Lost in La Mancha

Rating:
Summary: The windmill wins one
Review: For a film maker, as with any other working stiff, it sometimes just doesn't pay to get out of bed in the morning.

LOST IN LA MANCHA is a cautionary tale about the making of a feature film, or rather the un-making of it.

For years, Director Terry Gilliam dreamed of making a screen adaptation of the Don Quixote story - you know, that old and senile Spanish knight who tilts at windmills. In 2000, with a budget of $32 million, Terry set about to do just that. His film, entitled "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote", stars Jean Rochefort as Quixote and Johnny Depp as Sancho Panza.

After several months of pre-production, Rochefort and Depp arrive on location, and shooting begins in the Spanish desert. During the first week, the crew copes with continual overflights of screeching F-16 jets, a thunderstorm that generates a flash flood that destroys equipment, and an injury to the 70-year old Rochefort that'll apparently keep him off his faithful steed unless cured. (Don Quixote on foot? Hmm, doesn't call-up quite the same image, does it?)

In the second week of shooting, a visit by the investors is followed by one from the insurance adjuster, who begins to mumble about "acts of God" precluding payment. Meanwhile, Rochefort is back in Paris to see his physician, and things don't look promising for a timely return. Then, the First Assistant Director, Phil Patterson, delivers the final blow.

Viewing LOST IN LA MANCHA, there's a certain terrible fascination watching the director's dream crumble before his (and your) eyes because of appallingly bad luck. One can't help but feel sorry for the poor devil. The film will, perhaps, only appeal to one that loves the movies and appreciates, at least to a minor degree, the organization, preparation, and coordination necessary to mount and complete a major production.

A postscript in the end credits informs the audience that Gilliam has since re-acquired the rights to "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote", which defaulted to the insurance company, and plans to give it another go. If it's ever released, I'll pay to see it just out of sympathy.

Rating:
Summary: Terry Gilliam and 7 Days of Chaos (Hard Rain Included)
Review: Former member of legendary comic group Monty Python, and providing trend-setting cartoons there, Terry Gilliam became a respected and unique film director, whose track record includes "Brazil" "The Fisher King" "12 Monkeys" and so on. But at the same time, he was well-known for his tendency to get involved with troubled productions (his fight with Universal over the contents of "Brazil" is now too famous). Some say he is a troublemaker, but they should watch this splendid documentary for once because, as the film tells, the truth is different.

Terry Gilliam started the production of "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote" in Sep. 2000 in Spain. After ten years of preparation, with the cast like Jean Rochefort (as Don Quixote), Johnny Depp, and Vanessa Paradis, the film was going to be a success. And director Gilliam looks very happy and optimistic even if he had to make this film as all-European production without the help from Hollywood. OK, they got this budget as much 40 million dollars.

Suddenly things start to look bad. One major investor bailed out, so the budget went down to $ 32 million. But still Terry looks OK, but problems rush to the production team. No contract done with Vanessa Paradis (hey, but she must be living with Johnny in Paris! How come...) No available sound stage excpt one with terrible sound effect like broken karaoke. Anyway, the shooting starts.

Unexpected troubles happen one after another, as if testing the limit of patience of the crew. Sudden illness, thundering F-16 jets, and hard rain which literally washes out the whole equipment. And most terrifying event finally arrives -- the visit of investors! See Terry's face when he meets them.

As you know, so far (I hope) the production is abondoned. If you're interested in Terry Gilliam's works or the complicated process of film production, you must watch this. I cannot reveal the details of this excellent documentary, but your heart will be gripped by the tragic events which slowly kill the enthusiasm of the crew, particulrly that of Terry Gilliam.

I hope this film will change the bad boy image of Gilliam, which simply isn't true. He simply wants to shoot a film. He just want it, and that's all. And look at the remaining footage (one minute in all) of the abandoned film, which is simply fantastic, promising the great things that should have realized.

