cast – but again no fur­ther devel­op­ments were made until May 2016 when, at a press con­fer­ence at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val, Gilliam and new­ly appoint­ed pro­duc­er Pao­lo Bran­co con­firmed they had secure a bud­get and cast. ​“I met Adam Dri­ver,” Gilliam said, ​“who is kind of the guy I have been look­ing for all these years. And thank god for Star Wars; Adam Dri­ver is bank­able and can get us the mon­ey we need.” Fea­tur­ing along­side Dri­ver will be Willem Dafoe, Olga Kurylenko, Stel­lan Skars­gård and Michael Palin.

The orig­i­nal sto­ry by Miguel de Cer­vantes dates back to 1605, and is wide­ly regard­ed as one of the ear­li­est canon­i­cal nov­els. In the orig­i­nal, Don Quixote is a dream­er and San­cho Pan­za is his ser­vant. Due to read­ing too many romances Quixote even­tu­al­ly los­es con­trol of his own intel­lect. He comes to believe that he is a knight sent to revive the gold­en age of chival­ry. Pan­za fol­lows his adven­ture as Quixote’s squire. The nov­el has inspired many screen and stage adap­ta­tions over the years. Orson Welles began his mod­ernised adap­ta­tion, sim­ply titled Don Quixote, but passed away before a view­able cut was put togeth­er. Jesús Fran­co reed­it­ed and released the film in 1992.

For his adap­ta­tion, Gilliam is adding his own con­tem­po­rary twist. Fus­ing ele­ments of adven­ture and sci-fi, Gilliam’s tale fol­lows Toby (Dri­ver), an adver­tis­ing exec­u­tive who man­ages to jump back and forth in time between 21st cen­tu­ry Lon­don and 17th cen­tu­ry La Man­cha, where Don Quixote (Michael Palin) mis­takes him for San­cho Pan­za. Gilliam is a visu­al sto­ry­teller whose idio­syn­crasies do not always trans­late well to a wider audi­ence. But fans of the director’s work will be encour­aged by his appar­ent dis­taste for com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed images and com­mit­ment to imbu­ing authen­tic­i­ty through prac­ti­cal­i­ty wher­ev­er pos­si­ble: ​“Strange enough CG doesn’t pro­vide emo­tion, we still are human beings and there is a sense inside us, we know ok it’s won­der­ful but it’s not real. I like real­i­ty, I want peo­ple real­ly dragged into this thing.”

Bran­co has con­firmed that the shoot­ing sched­ule will con­sist of five weeks in Spain, four in Por­tu­gal and two in the Canary Islands, with pro­duc­tion fore­cast­ed to wrap in ear­ly Jan­u­ary 2017, pre­sum­ably in the hope of hav­ing a locked edit ready for Cannes.