From Orson Welles to Terry Gilliam, the many quixotic efforts to film the Miguel de Cervantes novel

In 1597, a Spanish tax collector with literary pretensions found himself behind bars when the Sevillian banker with whom he had deposited the collected tax money went bust. He was out in three months, but in the interim he had come up with the germ of an idea that would lead to the first modern novel – and one of literature’s most idiosyncratic protagonists.

2016 marks the 400th death anniversary of Miguel de Cervantes, a fact that has largely been ignored in the English-speaking part of the world, not least because it’s also the 400th death anniversary of a certain William Shakespeare. But there is at least one (honorary) Brit out there who’s had only Cervantes on his mind for a while. When the year began, he tweeted:

It was in 1990 that director Terry Gilliam first contemplated a film on Cervantes’s legendary creation: “I called my old friend Jake Eberts [the executive producer on his previous film, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen] and said, ‘I have two names for you: Quixote and Gilliam. And I need $20m.’ He said, ‘Done!’ I then sat down and read the book and thought, Jesus, this is unfilmable.”

It took ten years and countless meetings for the money to materialise. By then, Gilliam and his co-writer Toni Grisoni had improvised a script about a modern day advertising executive who somehow lands up in La Mancha, where Don Quixote mistakes him for Sancho Panza. Gilliam’s dream project was going to be one of the costliest films ever made in Europe. Even so, he was taking a massive pay cut; so was the film’s marquee actor Johnny Depp, who was going to play the role of the ad executive/Sancho Panza. Quixote was being played by the French character actor Jean Rochefort, who had spent months learning English for this role.

With just weeks to go before principal photography began on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, everyone was jittery. “It’s got lot of potential for chaos,” Gilliam said in an interview. But the crew members trusted Gilliam and believed if anyone could pull it off it was he. “It’s Terry’s sort of film,” said his long-time collaborator, the Italian cinematographer Nicola Pecorini.

It was Terry’s sort of film. Gilliam, who grew up in America, shot to fame with his work with the British comedy collective Monty Python. He then went on to direct a series of critically and commercially successful films such as Time Bandits (1981), Brazil (1985) and 12 Monkeys (1995). Described as one of the great cinematic fabulists of our time, the Don Quixote adaptation is right up Gilliam’s alley.

Production on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote began in Spain towards the end of September 2000. Things began to go massively wrong on the first day itself. Rochefort, whose arrival had been delayed due to illness, showed clear signs of discomfort when perched on the horse. This was ironic, given that one of the reasons Gilliam backed Rochefort for this role was that he could ride a horse. With the actor believed to be suffering from a “prostrate problem”, the film’s first assistant director declared Rochefort unfit to continue shooting. He was overruled by a gung-ho Gilliam and the jittery producers.

This was a bad enough start, but no one could have predicted the events of the second day. It was a beautiful morning. But by afternoon, the light changed as dark, ominous clouds began to gather. And then the heavens opened up. “It was a tempest,” Gilliam later told a journalist, “It was like a punishment for everything bad I had ever done in my life. It was like Job.”

The flash floods left the set in chaos. When the crew gathered again on the fourth day, they realised the rain had completely changed the colour of the landscape. And when Rochefort flew off to Paris as the pain had become unbearable, the writing was on the wall. Terry Gilliam’s dream project lay in tatters. The only positive outcome of the abandoned project was a documentary that filmmakers Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe made in 2002 from behind-the-scenes footage they had shot during those tumultuous weeks. The film was aptly titled Lost In La Mancha.

Gilliam is not the first high-profile director to try and adapt Don Quixote. In the mid-fifties, the great American filmmaker Orson Welles had shot test colour footage for a 30-minute television production titled As Don Quixote Passes By. When the project was shot down by CBS, Welles decided to expand it into a full-length film.

In 1957, when the producers of Touch Of Evil asked Welles to stay away from his own movie’s edit, the mercurial director headed off to Mexico with a crew and a little girl named Patty McCormick to make his Quixote film. McCormick was to play Dulcie, who would come across Welles (playing himself) and he would tell her the story of Don Quixote. She would then encounter Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and become part of their adventures in the contemporary world.

Welles shot two schedules in Mexico when, inevitably, the money ran out. By the time he had enough money to begin shooting again, Patty McCormick had grown up. Consequently the Dulcie track was done away with. The project continued to evolve, with the shooting relocating to Spain and the script undergoing constant changes.

In 1969, Francisco Reigeura, the veteran Spanish actor who was playing Quixote, died. Three years later, Welles was still working on the film, a fact confirmed by his decision to send his cinematographer to shoot second-unit material in Spain. But the film remained incomplete. In 1986, a year after Welles passed away, 45 minutes of footage assembled from his rushes was shown at the Cannes film festival.

And that’s where matters would have rested had not a Spanish film distributor by the name of Patxi Irigoyen decided to embark on a mission to hunt down all the footage, now lying scattered with various sources in Europe and America, and put it all together. He was joined in his pursuit by director Jess Franco, who had worked with Welles on Chimes at Midnight and then gone on to make a name for himself with his arthouse sexploitation films.

The result of their collaboration, “a 116-minute, 35-mm film edited from about 328,080 feet of film footage” shot across various formats, was screened at Cannes in 1992. Don Quixote de Orson Welles didn’t do go down well with audiences, with some critics even going on to call it an act of butchery. It also did not help matters that, due to legal hassles, Franco did not have access to some of the material Welles had shot in Mexico all those years ago, including a brilliant sequence that has been described by the Italian philosopher Girgio Agamben as “the most beautiful six minutes in the history of cinema.”

In May 2016, Terry Gilliam arrived at the Cannes film festival to announce The Man Who Killed Don Quixote Version 2.0. Armed with his old swagger and a new producer, he told the press he was going to make the film with a completely new star cast – old Monty Python mate Michael Palin as Quixote, Adam Driver (Star Wars: The Force Awakens) as the ad executive/Sancho Panza, and Bond girl Olga Kuryenko in an important role. With a scaled-down budget, he was going to begin shooting in the first week of October, again in Spain. When a journalist invoked Orson Welles and ‘the curse of Don Quixote’, the director laughed it off and said he hoped to bring the completed film to Cannes in 2017. As of September 2016, the film has been delayed yet again over funding problems.

Terry Gilliam, some will say, is a brave man. There are others who might label his efforts quixotic.