Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/Lost in La Mancha

Movie Guru Rating:

Enlightening (4 out of 5)

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Lost in La Mancha proves that bad things can happen to good directors

by Adrienne Martini

And you thought you were having a bad week.

Fall on your knees and thank the deity of your choice that you're not film director and former Monty-Python-er Terry Gilliam. For one strange week in 2000, almost all of the bad luck that could visit a production plagued the set of his The Man Who Killed Quixote. Only locusts would have made the catastrophe complete.

On paper, Gilliam's Quixote project seemed like a winner. Here the creative mind that gave the world such imaginative fodder as Time Bandits and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas would take on the Cervantes classic about a man with a wild, romantic imagination. Two things stood in Gilliam's way. The first seemed easy enough to overcome; the Quixote tale has a legend in filmic circles that is equivalent to the theatrical superstition around Hamlet. All who try to tackle Quixote will fail. And for the last decade, this director has been trying to mount his Quixote and ride it into film greatness.

But Gilliam perseveres in spite of this curse in Lost in La Mancha, the documentary that captures the disaster that was Quixote. The realization of this film is his Grail, and nothing will stop him—not even the second major obstacle, which is the fact that no American studio is willing to back his project, because Gilliam has been labeled "difficult" since his 1988 flop The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Despite his recent successes, like The Fisher King and Twelve Monkeys, Gilliam just can't raise the scratch he needs for the Quixote project.

For smaller projects, this wouldn't be much of a speed bump. Wonderful movies find financing outside of the Hollywood studio system all of the time. Usually, however, these are smaller pictures, driven by character and story more than imaginative sets and fantastic vision. For that, you need cold hard cash, which is the one thing Gilliam can't find. For his $40 million feature, the director can only raise $32 million, which still seems like a lot of money, until you put it against a Hollywood scale. Quixote could easily top $100 million or more, if Gilliam were written a blank check.

For lack of benjamins, a series of events quickly becomes catastrophic. The shooting schedule leaves no margin for error. European sound stages are booked solid, except for one economical choice with an echo that rivals the grand canyon. There is no time or money for rehearsals, which isn't that large a deal since none of the main actors (Johnny Depp, Jean Rochefort) can get to the set until the first day of shooting—a detail that springs from these stars taking a pay cut in order to work with Gilliam. Because they aren't there, costumes and make-up fall behind schedule. And on. And on.

All of these mini-crises are amusing, at first. Somehow, it's always comforting to know that famous people have problems, too. Gilliam's ebullience makes you firmly believe that this will all work out well in the end—despite the fact that you know that it doesn't. If only they can get the cameras rolling, you whisper to yourself, then all will be well. Only they do, and then the fighter jets scream past. And it starts to rain. And Rochefort falls ill. And on. And on.

Filmmakers Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, whose The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys graces that film's DVD, were given amazing access to this little production that couldn't. Even after it all starts to go horribly wrong, which is when most documentary subjects insist that the cameras go away, Fulton and Pepe keep rolling film, capturing wonderful moments of chaos and putting them in context. Witness Gilliam's right hand man, the Aussie Phil Patterson, be roundly ignored as he preaches pragmatism and, ultimately, quits. Catch a disgruntled crew learn that their jobs are over long before they've really begun. Eavesdrop on conversations with the insurance adjusters who insist that the whole debacle is an Act of God and, therefore, not covered. And weep with Gilliam once his dream project whimpers and slips into a coma.

Lost in La Mancha, if nothing else, serves as a great memorial for what could have been a brilliant film. Film junkies, however, won't be the only ones who will get something out of this doc. La Mancha hits some of the great literary universals—age and dreams continually conquered by nature and reality, the indefatigable will nearly crushed by fate—that it is a testament to what makes us human despite all of our frailties. It is about laughing wild amidst great woe, a message that can fit any decade but feels especially important now.