Another filmmaker might have given up on a dream project that has been set up and shut down so many times already, but Terry Gilliam is still committed to The Man Who Killed Don Quixote after all these years and enough complications to give mere mortals a case of the screaming nerve jangles. And, talking up the film at Cannes, he's announced a new cast member, with Olga Kurylenko now aboard.
Having evolved through the years with various leading actors (most famously Johnny Depp), the film boasts a current script by Gilliam and co-writer Tony Grisoni. As it stands now, Adam Driver is playing Toby, an arrogant ad executive who was once an idealistic young film student. When he unexpectedly comes across a copy of his student film about Quixote, he visits the Spanish village where it was set and is horrified to see the impact his work has wrought. And that's before he meets the man who now believes he is Don Quixote himself, and that Toby is Sancho Panza... Gilliam has old Monty Python chum Michael Palin on board to play "Don". Kurylenko, meanwhile, is set as the wife of Toby's boss.
“I want to get this film out of my life so I can get on with the rest of my life,” the director told a press conference, remarking he's made other movies in the time since he first dreamt up Quixote, but it just won't leave him alone. “When they finish, Quixote comes creeping back through the back of my skull. It just won’t go away. I can see the film so clearly, and I think we’ve written a good script, and I hate the idea of that work going for naught.”
And we can thank a certain big space franchise for this latest iteration finally coming together. "It's a funny thing along the way there have been so many version of this story in my mind and it changes with each cast," Gilliam says. "Finally we have the perfect cast. Driver is the guy I've been looking for all these years. Thank god for Star Wars, Adam Driver is bankable!"
He'll be on set next month for a shoot that will take in Spain, Portugal and the Canary Islands and that Gilliam is looking to have ready for release next year. He could use a certain amount of luck; does anyone have a five-leaf clover handy?