Rating:
Summary: ¡¡¡ Terry Gilliam's Worst Nightmare !!!
Review: I consider this is Terry Gilliam's Worst Nightmare.
First, his budget goes down.
Then, he has no actors.
Then, some jets fly over the set.
Then, a terrible hailstorm attacks.
Then, the investors visit the set.
Finally, the productions suspends.

This is every director's nightmare.
The most threatening "unmaking of" of all, heartbreaking.

Rating:
Summary: Redemption in the worst possible way
Review: I viewed this movie with slight trepidation, as Gilliam's last directorial outing was his least successful (Fear and Loathing). However, I gradually allowed myself to be subverted into enjoying this atrocious account of Don Quixote's film adaptation. That's not to say that the documentary is less than satisfying, it certainly is, but this movie made me ignominiously depressed at the very sight of Gilliam's nightmare, for I portentously suspect had this movie been completed as the director intended, it could have been his greatest film accomplishment yet (even toppling the immaculate Brazil and masterful 12 Monkeys). Watching this tragedy unfurl was most debilitating because Gilliam is so persistently passionate about his work. From the very introduction you feel the dedication and obdurate work ethic he attached to the project. In what I recall was less than a week, Gilliam's production devolved into a financial fiasco, his supporters were running low on steam, and the main star contracted a demobilizing illness. Yet throughout all of this, Gilliam's ardent support and desire to finish (or even begin) his movie still courses through his vains like ichor, and when the ineluctable conclusion rears its moribund head and Gilliam is forced to retract every bit of energy he ground into this film, it is truly sad. While the documentary itself would probably warrant a 4-star rating, the supplemental disc is absolutely incredible, and is at times much more insightful than the film. The Sundance Channel feature with Gilliam offers a unique perspective of Gilliam as a filmmaker, and espouses his thoughts regarding the completed account. More intriguing is the feature where author Salman Rushdie confabulates with Gilliam about film, books, and everything remotely imperitive or oft times trivial about the "business." Essential viewing for any Gilliam fan.

Rating:
Summary: LA MANCHA is a classic "Unmaking of" documentary
Review: I'm sure we've seen many "Making of" features, in which the trials and tribulations of a film production company are documented until the film is finally triumphantly displayed onscreen. LOST IN LA MANCHA takes the opposite tack. This funny and almost heartbreaking movie tracks the misadventures of director Terry Gilliam (of MONTY PYTHON fame) as he tries...and fails to get his vision of Cervantes' classic character of Don Quixote filmed. From dealing with loud fighter jets flying overhead, through torrential rain, and through his lead actor becoming so ill that he can't sit on his horse, this flick holds your attention. Of course, it helps that Gilliam is rather a good sport about the whole thing, as he and his crew freely contributes their time and allow for almost unrestricted access to the documentary film crew. For students of filmmaking, or if you just enjoy films in general, this is definitely a must-see which I definitely recommend.

Rating:
Summary: Murphy's Law
Review: It isn't surprising to see the attraction Terry Gilliam has to Cervantes' Don Quixote. A tale of an old man on his death bed who dreams of being a knight. One day he gets out of bed, slaps some tin on his body, hops on an old horse and becomes a swashbuckler. Don Quixote suffers from disillusion and in Lost In La Mancha our director does as well.

Terry Gilliam has a notorious record of going over budget. On Munchhausen he was ten million dollars over on the sixth week. In the case of Don Quixote he had 34.1 million dollars for a film that should easily cost twice as much. The sad thing about watching this fragile house of cards get blown away is knowning this thing never had a prayer to begin with. These guys were a week before production without even locking down the actors, what did they expect? I know we hear all these success stories in cinema about how so and so director made this film for no money under brutal conditions and came out with a masterpiece but what we don't hear about are the much more prevalent UNSUCCESSFUL stories and so it's great to watch this thing and see the more realistic side of the coin.

