The man who was nearly killed by Don Quixote

Terry Gilliam does not have an office, but rather a den. The lair is located in the attic of the London house where the Monty Python director has lived with his family since 1985. You reach it by climbing four flights of narrow stairs and through a pair of curtains. It's a random magical place where you can imagine a character from one of his movies living, maybe a mad professor or an exiled king. The place is decorated with Persian carpets and sculptures of all sizes, books are scattered everywhere; On shelves and tables, stacked on the floor.

As soon as you enter, your eye is drawn to many of the accessories that were in Gilliam's films. There are anthropomorphic statues of Baron Munchausen and Venus, which are used in many of the shots and effects in 1988's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. A black-shrouded "Angel of Death" from the same film hangs from the ceiling next to a winged Sam Laurie from 1985's Brasil. On the tables sits the helmet worn by Sean Connery as King Agamemnon in 1981's Time Bandits. Behind him, on the stereo, is a miniature of the Crimson Perpetual Insurance Building, the pirate insurance company that terrorized everyone in the opening scene of 1983's The Meaning of Life from Monty Python.

At the center of it all, Gilliam stands tired and apologetic for being on his last day of antibiotics after a recent bout of pneumonia, though he seems quite energized as he shows me around and points out accessories hidden in nooks that I might have overlooked—including That human-faced fish from "The Meaning of Life" perched on a shelf above our heads. "They throw it away at the end of the movie, so I try to keep as much of it as I can," he says.

It's no surprise that Gilliam, at 78, resembles one of his characters. His stories of dreamers battling against the forces of oppression always felt personal to a director who constantly found himself at war with studios and producers. But the word "personal" doesn't come close to describing the strange attachment he has for his latest film. Starring Jonathan Pryce and Adam Driver, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which finally premiered in Cannes last year, is now starting to open in the US. On April 19, it opened in a limited theatrical release, as well as on VOD platforms.

Gilliam has been working on this movie for three decades; Long considered one of the greatest never-made films in cinema history, the film came to define his career in all the unexpected ways and nearly destroyed him in the process. For years, Amy Gilliam, the director's daughter and producer of his latest work, said the project was "the dragon that kept raising its head to breathe fire". Part of Quixote's notoriety stems from the 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha produced by Keith Fulton and Louise Bibb, which followed Gilliam's disastrous attempt to shoot the film in Spain in 2000 with Johnny Depp and French actor Jean Rochefort in the lead roles.

The documentary, initially intended as a behind-the-scenes DVD of the film's production, depicts the many misfortunes suffered by Gilliam's crew and cast; For example, one of the filming locations was next to a NATO air base, and the roar of combat aircraft over the sound rendered the viewer's voice unusable. Rainstorms flooded the set and nearly washed away the equipment; Rochefort was immediately diagnosed with a prostate infection, which made him unable to ride a horse, and when the film got out of hand, the insurance company shut it down.

Lost in La Mancha may be a documentary, but it contains a measure of the surreal madness typical of Gilliam's films; Some viewers even thought it was a scripted story. In his 2015 memoir "Gilliamesque," the director recalls that Fulton and Babe wanted to return home once production began to spiral out of control; Gilliam said to them, "Keep shooting, you idiots!" "I had to shout at them from the depths of my despair," he wrote, "You may not have a film about making a film, but at least you will have a film about failing to make a film, and that might actually be more interesting."

By the time it was attempted in 2000, Gilliam had spent nearly a decade trying to make a film adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes' 17th-century novel Don Quixote, about the adventures of a delusional old man who fancies himself a medieval knight. Gilliam first had the idea after making Munchausen, and despite the financial disappointments of that film and Brazil, the project was easy to fund, at least initially. "I started making money a long time ago," Gilliam said. "Before I read the book, I called Jake Eberts [the Oscar-winning producer] and said, 'Jake, I need $20 million, and I have two names for you: one is Quixote and one is Gilliam.'" He said, 'Here's what you want.' And it was that simple, and the result, of course, is that the novel is over a thousand pages long and a surprisingly broad and dense story. 'Finally I sat down and read it, and I realized the horror of the predicament I had put myself in,' says Gilliam.

