A script that calls for big movie stars, expensive fighter
planes and a natural disaster would hardly faze most Hollywood film
directors. For a pair of documentarians, however, capturing these
elements on film is something to get excited about.
When Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton set out to make a documentary
of the preproduction stages of Terry Gilliam’s film version
of “The Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha,” they
felt sure they could find enough conflict to make an interesting
film. Witnessing the film’s cast and crew subjected to one
catastrophe after another, ultimately leading to the disintegration
of the project, was well beyond the kind of conflict they had hoped
to find.
“The first week of any film production is going to be
miserable. There’s 150 people who are all learning to work
with each other. But you don’t think that this is going to be
the end of the film,” Pepe said.
Tensions were already high when Fulton and Pepe arrived on the
set of what would ultimately become their wrenching new
documentary, “Lost in La Mancha.” The European crew was
operating on a pint-sized budget, many of them did not speak the
same language, and none of the actors had arrived for crucial
rehearsals and wardrobe fittings.
But Gilliam, director of “Brazil,” “12
Monkeys” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,”
had struggled for 10 years to bring “The Adventures of Don
Quixote de la Mancha” to the screen and was determined to
make the best of a difficult situation. It took an unbelievable
series of events over only six days of filming, including a flash
flood, NATO bombers doing flybys, and actors falling ill to destroy
finally the director’s dream.
The resulting documentary, opening in limited release today,
chronicles the often hilarious and eventually heartbreaking
struggle of a creative and passionate man unwilling to accept that
his fantasies will not become reality. For Fulton and Pepe, the
parallels between Gilliam and Don Quixote, the man who fought
giants that were really windmills and loved every minute of it,
were obvious from the beginning.
“Most of the movies he has made have Don Quixote
characters embedded within them,” Fulton said. “Don
Quixote has always been the source for Terry Gilliam, and here he
was finally going to tackle the source itself.”
The tragedy of Miguel de Cervantes’ classic hero is that
at the end, Don Quixote is forced to accept that the things he had
seen were only in his mind. Instead of feeling relief that Don
Quixote has finally been cured of his insanity, the reader laments
the loss of a true adventurer. While any filmmaker would be
thrilled to stumble upon a story as compelling as Don Quixote, in
the case of “Lost in La Mancha,” the directors had
mixed emotions.
“When you’re making a documentary, you’re
looking for dramatic things to happen,” Fulton said.
“So when the flash flood was occurring, we were excited.
You’re getting very high production values for free. But at
the same time Lou and I have known Terry for a long time, and
suddenly we’re filming his disaster, his worst
nightmare.”
Perhaps they all should have known better. In the course of
editing their film, Fulton and Pepe stumbled upon an odd piece of
both literary and film folklore: The Quixote curse. Owing to a
fraudulent version of the second part of his book having been
published a year before he completed it, Cervantes included in his
final version a warning to anyone who might try to use his
character for their own means.
Gilliam was not the first filmmaker to fall victim to the
Quixote curse. Orson Welles tried to make his version for 30 years,
leaving it still unfinished at the time of his death. Actor
Fernando Rey died in the middle of filming a miniseries version for
Spanish television. But perhaps these failures have had more to do
with the nature of Cervantes’ character than with a centuries
old threat.
“I think it’s just the case that Don Quixote as a
subject matter is appealing to a lot of filmmakers and writers who
like to take on impossible dreams. It appeals to dreamers,”
Fulton said.