This is a great documentary, great for Gilliam fans, film students, cinephiles, and anyone who has even a slight interest in films. Way better then that project Greenlight.

Ciao

Rating:
Summary: Gilliam finally has his 'Lost Film'
Review: It seems no director is truly given the title of genius until he has at least one project that never makes it to fruition. The same can be said for Orsen Welles, & even Walt Disney, who had several projects that never made it, including the recently-discovered 1946 collaboration with Salvador Dali entitled 'Destino'. Anyway, as an avid fan of Terry Gilliam's since I first saw 'Brazil' at the age of 12, no other single director, with the possible exception of George Lucas, has stimulated my imagination to the degreee this man has. A true auteur in every sense of the word, Gilliam is more akin to a musician, releasing a morsel of genius every 5 years or so to whet his fans' appetites. Having not heard from the man since 1998's 'Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas' also starring Johhny Depp, I have been in dire need of a Gilliam fix for some time. Of course the lavish & well-deserved DVD treatment some of his new & older films have received has made the wait more bearable. Then I heard rumors he was directing Neil Gaiman's 'Good Omens' several years back, & my hope began to return. After not hearing anything about that failed project for the next couple of years, I was again excited to hear he was adapting Don Quixote into a trademarked Gilliam-black comedy-timetravel-eyecandy piece his fandom had been waiting for. Cut to 2 years later & reading about the horrific end this film came to, the health problems, set problems, & overall bad karma that seems to follow Gilliam around like bad B.O. Then 'Lost in La Mancha' came to be & I was dying to see it in a theater. Well, living in Tennessee, you can imagine it never got this far. Anyway, I'm glad to see this FINALLY released on DVD in this country, having been out in Europe for several months now. It's not much of a time pill, & Terry is getting close to his 70th birthday, but I still believe the man will grace us with his vision again, & hopefully be recognized as the true genius he is, before he leaves us for that great financial pirate ship in the sky...

Rating:
Summary: The secret is in the second disk
Review: LILM is a workmanlike documentary, hitting the marks it wants to hit, but limited by a considerable flaw--the allegiance of the filmmakers to Terry Gilliam. Certainly Gilliam possesses a kind of manic charm, and while it's true that his Quixote production did suffer from bad luck that the documentary captures pretty well, LILM glosses over Gilliam's own missteps, some of which come out in the interviews on the second disk. Among them:

1) Who picked the locations for the film? How did they not do their homework on the weather conditions/air rights, etc? How in the world did they not even look at the sound stage the production planned to use? Inexcusable, and entirely on the shoulders of the production team, which includes Gilliam.

2) This is the second big-budget project that Gilliam has blown--is there any other director with a comparable record? The documentary gives us no idea of where Gilliam falls within a spectrum of production failures. Is he truly a poor manager of productions, or does this kind of thing happen more often than we know?

3) The second disk betrays Gilliam's cavalier approach to paperwork and contracts. Gilliams's not settled on his own deal days before the shoot, Vanessa Paradis hasn't finalized her deal on the eve of her scheduled appearance, and Depp and Rochefort seem to show up on their own schedule, not the production's. And, when it really matters, no one seems to have a handle on the insurance issues. Maybe this is the normal course of things on a movie set, but the documentary doesn't let us know, and to an outsider, it sure looks like Gilliam ignores the details until the consequences prevent him from doing whatever he wants to do whenever he wants to do it.

4) In the interview extras, Gilliam chats blithely about wanting to do Quixote for a decade, then lets slip the fact that HE DID NOT READ THE BOOK UNTIL AFTER HE'D LANDED A DEAL. I couldn't get over this one...the hubrus of complaining about Hollywood/European executives keeping a tight rein on his budget (a not inconsiderable $32 million) when HE HADN'T EVEN INVESTED THE TIME TO READ WHAT HE WANTED TO FILM. As interesting as his work has been, Gilliam, thanks to the second disk, looks more like the kind of product of the sixties and seventies that everyone's come to hate, persistently placing blame for his shortcomings on the system, complementing his own independence (when no one's asked), and believing that he's entitled to extravagant resources for his artistic vision. In the film and the extras, poor Gilliam spends a lot of time telling the camera/assorted interviewers that he's a responsible person, a responsible manager of a film set, but he looks more like someone who's saying it aloud to see if it sounds true than someone who really believes it.

