We're sure you don't need reminding what happened the first time around. You can check out the infamous docco Lost in La Mancha for that particular saga. But now it seems Terry Gilliam's re-mounted version of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote has also run into trouble, in the form of, in Gilliam's terminology, "a financial hiccup". Somebody get that man a glass of water.
Originally it was set to star Johnny Depp as a time-travelling ad executive, and Jean Rochefort in the title role. This time it was planned that Ewan McGregor would be the suit, and Robert Duvall would have his lance pointed windmill-wards. And that, according to the director, is still very much the intention. 'It's all still happening," he told MTV, "but we moved forward and then stepped back a bit. Originally I thought we'd be in pre-production by now."
Gilliam is using the hiatus to do some work with Arcade Fire (he's directing the webcast of their Madison Square Garden show, happening practically as we speak), and says he'll get back to working on **Quixote **after that. But there's a resigned tone to his assurances that suggests he might be dreaming an impossible dream, at least for the forseeable future.
"The sad thing is you get used to this," he laments. "It's a kind of numbing experience, and to be numb is not the best thing to be creative. You gear yourself up for a certain level of work, and then suddenly the energy has nowhere to go. At the moment out there, if you're not spending a couple hundred million dollars in Hollywood, it's pretty rough. It's hard to predict anything. Everyone's having these problems. I'm not different from anybody else."
We beg to differ, sir. And if Guillermo Del Toro can get At the Mountains of Madness up and running, surely there's hope for Don Quixote yet.