Cannes chiefs denounce bid to block Gilliam film

Monty Python director’s disaster-prone, 20-year project on Don Quixote suffers another setback

THE Cannes festival has launched an outspoken attack on a producer’s “ridiculous” legal bid to block the world premiere of Terry Gilliam’s latest film, set to close the festival next month. Said to be the most cursed film in cinema history, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was finally due to be screened on May 19 at the festival.

However, the Monty Python director’s ill-fated project – which was 20 years in the making – hit yet another snag last week when lawyers for producer Paulo Branco mounted a legal challenge to block the screening.

The Portuguese producer claims that the film, starring Star Wars actor Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce, is “illegal” and that his Alfama Films owns the rights to it, rather than Gilliam. The legal challenge will be considered at an urgent hearing on May 7, the day before the festival opens.

However, in a furious statement, Pierre Lescure, Cannes president, and Thierry Frémaux, general delegate, said they would not bow to “intimidation”. While they promised to respect the court ruling, the pair said: “We stand squarely on the side of film-makers and in particular on the side of Terry Gilliam. We know how important this project, which has gone through so many trials and tribulations, is to him. The trouble was caused on this occasion by the actions of a producer who has shown his true colours once and for all during this episode, and who has threatened us, via his lawyer, with a ‘humiliating defeat’.”

“Defeat,” they insisted, “would be to succumb to threats.”

Lescure and Frémaux said they decided to feature Gilliam’s film in this year’s official selection “after careful consideration”. When they took their decision, “there was no opposition to the screening of the film at the festival”.

Judges in France and Britain have ruled that Branco owns the rights to the film but the American-born Gilliam has challenged the French ruling and a Paris appeal court will give its decision in June.

Last month, Gilliam claimed that Branco had “nothing to do” with the final film. “His demands are laughable, absurd. He is trying to make as much money as he possibly can from a film he did not produce,” he told AFP. However, the producer’s lawyer and son, Juan Branco, denied this and said the film could be released only if Gilliam reached a deal with his father.

On Twitter, he wrote that Gilliam and his new producers “knew that the law was against them, but they have tried to play a killer poker hand with Thierry Fremaux” by premiering the film at the festival.

Gilliam’s disaster-prone attempts to make the film have led to inevitable comparisons to the deluded knight from Cervantes’ 17th-century Spanish novel, who duels with windmills.