So if you're going for LILM, make sure you watch the second disk, and for a comparison film, watch Raising Victor Vargas--made for NOTHING, with no stars, no elaborate sets, and packed with more feeling and drama than Gilliam, for all his costumes and pyrotechnics and effortless self-aggrandizement, has ever produced. Maybe Gilliam's roaring about not having much to say...

Rating:
Summary: LIVE YOUR DREAMS
Review: LOST IN LA MANCHA (New Video Group) is the sad, frustrating and highly quixotic dissolution of Terry Gilliam's ten-year obsession of bringing Don Quixote to the big screen. This fabulous documentary covers about a month of preproduction and less than a week of actual shooting when everything that could go wrong does. Screaming jets from a nearby military testing range disrupt shot after shot, the actor playing Quixote develops serious medical problems and can no longer ride a horse, the multi-national crew has a communication breakdown and then an act of God, in the form of a flash flood, wipes out the elaborate location set and one of a kind props. Of course, through it all Gilliam is the metaphor for Quixote and we get a glimpse of what might have been and what still could be. Live your dreams. Recommended.

Rating:
Summary: a documentary about how a movie didn't get made
Review: Lost in La Mancha is a documentary film focusing on Terry Gilliam's failed attempt to film "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote". For ten years director Terry Gilliam (Twelve Monkeys, Brazil, The Fisher King) had been trying to get a movie made of Don Quixote made. It is his dream project. Unfortunately for Gilliam, it is also a film he has never gotten to make. Lost in La Mancha covers the six weeks of preproduction and the six days of actual production on the film.

Lost in La Mancha is a document of what can go wrong on a film shoot. During this documentary, a crew member states that if someone would write this story, nobody would believe him. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong.

We see a brief bit about the history of trying to film Don Quixote including Orson Welles' twenty year obsession and ultimate failure to get the movie off the ground. This leads into Terry Gilliam and his ten year obsession with the same thing. We begin with the six weeks of preproduction and the principal actors do not have signed contracts and the ones that do are not quite living up to the requirements of the contract. Costume fittings and rehearsals are being missed and the studio for some of the filming is nothing more than a warehouse with no acoustics to speak of. Things just have the feel of slipping out of control. It is suggested that this is the way Gilliam works, but even Gilliam feels that things are slipping. He mentions the fiasco of Baron Munchausen. Gilliam states that things are similar. Munchausen had actors but no costumes or sets. Don Quixote has costumes and sets but no actors. The film is slipping away from him.

Finally the actors arrive (including Johnny Depp). There is minimal rehearsal but they are ready to begin. They are filming the first scenes nearby a NATO bombing range in Spain. Supposedly NATO only uses it an hour a day. Filming begins. NATO flies the fighter jets overhead so that sound is ruined for these scenes. An extra wasn't there for rehearsal and ruins another shot. A storm that was not mentioned on any weather report for three days rains down and floods the set. Not only is equipment partially damaged, it changes the color of the landscape. Gilliam selected that location because of how it looked. The color of the dirt has changed because of the rain and mudslides. The lead actor playing Quixote (a Frenchman) has a prostate infection and can't sit on a horse. He'll be gone a day, a week, another week. The film has come to standstill and there has only been six days of actual filming.

Finally, Gilliam's movie is done. Nothing more can be salvaged and it is taken as a loss. Lost in La Mancha is a fascinating look at the breakdown of a movie (and one that looked like it could be good, too). I didn't know that a documentary about how a movie didn't get made could be so interesting, but it was.