Terry Gilliam has said his Don Quixote project will finally get back off the ground after years of financial wrangling and on-set troubles (all fantastically documented in the movie Lost In La Mancha). Speaking at the London Film Festival screening of The Brothers Grimm last night, Gilliam commented: “I’ve got some old projects sitting around that I might resuscitate.” And one of these, it seems, is The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.
“We’re getting closer to getting the script to Don Quixote back,” said Gilliam. “We’ve got nothing to show for all that time except the documentary and you sort of switch off and wait until you get the script back. It’s been three years and it looks like there’s some movement now: there was kind of a legal situation where the insurance company and French production company put up a lot of money, but it looks as though things are loosening up.”
Gilliam also confirmed his original lead, Johnny Depp, had signed up to the project. “Johnny’s still there, we caught him in Toronto - he said publicly [he would do it] again so we’re good.”
But why resurrect Quixote after all that heartache and all those headaches? “It’s got to the point that I think I just have to get it out of my system. Everyone’s been asking me questions about it, so just to shut everybody up I’ve got to make a film...”