Where do we start? The problem with it all was always trying to escape from the book. However, direct adaptation of Cervantes' story has come close several times; The 1990s was a fruitful period for Gilliam, with acclaimed successes such as 1991's The Fisher King and 1995's Twelve Monkeys. But the director—who was working at the time on Brazil—and writer Charles McQueen had difficulty tackling the story, and in addition had trouble finding on an actor who can bring the right mix of tenderness, languidness, melancholy, and naivety to the role of Quixote. Producers at one point wanted actor Sean Connery, but Gilliam felt that "Connery was like the earth, while his quixote was the air".

In 1998, working with his co-author Tony Grisoni, Gilliam began writing from a new angle. The director was working on a film adaptation of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and decided to combine the two ideas. In this version, the story follows a young CEO, Toby, who falls on his head and imagines himself going back to Quixote's time. There, the wandering knight mistakes Quixote for Sancho Panza as his trusted friend. This was the script that went into production in 2000, with Johnny Depp as Toby and Rochefort as Quixote.

Gilliam can sometimes seem like the most unlucky director in the world. His career was one of fights with producers, out-of-country productions, and bouts of catastrophic bad luck. In Brazil, considered a masterpiece today, he got into a public war with Universal Pictures chairman Sid Sheinberg, who refused to release the original version of the film and tried to give it a (highly misguided) happy ending; Gilliam famously ran a full-page ad in Variety asking when the Sheinberg movie would be released. Munchausen wound up a victim of regime change at Columbia Pictures, which contributed to a messy shoot so bad it ran over budget, prompting the insurance company to step in and threaten to fire Galea, who then rewrote several scenes. Subsequently, the hostile Columbia regime gave Munchausen a very limited release, and the film made little impact; It is now considered one of Gilliam's best works.

In the 2005 Brothers Grimm film, the director clashed with Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who contested his right to choose the lead actress and supplied the cinematographer. (Gilliam later admitted he was reluctant to work with the Weinsteins, but felt despondent in the aftermath of Quixote's collapse.) 2009's Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was also thrown into disarray when its star, Heath Ledger, died midway through production; Gilliam had to recruit three other actors - Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell - to play Ledger's character for the rest of the film, set in three different fantasy worlds. The results were surprisingly smooth, though the movie itself got mixed reviews; And these bad fortunes are only in films that have already been made.

Many of Gilliam's travails, as well as his accomplishments, stem from the particular combination of influences and motivations that defined his career. From his beginnings as an illustrator and character designer, he is an artist who has a very specific vision in his imagination of how each scene should turn out. (In his earlier attempts, Gilliam had sketched every shot, often, as he admits, being quite determined to make sure what appeared on screen was exactly as he had imagined it.) But as a member of Monty Python, he also understood the value of collaboration and resourcefulness: after all, the Monty Python Holy Grail, which Gilliam co-directed, is a film in which characters slam coconuts together to mimic sound, rather than ride a horse.

At the same time an independent filmmaker, he is drawn to a strange and disturbing subject matter; Perhaps his most well-known film is The Fisher King, in which a demonic red knight chases the mentally unstable homeless hero through Central Park. Such material makes it unlikely that Gilliam would get big budgets. As a result, given his interest in fairy tales—dark fairy tales, legends, epic adventures, sci-fi dystopias, he will often have to squeeze every dollar as hard as he can into spending, and then squeeze it some more. This can, of course, cause problems; Amy Gilliam says, "Everyone tells us to cut the budget even after we've cut the budget quite a bit, but there comes a point where cutting the budget doesn't allow Terry to make a Terry Gilliam-branded movie."

The story of Quixote's financing is a tortuous journey through the bizarre challenges of making a Terry Gilliam film . In 2000, the film cost $32 million to shoot and would have been one of the most expensive films ever made entirely with European money, although it was not enough to fulfill his vision. At the time of Lost in La Mancha's release, Gilliam had hoped that the documentary would serve as a long-form promotional clip for his final version of Quixote, but most reputable producers told him to drop the project. "It looked like it was finished," he says, "and everyone was telling me, 'Enough, don't keep working on it.

But then, other, lesser-known Quixote-like characters emerged, perhaps hoping to become the knights in shining armor who could save the legendary auteur's dream from ending up on cinema's golden scrap heap of unmade masterpieces. "Each one of them comes in very confident, they come in with their promises and they don't keep them," says Gillian.

