A French court has given the go-ahead for Terry Gilliam’s new film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, to be shown at the closing gala of the Festival de Cannes on May 19. After working for decades on the film, the former Monty Python star suffered a stroke earlier this week as one of the project’s backers sued to stop the screening. Gilliam was released from hospital on Wednesday and is expected to attend the premiere.
Gilliam first started working on his “fantasy/adventure/comedy,” loosely based on the novel Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, in 1989. He wrote the screenplay with Tony Grisoni who has worked with Gilliam on previous projects. A documentary, Lost in La Mancha, about early efforts to make Quixote, was released in 2002. The finished film, stars Jonathan Pryce (as an old man who thinks he is the character in Cervantes’ novel) and Adam Driver (as Tony Grisoni, an advertising executive, who the old man thinks is Sancho Panza).
Over the years Robin Williams, Johnny Depp, Ewan McGregor and Jack O’Connell have all been cast in the role of Tony Grisoni/Sancho Panza. John Cleese, Jean Rochefort, Michael Palin, Robert Duvall and John Hurt have all been contracted to play the part of Don Quixote. Pryce was originally cast in another role in the original 2000 production.
In the making of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote Gilliam has managed to surpass the machinations of even the late, great filmmaker Orson Welles who rarely finished a film without having to go through extraordinary financial hoops - like Gilliam usually involving both Hollywood and other financing to keep the ball rolling. Ironically, a reconstructed version of Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind, left unfinished by the filmmaker himself, was scheduled to be shown at this year’s Cannes. A dispute with Netflix, who came on board to help complete the project, resulted in all Netflix productions being pulled from the festival.
But the show must go on, as Welles said many times. Even though the battle over the rights to The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is still active in the courts, Cannes will allow Gilliam’s film to be shown on the closing night of the festival.
