Terry Gilliam is talking about a return to La Mancha once again. You’ll recall in January of this year the fanciful director was talking aloud discussing the possibilities about revisiting his doomed pet project, “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,” whose spectacular failure was captured in the documentary, “Lost In La Mancha.”
The obsessive filmmaker has seemingly never gotten over the disastrous project that would have starred Johnny Depp had it not been cursed from the get-go (they shot a pathetic five days of footage, the production was like a plague of increasing calamities). Apparently the rights to the project had been entangled in legal snares and at the top of the year, Gilliam was sounding hopeful he’d have another shot at the film. But to be perfectly honest, we shrugged and thought well, “we’ll believe it when we see it.” Gilliam’s career hasn’t been stellar this decade and to paraphrase something we just read somewhere (we forget), the super-brief theatrical releases of his film have almost been a portal, head’s up to the straight-to-DVD market.
But now that Gilliam has dead-Heath Ledger in his upcoming film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus,” surely more eyeballs will on his next project, no? Not that dead people or cache have any sway over legal matters, but Gilliam recently told Hello magazine (via Vulture) that he hasn’t abandoned the idea and would like to tackle it one more time, again with Depp (pretty much exactly what he said six months ago). What did he say this time? Nothing, there’s no quotes. Why did we bother? This is what happens when you start to blog about something and actually haven’t read the piece. Well, fyi, for anyone having not heard this story during the new year, blargh.
ACtually I think that the first article about this is there : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/2462406/Johnny-Depp-and-Terry-Gilliam-tilt-again-at-Don-Quixote.html
and there’s quotes… Not from Gilliam but from “one source close to the revived project”, who says : “”They are having another crack at it after putting a deal together. Johnny is a bigger star now than he was then, thanks to the Pirates of the Caribbean, and there is every confidence they can pull it off.”
The big new element in all this is that “Ownership of the script has now returned to Gilliam.”, which was what Gilliam had been waiting for to start the film again.