According to the director, some of them were well-meaning fans who didn't really know what they were doing. Others were more obscure; The director laughs as he recalls one would-be producer who approached him sometime around 2014: “It was a woman with Italian connections, and she made some money that was supposed to be money that the president of Tunisia stole when he left the country during the Arab Spring. And it was like that. It involves setting up an offshore company, to get access to this money.But it seems that the money moved from Tunisia abroad to somewhere in Switzerland, and then to a new man who she claimed owns 50 percent of the mineral wealth in the world.And for some reason, he had a crush on her.And he was He comes to London, then he doesn't come to London anymore. Then he has a heart attack, so he's a bit late. Then all of a sudden he comes to London. But then he decides to manage the financing of the movie through his daughter's bank account. And it's getting crazy! We're talking about people making calls Through Skype, they upload parts of documents proving the validity of their words, and after the financing deal with that metallurgist tycoon, the next day his lawyer calls and says: “This document means nothing! "

According to Gillian's estimation, seven of them made sincere efforts to make Quixote's film over the past 25 years. (The 2000 attempt was actually the third.) Each time, there was money made, some cast decided, and a start date set. After giving up filming in 2000, Gilliam attempted to buy back the script from the insurance company and set about making the film again. And in 2005, he was planning to shoot with Johnny Depp and Gerard Depardieu. By 2009, Robert Duvall was considering playing Quixote, and by 2010, Ewan McGregor had replaced Depp.

In 2014, it was announced that John Hart had taken on the role of Quixote, and Jack O'Connell's name had been put forward to play Toby. “That was a good time,” he says, looking out the window: “I still have tapes of John and Jack in my garden rehearsing the roles.” Gilliam worried about the vulnerability Hurt would have brought to the part: . It wasn't as funny or crazy as Jonathan, but it was more tragic."

In June 2015, Amazon joined the project as a distributor. Early the following year, Amy Gilliam recommended that Terry meet Driver, his newly successful hand in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The two got along and Driver signed on to play Toby. In the end, things seemed to go according to Gilliam's fancy. But when the cameras were on, Hart announced that he had pancreatic cancer. (He died in January 2017) Out of respect for his friend, Gilliam waited before returning and looking for a replacement for the film. He says that despite the painful diagnosis, "I wouldn't think of looking for anyone else. I put everything off for six months."

Subsequently, Gilliam's colleague and former Python member Michael Palin was cast as Quixote in 2016, around the time of the arrival of Portuguese producer Paulo Branco. Although he has a good reputation, Branko turns out to be one of those characters who promises more than he can deliver. According to Gilliam, during the four months that Branco was involved with the project, he demanded creative control and tried to cut staff salaries, which drove Palin away and ultimately drove Amazon out. When the producer failed to deliver the funding he had promised, he and Gilliam hit an impasse, and the producer canceled filming, Gilliam recalls. "We were all either in cars going to the airport or actually at the airport ready to fly to Lisbon for the shoot when Paulo canceled everything."

The money had already been spent and the shooting locations set up, so the director kept working. "We had to put the whole thing back together in three or four months," he says. With Palin leaving he called Price, who Gilliam says he had been waiting "patiently for 15 years" suitable. (In earlier versions of the project, Gilliam had considered casting him in a smaller supporting role.) The actor recalls that he received a letter from the director in the middle of the night. It was, "Well, I suppose you better take the part."

But Gilliam was still $3 million short. Miraculously, Alessandra Lou Savio, a friend of Emmy's producer, offered to pay the money. Amy and Terry both went to meet her in admiration. Then Terry Gilliam had a stroke. "Amy was driving me home," he recalls, "and suddenly she turned halfway there. I said, 'What are you doing?' She said, 'I'm going around that bus.' I said, 'Which bus?'" Terry didn't feel anything, but the doctors confirmed that a blood clot had hit a nerve. And I took part of the vision in his left eye. "Now I'm not quite a visionary director," he jokes.

In some ways, it had to be. The final budget for Quixote's film was about half the cost it had been estimated for 2000, partly due to changes to the script over the years. “We stopped thinking of Quixote as a story set in the past and started thinking of it as a contemporary story,” says Grisoni. He notes that in some ways this version of Quixote is darker than what they would have made several years ago. "The modern world, Toby's world, is tougher and more difficult than before," says Grisoni. Partly this was just a by-product of getting rid of the time-travel element — things are always more emotional when someone falls head over heels in the 17th century — but it's also a reflection of Gilliam's own frustrations with what he sees around him. The director says, "I've reached a point with the modern world where I don't know what to do, I don't know the door to hell has opened, and we live in a time of chaos and madness. From Trump to Brexit, it's madness!"

