Normally, we’d be “another day (or another six months), another Terry Gilliam story on how he wants to resuscitate his plans to bring the Don Quixote story to the bigscreen.”
Gilliam obviously failed miserably in his attempt to shoot, “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” in 2000 (which we feel we’ve documented more than once). The production seemed hexed and the unsuccessful attempts to shoot the film were painfully recounted in the 2002 documentary, “Lost In La Mancha.” But Gilliam ain’t a quitter (and or a huge sucker for punishment) as every few years or months, it seems that the director talks up his plans to revive the project.
We’re always skeptical frankly. ‘La Mancha’ is almost evidence enough for no studio to ever fund his project and his recent films have done so poorly, he’s had trouble scraping up budgets higher than single million digits (seemingly way too small for the Quixote story).
But a small glint of hope is this recent Empire story, wherein Gilliam claims that a new script is finished. Oh wait, not that optimistic, a new version has started (awesome and you know what? We just thought of an awesome new idea for a film too, stop the presses!).
“[Longtime writing collaborator] Tony [Grisoni] and I have started rewriting Don Quixote just this last week. [We] finally got the script back. I re-read the greatest script ever written and realise we gotta get rewriting! I really wanna knock that one out in the next month or so.”
Gilliam didn’t want to reveal too much but said there are, “some very different ideas” and he hasn’t lost his zeal for the project either.. “[I’m] starting to think I was lucky, because maybe the film will be better seven years later. It will have matured a bit longer.” The good thing for Terry Gilliam is Johnny Depp has still expressed interest in starring again. Or at least he once did.
We just hope it ends up being about 10,000 times more intelligible than the script for “The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus” which was probably the worst screenplay we read last year [ed. OK, it wasn’t all bad, but man, that first 20 pages – the 20 pages that are supposed to count and draw you in – were a fucking mess].
