When a freak hailstorm and flash flood struck the set of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in September 2000, the actors ran for cover, the crew scrambled to secure the cameras, and the embattled director Terry Gilliam walked out into the storm. He raised his fists to the skies and shouted at the top of his lungs, and then he stood and watched as much of their equipment was washed away on a torrent of mud.
The indelible image of Gilliam staggering against the elements was captured in the tragicomic documentary Lost in La Mancha (2002) and – having already endured the disruptive presence of Nato bombers flying over their location – it seemed to mark the point when he knew that his dream project, which he had first conceived in 1989, was falling apart. When they attempted to resume shooting, a double herniated disc incapacitated his septuagenarian lead actor Jean Rochefort and removed all doubt. Five days into production, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was doomed.
Seventeen years later, I arrive in Portugal to observe Gilliam’s latest attempt to resurrect The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and the prevailing mood is calm. There have been no illnesses, no mishaps and no acts of God; in fact, the company has experienced just two days of inclement weather so far, which happened to coincide with days scheduled for shooting interiors. Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, the directors of Lost in La Mancha, have been documenting the film’s progress again, but so far their sequel is shaping up to be considerably less dramatic.
Everyone is quietly moving forward with a production that has already come through five weeks in Spain unscathed and has now descended on Tomar, a small Portuguese city founded by Knights Templar in the 12th century, with the spectacular Convento de Cristo offering a perfect backdrop for Gilliam’s tale of a knight-errant. One section of the convent has been commandeered for today’s shoot, while tourists continue to roam around the rest of the building, some of them confusedly snapping pictures of a giant wooden pyre that production designer BenjamÃn Fernández is constructing for a later scene.
When I reach the set I find Gilliam busy preparing for a shot that will involve a long camera movement and 20 actors on horses, and the animal factor is giving him a headache. The horses have to be lined up two-by-two in the same order for each take, and some of them are more compliant than others. “I’ve always avoided horses and now they’re here, it’s a nightmare. You have this idea that you’re going to be like John Ford and everybody else, but no,” Gilliam complains, pining for his Monty Python days. “We were really smart when we were young: we just used coconuts.” Still, if the biggest issue currently facing the director is a few uncooperative horses, then perhaps the cinema gods are smiling on Gilliam at last.
