Getting it ‘Don’
Inside the 30-year making of Hollywood’s most cursed movie
T URNS out, like the parrot in that famous Monty Python sketch, Terry Gilliam’s new movie isn’t dead, it was just resting. For some three decades. “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” is one of the most famous unfinished Hollywood projects — a cursed production that has been trying to get off the ground since 1989. But now, it’s unfinished no more, and it finally gets a theatrical run (and a VOD release) Friday.
The director (“Brazil,” “The Fisher King”) and Python alum first pitched a riff on the Cervantes novel in the 1980s, but problems securing funding and legal entanglements have kept the film off the screen until now. A 2000 attempt starring Johnny Depp was partially shot before being abandoned, after — among other catastrophes — a flash flood destroyed production equipment.
The script and cast have morphed over the decades — today’s version stars Adam Driver as an egotistical commercial director who returns to a small Spanish town where he once made a student film about Quixote. He discovers that the film has had a detrimental effect on the village, including convincing its amateur star (Jonathan Pryce) that he’s actually Don Quixote.
Gilliam, 78, who grew up in Minnesota, spoke to The Post from his home in the UK . What was it about this film that kept you pursuing it for so long?
I guess there’s more Quixote in me than I want to admit to. I think it’s the result of a Midwest upbringing. It’s about work, and if you say you’re going to do something, you do it.
The plot was partly based on your experiences shooting [1975’s] “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and how making a movie affected people.
We were shooting “Holy Grail” in Scotland, and we were based in a little village called Doune. They were good people in a small little village, and here a film unit comes to town. We’re like the circus, and like the circus we lured the young and impressionable. We leave town and we leave behind a lot of people, some of whom are like, “God I want to be like that!” And they follow us down to London thinking they want to be actors or filmmakers. Others followed us down because they fell in love. Marriages broke up, all sorts of things happened.
Do strangers approach you and start quoting Monty Python sketches?
People occasionally do it. I was in New York [earlier this month], I was walking near Times Square. This guy just stopped me and said, “Are you Terry Gilliam?” It was a nice surprise, because I don’t have a sense that I’ll get recognized. I get it often enough to keep my ego inflated sufficiently, but never enough to be annoying. You lived in New York as a young man. How has the city changed?
It’s obviously taller. I find the verticality is getting sillier and sillier, and those breadstick buildings are just crazy. The weird thing is, people are very friendly. They’ve gone all nice, and New York has never been nice. It’s probably the High Line. Maybe that’s what’s doing it. They’re walking up there, and the air is breathable.