I know we’ve asked this question before, But could this be the time that director Terry Gilliam gets his long held passion project The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in front of cameras?
The Hollywood Reporter is stating that Paris-based producer Paulo Branco (David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis) is signing onto the project and bringing with him $18.25 million in financing.
Filming is expected to start in September, with John Hurt in the title role of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s questing Don Quixote, alongside Unbroken‘s Jack O’Connell.
Gilliam first wrote his screenplay in which a 20th century ad man travels back in time to meet Quixote back in the late 1990s. The first time he tried to film it with Johnny Depp and French actor Jean Rochefort the production was beset with such insurmountable obstacles that it shut down after just a few days. The attempt was chronicled in the heartbreaking 2002 documentary Lost In La Mancha. A second attempt happened a few years agow ith Ewan McGregor and Robert Duvall attached, but Gilliam could not get the financing to proceed. This current incarnation looked in danger last year when Hurt was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. However, following treatment to get that cancer into remission, Hurt’s doctors gave him permission to resume working this past October.
As a nearly life-long fan of Gilliam’s works, I so desperately want this movie to happen. Not to see it myself, but for Gilliam to finally get it made. It has consumed so much of the last several decades of his life that I am rooting for him to just get it into existence. Even if it turns that maybe over the years he has wound up overthinking the movie and it doesn’t turn out the way it could have based on his original screenplay he wrote some twenty years ago.
