Lost in La Mancha
IFC, $29.95They say that it is the first film about a film that doesn’t exist. Lost in La Mancha documents six tragic days of shooting that followed seven short weeks of preproduction for the Terry Gilliam disaster The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, starring Johnny Depp. The epic was never completed. Directors Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton initially set out to make an hourlong TV documentary on the fruition of a Gilliam work 10 years in the making; it was the director’s second run at the oft-attempted Cervantes classic, rumored to be cursed. When Pepe and Fulton were met head-on with that curse — financing, scheduling, and actor problems along with “a great biblical storm,” F-16 flyovers, and disabling pain — they decided to turn their humble documentary into a feature-length film. The doc debuted in the U.S. at the Telluride Film Festival in fall of 2002 to great acclaim, and it was recently released as a 2-DVD set boiling over with special features. Along with deleted scenes and production stills, La Mancha includes almost an hour of interviews with Gilliam and Depp as well as the documentary team, a “conversation” between Gilliam and author Salman Rushdie at the Telluride Fest, and the unedited version of IFC Focus: Terry Gilliam, which aired on IFC in January. All it lacks is commentary, but one guesses these vérité filmmakers wouldn’t stand for it. All in all, it’s a glimpse into a nightmare; as Depp explains deftly, “It’s very funny and very tragic — and all horribly true.” Apparently not given to defeatism, Gilliam plans on entering the fray again as soon as he can buy back the rights to his script. If the next attempt is even half as entertaining as this doc, the curse definitely will have been lifted.
This article appears in Tom ‘Leatherface’ Delay.