Lost in
La Mancha
The film by Keith Fulton
and Louis Pepe about Terry Gilliam's attempt to make his Don Quixote movie
Featuring Terry Gilliam, Jean Rochefort, Bernard Bouix, Rene
Cleitman, Johnny Depp, Benjamin Fernandez, Toni Grisoni, Vanessa Paradis and
Philip A. Patterson. Narration by Jeff Bridges
From a review by Peter
Bradshaw, The Guardian ***** [Read
The Review Here]
"Alas and alack! Our trouble is great! Woe is me!" The speaker is
Terry Gilliam, inspired Python animator and director of wacky acquired-taste
masterpieces like Time Bandits, Brazil and Twelve Monkeys.
(ed: of course he didn't really say that, but some KFC members might be offended
by his actual words...) 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 (other reports speak of the need
for a prostate op.) 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.
Philip French [Read
More Here]: Fortunately the American documentarists Keith Fulton
and Louis Pepe were on hand with complete access to everyone involved. Five
years earlier, they'd collaborated on The Hamster Factor, a cinéma-vérité
account of the making of Gilliam's The Twelve Monkeys. From the ashes
of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote has risen their own lively phoenix about its
making and unmaking, Lost in La Mancha, so all was not lost.
Fulton and Pepe's film starts with several advantages. First, the business of
making films is as interesting as the films themselves, as the arrogant young
cub Scott Fitzgerald told the weary lion DW Griffith on his first visit to Hollywood
in the 1920s. Second, the really interesting accounts of pictures are of those
that go wrong - Lillian Ross's book Picture for example, recounts the tribulations
surrounding John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage, or Julie Salamon's The Devil's
Candy, a blow-by-blow chronicle of Brian De Palma's disastrous Bonfire of the
Vanities...there is a special fascination aroused by films that were for different
reasons left incomplete and only to be seen in fragmentary, unfinished form
- like Jean Renoir's Une partie de campagne, Andrzej Munk's Passenger, Josef
von Sternberg's I Claudius. We complete them in our minds and become imaginatively
involved in them.
Lost in La Mancha offers astonishing insights into the irresponsible
way big-budget pictures are made nowadays, and the currently chaotic state of
the capitalist system. It's a corrective to those bland, self-congratulatory
'making of' pseudo-documentaries that are churned out to provide bulk for DVDs
and be shown as overlong trailers on cable channels.
Jeffrey M Anderson, San Francisco Examiner [Read
More Here]: Despite the ramshackle production, the small bits of finished
footage hint at a grand and bizarre film. Gilliam is a true visionary, a one-of-a-kind
filmmaker who lives by his own instincts -- hang what anyone else says.
Case in point: His extraordinary (and very expensive) The Adventures of Baron
Munchausen was met by indifference when it was released in 1989, and it
flopped. Its failure has been a monkey on Gilliam's back ever since, turning
him into a modern-day Welles -- a genius unappreciated in his own time by short-sighted
investors and brain-dead audiences. Lost in La Mancha does make a passing
reference to the Welles connection, but it fails to understand the bigger picture.
Indeed, the film gives the impression that Fulton and Pepe were in the middle
of another dull making-of documentary and decided to cash in on the project's
problems... Fortunately, Gilliam's previous film, the highly misunderstood and
criminally underrated masterpiece Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998),
will be released on a special edition DVD next month by the Criterion Collection.
That, more than Lost in La Mancha, should help nail down what a tremendous
filmmaker we have in Gilliam and why he should be given all the money and freedom
he needs.
Comment from the Toronto International Film Festival: The best thing about
La Mancha is how it leaves the viewer with an inflated respect for Gilliam,
who never once seems out of control or irrational (in fact, he's often serenely
practical), and for the alchemy of filmmaking process, which is, after all,
a "business" as well as an "art", and sadly, subject to
the realities of finance, nature, and the frailties of the human body like any
other.
During the post-screening Q&A, in which we were all delighted to find Gilliam
in attendance and in good spirits (but he didn't watch the film, too painful),
the director announced that while all of the props had been sold off by investors,
the script would soon be his again and he was jazzed on resurrecting the project.
He also requested that we check out another Jean Rochefort film playing at the
festival to assure him that the actor is, in fact, "seated' throughout
his entire performance.