Terry Gilliam Was Going To Shoot Stanley Kubrick's Unmade 'Lunatic At Large' Film, But Then Lockdown Happened

You’d think Terry Gilliam would like to take a break after finally getting his Don Quixote movie “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” out to the public after nearly 30 years, or after giving one problematic comment after another. Apparently, the filmmaker has no intention of taking a break, and he was even going to start shooting a film based on an idea by Stanley Kubrick this September before the lockdown put a stop to it.

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In an interview with the Ventotene Film Festival (via Italian outlet La Repubblica), Terry Gilliam revealed he was due to shoot a new film this September. “I was doing a film that was originally an idea by Stanley Kubrick,” Gilliam said. “There was a script and I had a cast, but the lockdown has ruined everything.”

Last we heard, Gilliam was working on a script he wrote with writer Richard LaGravenese, which they had been working on since after “Fisher King.”

When it comes to Kubrick, in 1995 the filmmaker planned to make a sequel to “Dr. Strangelove” titled “Son of Strangelove” and he wanted Gilliam to direct it. In 2013 Gilliam opened up about the project and said “I never knew about [the project] until after [Kubrick] died but I would have loved to.”

Both Gilliam and Kubrick have a fair amount of projects that never made it to production. Throughout the years we’ve heard of Gilliam’s attempts to make a sequel to “Time Bandits,” and he even tried to make an adaptation of “Watchmen” in the ’80s, with Alan Moore saying he wanted Gilliam to direct it.

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As for Kubrick, the filmmaker left many projects unmade before he passed away, including a large-scale biopic about Napoleon Bonaparte titled “Napoleon.” Kubrick had a complete script, as well as costume designs, location photos and plenty of other research materials for the film. Unfortunately, the film was never made due to the prohibitive cost of location filming.

UPDATE: Writer and Kubrick expert Filippo Ulivieri posted on Twitter that the script is based on “Lunatic at Large” a short story/treatment the pulp novelist Jim Thompson wrote in 1956 that Kubrick started developing before losing interest in 1962. Back in 2010, Sam Rockwell and Scarlett Johannson were attached to a version of the script, but it never came to fruition.