Terry Gilliam has spent a long, long time trying to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. So much time, in fact, that an award-winning documentary, Lost In La Mancha, was released in 2002 about how it was impossible for him to make it, and nobody quite believed his claims in 2016 that he had finally secured funding and a cast and was making it happen. But, it’s real, unless this is an exceptionally elaborate gag.
The story revolves around Toby (Adam Driver), an advertising executive who revisits the village he shot a parody of Don Quixote as a film student in while scouting location for an ad. He’s quickly dragooned into becoming a squire by Jonathan Pryce’s Don, who Toby thinks at first is just a historical reenactor. It quickly becomes clear that Don thinks he’s really Don Quixote, and Toby finds himself increasingly unstuck in time and not entirely sure whether he’s hallucinated the story of Don Quixote or is somehow being sucked into the novel itself. Along the way he runs into Olga Kurylenko as a woman
The movie was ultimately saved by Amazon, which covered the bills and will be running it in theaters in a limited release before streaming it on their site. But the troubled production probably isn’t out of the woods yet, considering Gilliam’s statements about the Harvey Weinstein controversy, and the allegations that led to Roy Price, the former head of Amazon’s film division (who was behind launching the movie), abruptly resigning over sexual harassment allegations. It’s unlikely Gilliam is going to be able to promote the film without being confronted with his statements. We’ll see when it arrives later this year.
