(2001) Filmmakers Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's documentary chronicles Terry Gilliam's impossible dream of making a movie based on Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote. In August 2000, nearly a decade after his first attempt in 1991 (a few years after the release of his financial fiasco The Adventures of Baron Munchausen), having decided to forsake Hollywood for a group of European investors, Gilliam (a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus and the creator of the movies Brazil, Time Bandits, The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys, among others) in Madrid, Spain, has $32 million dollars with which to make cinema out of his obsession.

Unfortunately, even though this investment is one of the largest ever put together to produce a European film, it's only half of what Gilliam estimated he would need to create The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Ominously in the background are churning modern wind turbines. Beginning in 1957, Orson Welles had been similarly possessed by a passion to make a motion picture about the old man of La Mancha; two decades later after Welles's death, the story of fantasy and madness remained incomplete.

Writer Tony Grisoni summarizes the original premise of the famous novel (Cervantes, though a generation older, was a contemporary of Shakespeare's late 16th and early 17th centuries) and the character of Don Quixote with his loyal squire Sancho Panza, his scrawny nag Rocinante, and his lady love Dulcinea. Gilliam's conception is to send a modern man, Toby, back in time to be with the deranged knight.

Just as Don Quixote alone sees what others cannot, this film project of "Captain Chaos," as first-assistant director Phil Patterson calls Gilliam, repeatedly jinxed, plagued, cursed by encounters with windmills and acts of God, refuses to permit his valiant attempts to get his vision, his imagination, onto film.

The only available soundstage in Madrid has terrible acoustics. With only days before shooting is to begin (some preliminary footage of the three giants has been shot), costumes and sets are ready, but none of the actors (who have agreed to substantially reduced salaries) - Johnny Depp as Toby, Vanessa Paradis as Altisidora, and Jean Rochefort as Don Quixote (a role for which the 70-year-old actor, who looks the part and can ride a horse, has prepared by spending seven weeks learning English) - has arrived due to their tight schedules on other projects. "Sheer panic" sweeps through the crew since there's no margin for error.

Nonetheless, long-haired Depp and gaunt Rochefort arrive just before the first day's production. Striving for beauty and terror, Gilliam gets plenty of the latter: the overhead roar of F-16s from the military base nearby the filming site drown out the sound followed by a thunder-and-lightning storm that floods the scene, not only getting gear wet but changing the appearance of the landscape from the first day's filming; also the gray overcast does not match the sunlit early scenes. With the crew madly trying to shift the shooting schedule around to deal with the calamity, Rochefort then becomes ill and must be flown back to Paris for medical attention; his condition remains uncertain for many days.

Beginning the second week of production, the investors appear followed by the insurance adjusters. Just as Don Quixotes's own creator mocks the decrepit knight throughout the fictional tale, so Terry Gilliam seems to be mocked by forces majeures until he capitulates, realizing the project cannot be completed.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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