“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! We are so fucked. Fu-u-u-u-u-ck!” The speaker is Terry Gilliam, inspired Python animator and director of wacky acquired-taste masterpieces like Time Bandits, Brazil and Twelve Monkeys. He is giving his personal assessment – and a pretty fair assessment it is, too – of the progress on his doomed movie The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. It is a project which is collapsing about his ears, and documentarists Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe are there with their digital video cameras to witness its awe-inspiring collapse.
Their compelling fly-on-the-wall study, hilarious and heartbreaking at once, shows poor Mr Gilliam’s visionary project disintegrating like a slow-motion car crash. The double hernia and slipped disc that zonked his lead actor, Jean Rochefort, the flash floods that swept away his camera equipment, the overhead Nato jets which wrecked his soundtrack, the actors who didn’t show up, and finally, the implacable money-men who declared that the star’s indisposition was not covered by insurance as it was an Act of God. The Act of a furious Old Testament God with a serious grudge against Terry Gilliam. Perhaps He had seen The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and had decided enough was enough.
Anyway: the film’s French producer, René Cleitman, elegantly summarises the situation for a gobsmacked audience of crew and investors: “This shows us the fragility of Jean Rochefort and the fragility of cinema itself.” Nicely put, though this verbal flourish seemed not to impress everyone assembled, who wore the stunned faces of people who were about to not get paid – in a very big way.
Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams has its Fitzcarraldo; Fax Bahr and Eleanor Coppola’s Hearts of Darkness has its Apocalypse Now. But Lost in La Mancha has zilch. It’s the ultimate evolutionary form of the movie-madness documentary genre. A footnote to a text that isn’t there. A documentary about a legendary film that doesn’t exist. A legendary film whose legendariness must reside purely in the documentary, which shows what it can salvage from the dailies, and the on-location footage of producers, directors and crew hollering at each other. It is a pleasingly post-modern twist which Cervantes himself would have enjoyed, having written a book about absurd follies, delusions of grandeur and the deficit between fiction and reality.
And then of course there is Gilliam himself: a Quixotic figure if ever there was one, though shrewdly, Fulton and Pepe don’t labour the point. The director is excruciatingly aware of the parallel, being, as he tells us, 61 years old (though a very handsome and rangy 61) and modestly declaring himself not yet to have accomplished enough in his lifetime. The idea of a Quixote movie had already consumed Orson Welles, but why shouldn’t Gilliam take it on and slay the dragon of ill-omen? No one mentions the Titanic parallel, an idea thought to be jinxed after Lew Grade produced his awful Raise the Titanic in 1980, yet James Cameron had a multi-Oscar triumph with the old boat 17 years later. Unlike Gilliam’s Quixote, however, Titanic had serious Hollywood cash behind it, and no one involved is in the mood to make a zany indie movie about the scary and unfunny near-catastrophes that attended that project.
What is fascinating about Lost in La Mancha is the psychological phenomenon of denial. Everyone, from Terry Gilliam down to the lumpy, monobrowed extras Gilliam has found to play his giants, are in denial about what is happening. Everyone is determinedly looking the other way. Everyone is pretending that the movie will happen. Yet why shouldn’t they? The cast and crew have probably been in precisely this sort of denial for every picture they have ever worked on – and somehow the movies get made, when every tenet of common sense and financial logic declares that they can’t, like the principles of aerodynamics that prove that a bumble-bee can’t fly. Being in denial is a vital part of maintaining morale, momentum and keeping the financing house of cards upright.
The real problem is that Gilliam doesn’t have a Sancho Panza figure of his own: he has no loyal squire to help him in his hour of trial, still less to urge restraint or compromise. His first assistant director, Phil Patterson, doesn’t fit the bill, being largely distracted by rowing with cinematographer Nicola Pecorini, and the two men’s icy dislike of each other is obvious.
Actually, the nearest thing Gilliam has to a Sancho is Johnny Depp, who actually plays the modernised Panza-figure. He shows up on time (near enough) in good health, works hard and humours the director like an absolute trooper. In fact, the few finished scenes show that this film might have been a real success for Depp. Once it was clear that his Quixote, Jean Rochefort, was out, couldn’t someone have persuaded the director radically to rewrite his script, somehow finessing it so that Rochefort’s finished scenes were still usable, but building up Depp’s part so that he was the star? It would be strange, but then Gilliam’s movies are strange and this sort of make-do-and-mend happens in Hollywood all the time. But I fear that it would need a flexibility and realism to which the visionary Gilliam is not amenable.
Just before he died, Cervantes was crisply described as “old, a soldier, a gentleman and poor”. I very much hope that the talented and still youthful Terry Gilliam on his deathbed can describe himself as old, a film-maker, a gentleman and rich. But persisting with Don Quixote - and the documentary reveals that this is still what he wants - is not the way to go about it.