This feeling of helplessness and hopelessness runs throughout the final film. The characters all end up at the mercy of the wealthy oligarchs and their servants. This matches well with Cervantes's disastrous and surprisingly modern image of class and aristocracy. Meanwhile, though Gilliam had initially seen more than that in his romantic Quixote, he gradually found himself sympathizing with Tobey, who in the final version of the film became a film director who dashed his promise and became a director of commercials. While filming in Spain, he discovers a DVD copy of his thesis project, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. While taking a jaunt to the small village he photographed a decade ago, Toby finds the place in shambles; And it turns out that people's lives were ruined by his short photo session. Most notably, Javier (Price), the old cobbler he had recruited to play Quixote, still thinks of himself as Cervantes' wandering knight.

The theme of Tobey's guilt—and the transformative effect that movies can have on people, as did chivalric books about Cervantes' "imaginary man"—was something Gilliam insisted on when Grisoni rewrote the script. "We're a movie crew like Vikings and pirates. Or maybe locusts," says Gilliam. He recalls filming Monty Python and the Holy Grail in a Scottish village in 1974: "Marriages fell apart, people came running to London after us, so many problems. It's like a bad disease. I thought we'd go along with it all." He remembers a man during the filming of Holy Grail who got on a bus to go to Scotland to work on the movie, paid for it to get there and arrived and said, "Can I be in the movie?" And it was great. He was a substitute for Graham (Chapman) for a while. And he did the stunts that others couldn't do. It is the appeal of cinema. Some people crash on rocks and drown, others soar high and fly."

It could be said that Gilliam did a bit of both. The final shoot of Quixote was remarkably smooth. Many of the locations were the same ones he had prepared (or planned to shoot in) in 2000. "Nature was kind to me this time," he said, though he did mention that a rainstorm eventually hit during the scene requiring fireworks, and flooded Water the site briefly. But more often than not, Gilliam's challenges were related to the project's ailing legacy. He admits he was terrified at first that "it wouldn't be as good as I dreamed it would be, and worse, it wouldn't be as good as other people imagined it to be." Price's performance was a pleasant surprise, usually modest and reserved, and he turns out to be a showman of the first order. "He's a great comedian, Quixote deserves the humour, and when we were filming I said to him 'It's like you're doing every Shakespearean character you've ever played, all in one.'" Gilliam says. "He brought so much madness and ego and sweetness and humor - I thought he He exploded when he got to the site, it's great."

But, of course, it's Gilliam, and there's nothing he can do easily; In 2017, the dispute with Branco reached the French courts, and the producer tried to stop the premiere of the film at the Cannes Film Festival, claiming that the film was his. A judge ruled in Gilliam's favour, but at the festival the film was preceded by a disclaimer stating that the festival screening did not "prejudice" Branco's claim to Quixote's rights. A month later, an appeals court in Paris ruled in favor of Branco, after which the producer claimed he owned the rights to the film. Fortunately, it turns out that all that was required for the film to release as planned was for Gilliam to pay Branko $11,600 in compensation.

But the legal problems took their toll. Before the Cannes premiere last year, Amy Gilliam noticed something was wrong with her father. “Your whole left side of your face has dropped,” she told him, even though he didn't feel anything. A further medical examination confirmed that Terry had suffered an artery blockage, and reports suggest he had another stroke, but he insists that is inaccurate. "There was a blockage in something, but I seem to be fine," he says. Either way, he (and the film) arrived at the premiere on time, and the director danced and joked with the cast on the red carpet and up the stairs to the Grand Hall Lumière before finally raising his arms in triumph. At the end of the show, the audience gave him a standing ovation for 10 minutes.

On his return to London, Gilliam opened his computer to look at some marketing photos and then to Facebook. As Quixote slowly made its way into shows in Europe, it got some good reviews, though he's still not sure how the film will be received in the United States. With the finish line near, he admits he's not quite sure why he found himself unable to quit the project. "I hate when people tell me not to do something," he says. "I'm still like a child who won't listen to those who tease him, and he's become so obsessed. Why does Quixote himself keep getting up? I don't know, and I can't explain it."

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Translated by: Sarah Al-Masry.

This article is taken from Vulture and does not necessarily reflect Meydan's website.