Terry Gilliam always has to struggle to get his movies made or seen, but hopefully his new deal with Amazon to produce various projects might help a little with that. The director has revealed to The Playlist that the latest stab at his long-cherished The Man Who Killed Don Quixote will be part of that deal.
The film, which currently has Jack O’Connell and John Hurt in the lead roles, with the story now featuring Toby (O’Connell), a jaundiced commercials-director-for-hire who heads to Spain for a shoot where he encounters a mysterious gypsy (Hurt). The plan is for Gilliam to start shooting early next year, with Amazon handling the release at least in the US. “I’m intrigued by their way of doing it,” the director says. “They go into the cinemas first and then a month or two afterwards they go into streaming. And I think that’s good because you get a chance to see it on the big screen, and yet I know that more people have seen my films on DVD than they have in the cinemas and that’s the reality of life now.”
And he’s clear on why this is a good company to be in business with. “Amazon and the like are interesting because they are all still in their formative stages. They’re not a bureaucracy that has been around for years like the studio system, and so they’re full of people that are open to new and fresh ideas. So it’s a good time to be working with people like that.”
There’s also the encouraging news that more of the stories he’s had floating in limbo could finally come to fruition. “I’ve got a couple other things I’m playing with,” he says. “A couple of old scripts that have been wallowing within the studio system; we’ve got them out, so we’re going to stretch them out. So what was going to become a two and a half hour movie will now become a six-eight part TV series.” He appears to confirm, or at least suggest that one of those targeted for such a transition is** Defective Detective** that he wrote years ago with Richard LaGravenese, which seems ripe for that treatment. Fingers, eyes, legs and toes crossed, then.