This year was a bit quiet for Terry Gilliam. The filmmaker spent most of 2018 trying to finally secure the release of his long-awaited film, “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.” And outside of a few headline-grabbing comments, Gilliam was relatively quiet in 2019. So, that begs the question, what’s next?
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Speaking to The Wrap, Gilliam talks about how he’s approached a new frontier in his career — the unknown.
“I’m playing with a few things, but I just don’t know,” he said about the future. “It’s the first time in my life I felt this. Maybe I have burned myself out. I’m reading like mad trying to get something that kicks me into belief again. Maybe the problem is getting old. You get weary. My life and my filmmaking has been about fights, and now there’s nobody attacking me. (Laughs)”
He added, “We’ll see what’s going. I’m working with Richard LaGravenese on an old script that we had years ago, trying to see if we can update it and make it work. We thought, well, maybe we can extend this and make a six-part TV series. Because the money is sitting there at Netflix and all the other streamers. But when you see Marty [Scorsese] doing what he does, the Coen brothers doing it, I’m not sure if Netflix is going to have any money left by the time I get there.”
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What is that old script he’s working on? Well, in another interview with Deadline on the Crew Call podcast, Gilliam goes a bit deeper into the project he’s co-writing with LaGravenese, and for followers of the filmmaker, it’s a project that they’ve likely heard about before — “The Defective Detective.”
“This is something we wrote after ‘Fisher King,’ and it never got made,” he explained. “It’s been hanging around. We’ve been playing with it recently to see if we can put some life back into the thing. We haven’t solved it yet. And we’ve been talking and seeing if it would be better to extend it and make it into six hour segments and really let it breathe a bit. I don’t know. It’s not there.”
He continued, “And I am doing a theatrical musical next year. It’s in London at the Old Vic. It’s a Sondheim musical. I’ve moved into opera and things like that. While I wait to get movies off the ground, I have to do these other jobs.
Details of the last project aren’t known at this time, however, it’s good to know that Gilliam is keeping busy after the decades-long wait to release ‘Don Quixote.’
