It’s now many, many years since Terry Gilliam first embarked on his attempt to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a fantasy-adventure loosely based on Cervantes’ classic novel.
Production on Gilliam’s Don Quixote originally got underway in the late 90s – only for the production to drift into disaster, as captured in the infamous yet wonderful documentary, Lost In La Mancha. Original Don Quixote actor Jean Rochefort badly injured himself; the Spanish set was flooded; what appeared to be a remote location in the desert turned out to be located near a profoundly noisy airbase.
Showing a tenacity that might have made Quixote himself proud, Gilliam has pursued the project through thick and thin, and finally, he’s on the cusp of realising his ambition.
Certainly, there have been a few changes in the intervening years, with Jonathan Pryce stepping in as Quixote (Rochefort sadly died in 2017) and Adam Driver co-starring in place of Johnny Depp (who’s probably old enough to play Quixote himself by now, thinking about it). The movie’s set to make its debut at Cannes in May, but before then, there’s the first trailer to feast our eyes on.
If nothing else, it proves that Gilliam’s dream project really does exist…