Well that only took 20 years.
In possibly the most infamous film production disaster of all time, director Terry Gilliam (The Fisher King, 12 Monkeys, Brazil, and Monty Python alumnus) saw his Don Quixote passion project go up in flames while he was shooting it in the 1990s.
As accounted for in the absolutely fascinating documentary Lost in La Mancha, Gilliam’s shoot was not a production out of control; it was simply cursed, with everything going against it that possibly could. It’s a heartbreaking, cautionary tale of just how precarious any film production can actually be.
Now, two decades later, Amazon Studios has come along to help Gilliam make his long lost dream a reality, and the first trailer for it (a foreign one) has finally debuted.
Starring Jonathan Pryce as the titular quixotic hero and Adam Driver as a time-traveling advertising executive, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is a testament to a filmmaker who was crazy enough to never gave up.
These 90 seconds look as fantastically and comically hypnotic as you’d expect from Gilliam, who said on the film’s official website:
- “Don Quixote is a dreamer, an idealist and a romantic, determined not to accept the limitations of reality, marching on regardless of setbacks, as we have done. We’ve been at it so long that the idea of actually finishing shooting this ‘clandestine’ film, is pretty surreal. Any sensible person would have given up years ago but sometimes pig-headed dreamers win in the end, so thank you to all of the ill paid fantasists and believers who have joined to make this longstanding dream a reality!“
No release date has been set.
Terry Gilliam has had a colorful, if uneven, career but he was born to adapt(even if loosely) ‘don Quixote’ to the screen.