“It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth The minor fall, the major lift. The baffled king composing hallelujah.” Yep, rejoice. After years of tilting windmills, nearly killing himself and possibly making him go utterly mad in the process, filmmaker Terry Gilliam has finally wrapped production on his long, long, long in-the-works, elusive, holy grail project of “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.”
“Sorry for the long silence. I’ve been busy packing the truck and am now heading home” he wrote on Facebook today. “After 17 years, we have completed the shoot of THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE.
Muchas gracias to all the team and believers. QUIXOTE VIVE!”
“The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” stars Adam Driver as the main character Toby, Jonathan Pryce as Don Quixote himself and includes Olga Kurylenko and Stellan Skarsgård among many local actors from the shoot in Spain.
The once ill-fated ‘Don Quixote’ had been the albatross around Gilliam’s neck for more than a decade. As his Facebook post notes, Gilliam had been trying to make the film for 17 years and the disastrous initial production starring Johnny Depp was painfully chronicled in the warts-and-all-documentary “Lost In La Mancha” in 2002.
Over the years several incarnations almost came to fruition that starred the likes of Robert Duvall, Ewan McGregor and John Hurt. Funding always seemed to collapse at the last minute and even this current version, funded by the cash-heavy Amazon studios, had its issues too. But finally, ‘Quixote’s shoot has finished and now Gilliam will go into post-production. The director, presumably, is in no rush and wants to get it right. Hopefully we’ll see the picture sometime in 2018, but who knows.
Putting all those past woes aside, let’s sing hallelujah for Terry Gilliam and congratulate him on his long-fought victory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMUGYayk_VQ
