For two decades, Terry Gilliam has been trying to make Don Quixote, even with Johnny Depp attached all these years. Gilliam has moved on to other projects in the meantime of course, but he now claims that he’s finally got the money to pull it off. He also said that he’s now planning to do a modern take on the Miguel Cervantes story.
In an interview with TheWrap, Gilliam said that he now has the financing all set and filming could start as soon as after Christmas. He has also done significant work on the script, turning it into a modernized story that incorporates Gilliam’s personal journey to get the film made.
“I keep incorporating my own life into it and shifting it,” Gilliam told TheWrap. “The basic underlying premise of that the version Johnny was involved in was that he actually was going to be transported back to the 17th century, and now it all takes place now, it's contemporary. It's more about how movies can damage people.”
Depp’s character is now a filmmaker named Toby Grisoni, who made a dangerous adaptation of Don Quixote early in his career.
The former Monty Python member isn’t about to say that this attempt will definitely result in a film. He’s talked about making it for so many years that he won’t believe it’s done until he’s watching his own movie.
“I've done it so many times — or not done it so many times — I'll believe it when I see it,” he told the site with a laugh. “However, I'm behaving as if it's all going to happen as planned.”
Gilliam probably got the closest to making the film back in 1998, with Depp and Jean Rochefort. As Entertainment Weekly notes, the project was documented in the film Lost in La Mancha. In that version, Depp played a modern man mysteriously transported to the 17th Century.
One of the films Gilliam made while waiting on money for Don Quixote was The Zero Theorem, which opens in theaters on Sept. 19 and is available on VOD on Aug. 19.
image courtesy of INFphoto.com