Main Cast: Bernard Bouix, René Cleitman, Johnny Depp, Benjamin Fernandez, Terry Gilliam
Release Year: 2002
Country: UK
Run Time: 93 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
For years, one of filmmaker Terry Gilliam's great dreams was to make a screen adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's classic tale Don Quixote, and in 2000 it looked as if his dream was to become a reality. In collaboration with Tony Grisoni, Gilliam had written a script called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, in which a 20th century advertising man accidentally travels back in time and is mistaken by Don Quixote for his faithful companion, Sancho Panza. After ten years of shopping the project to American studios with no success, Gilliam and his producers had secured financing for the film from a consortium of European sources, and Johnny Depp had been cast as the time-tripping adman, with the venerable French actor Jean Rochefort as Don Quixote. However, as the production moved closer to its start date, more and more things began to go wrong -- contracts went unsigned, key cast and crew members had not yet arrived, and the carefully prepared budget seemed stressed to the breaking point. Nevertheless, Gilliam soldiered on, but after a mere six days of shooting, during which Spanish Air Force jets ruined several takes, flash floods destroyed several sets, and Gilliam struggled to keep his dream afloat, Rochefort suffered a severe back injury. The film's financiers decided to cash in their chips and pulled the plug in order to cash in on their insurance, though Gilliam struggled for months afterward to find a way to put the production back on track. Documentary filmmakers Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe had been invited by Gilliam to make a film about the production of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and after shooting 80 hours of footage of the chaotic pre-production process as well as the aborted shooting schedule, they instead created Lost In La Mancha, a look at the "un-making" of the film, which along with the story of the project's brief rise and messy collapse, featured a look at several completed scenes from the film, as well as animated versions of the film's storyboards which offered a glimpse of the look and scale of the film Gilliam was attempting to create. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review
Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's Lost in La Mancha is a moderately engaging account of iconoclastic director Terry Gilliam's misbegotten attempt to film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, an adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes' classic novel. Like Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse and Les Blank's Burden of Dreams, Lost in La Mancha shows how a filmmaker's own obsessions can bring about disaster. Unlike those films, Lost in La Mancha is not brilliant filmmaking, and it doesn't stand nearly as well on its own, which is problematic. To begin with, the disasters that befall Gilliam's set aren't particularly dramatic. There's the illness of his leading man, Jean Rochefort, and a badly trained horse that doesn't follow Gilliam's direction as he tries to shoot a scene to impress a group of investors. The most dramatic setback is a particularly violent hailstorm that temporarily decimates the film's desert set. It's also interesting to watch some of the internal conflicts, as Gilliam tries to protect his embattled assistant director, Phil Patterson, who doesn't seem particularly eager to continue with the shoot. As a companion piece to a film that doesn't exist, this is pretty interesting stuff, but as a finished product, in and of itself, it's nothing special. The few teasing glimpses of Gilliam's unfinished film that Fulton and Pepe provide make one hope that some day, Lost in La Mancha will take its rightful place beside its subject on some kind of deluxe DVD package. ~ Josh Ralske, All Movie Guide
Finding the source material by Cervantes too vast, Gilliam and his cowriter decided to create their own version of the Quixote story, including a major change inspired by A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The character of Sancho Panza would appear only very early in the film, to be replaced by Toby Grisoni, a twenty-first century marketing executive thrown back through time, whom Quixote mistakes for Panza.
Terry Gilliam was very excited to make this movie, since Don Quixote embodies many of the themes that run through his own work (such as the individual versus society, the concept of sanity, etc.). The entire movie would have been filmed in Spain and throughout Europe. Jean Rochefort was picked to play Don Quixote, in preparation for which he spent seven months learning English. Toby was to be played by Johnny Depp, and Vanessa Paradis would have been his love interest.
Production
Lost in La Mancha tells the story of the film's very delicate schedule and budget, which completely unraveled once production began. Gilliam is shown early on telling his crew not to be afraid to tell him that something is too complicated or expensive to be done because he needs to be restrained sometimes. In another interview he says he wants his films to be seen and enjoyed by the widest audience possible. These scenes contrast sharply with the difficult persona he gained following the controversies in earlier films like Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, but appear to honestly match Gilliam's actual beliefs, as evinced by the DVD commentaries on several of his films.
On the first day of shooting, the crew discovered that their outdoor filming location was plagued by nearly constant noise from a nearby NATO aircraft target practice area. Gilliam decided to continue capturing footage, expecting to replace the audio in post-production. The second day of shooting featured a flash flood and hail which damaged equipment, and permanently changed the appearance of the location, where some shots had not yet been completed.
Days later it became clear that Rochefort was injured, and within a week Gilliam learned that Rochefort had a herniated disc[1] and would be unable to continue filming. This ended production completely and resulted in a record $15 million insurance claim. The insurance company owned the rights to the screenplay for several years, until they were transferred back to Gilliam. Production of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was restarted in 2008.[2]
The Lost in La Mancha filmmakers, Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, had previously made a documentary about Gilliam's film Twelve Monkeys titled The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys and were strongly supported by Gilliam throughout their filming. Gilliam reportedly often has people documenting the making of films so that should something go wrong he has a record of the events from his perspective.
