Lost In La Mancha

Even Monty Python member Terry Gilliam’s own fertile, fantastical imagination pales next to the struggles and Biblical disasters that infested and finally squelched his production of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Practice NATO bombing runs drowned out the shoot on a key Spanish desert set. The only available soundstage had the acoustics of a bottomless pit and an air-conditioning system that rumbled like overhead F-16s. A flash flood and mudslides washed away equipment and any chance of staying on schedule. And the physical ailments of the film’s 72-year-old leading man, who was to spend most of the film on horseback, pounded final nails into a coffin containing Gilliam’s wilting dream of reviving Miguel de Cervantes’ classic tale of latent heroics and delusion. Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe were on location in Spain with camera in hand to witness the final eight weeks of pre-production and the principal shoot of Gilliam’s decade-long effort to turn his feverish Quixote dream into reality. For their documentary, they were looking for a backstage story unlike any other. They found a chaotic state of affairs in which the actual production not only depicts but also metaphorically embodies its story’s insanity, exhilaration, grimness and impossibility. M.H.