Directors: Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe
It surely can’t be possible for something like the making of a major motion picture to not have at least a few hitches. There are too many people involved across numerous departments and far too many moving parts for such a mammoth job to go completely smoothly. However filmmaker Terry Gilliam does seem to get more than his fair share of problems with his movies. He famously had a very public battle over the final cut of his film Brazil (1985), his leading man (Heath Ledger) died very early into the filming of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) and the less said about the problems that plagued The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) the better.
But at least, despite all of these problems, these projects all reached fruition. That is (at least initially) not the case with The Man Who Killed Don Quixote which Gilliam began filming in 2000 after around a decade of development. Within about two weeks of the cameras starting to roll the whole film was abandoned. While this would normally just become a footnote in Gilliam’s career, the presence of Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe who were there to film a ‘making of’ documentary meant that all of the catastrophes that plagued the production were recorded in horrifying detail. The result is this ‘un-making of’ documentary: Lost in La Mancha.
Rereleased to celebrate its twentieth anniversary, Lost in La Mancha like so many great documentaries ended up being something that nobody could have predicted when it started. Even when it was released in 2002, the ending was already well known, but the path to such an unfortunate end was (and still very much is) an equally fascinating and upsetting journey.
Loosely based on the 1615 novel Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, Gilliam’s film was to follow Quixote (Jean Rochefort) and his deluded quest to become a brave knight fighting giants, which are in reality windmills that he attacks whenever he comes across one. He would have been accompanied by his squire, not Sancho Panza but Toby, a 21st century advertising executive thrown back in time and played by Johnny Depp. This documentary doesn’t shed much more light on the film plot than this, but the real life events that unfold are undoubtedly more interesting and perhaps even almost as unbelievable. Prior to the cameras starting to roll problems are already apparent including absent actors, departments spread all over Europe and a soundstage that is more like an abandoned warehouse. And then within days of starting to shoot, the film is beset by hail storms, flash floods, a location besieged by fighter planes, the leading man becoming ill, and then the final nail in the coffin: the involvement of the insurance company.
Possessing something of an ‘enfant terrible’ reputation, Gilliam instead come across as generally very reasonable here. He has moments of frustration and the odd flash of something approaching anger, but this is entirely reasonable under the circumstances. This is a man who has been through massively problematic film shoots, and so he is initially philosophical and even cheerfully resigned to the chaos. However, as things start to massively stack up against the project and he sees it start to completely unravel, the camera is there to capture his realisation and abject despair.
Starting as darkly comic, the mood of this film becomes increasingly dark and hopeless as we watch the blissfully ignorant people involved careen towards the inevitable car crash finale. And just like the proverbial car crash, this is very difficult to look away from.
What would have been nice for this rerelease would have been the addition of a coda that explains what has happened to The Man Who Killed Don Quixote since (Gilliam finally made and released in 2017). However the film does not suffer for the lack of this and that is covered in Fulton and Pepe’s follow up documentary from 2019 He Dreams of Giants.
For anyone interested in the filmmaking process, this documentary is a must-watch. It also acts as a bitter warning to anyone who is interested in becoming a filmmaker themselves because sometimes trying to make a film is as pointless as tilting at windmills.
Blue Finch Film Releasing presents the 20th anniversary release ofLost in La Manchain cinemas and on digital 15 April 2022
The Reviews Hub Score:
Comically Tragic
