Honky dory TAB

Director Terry Gilliam is beloved by genre fans for films like Brazil, 12 Monkeys, and Time Bandits, but his pictures are often - and famously - plagued by production troubles. Never was that more true than with his doomed The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, the film that notoriously never came to be but the troubled and incomplete production of which was portrayed in the popular 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha. Now, however, Gilliam says that he is on the verge of resurrecting the long thought dead project.

"We're in the final stages of getting the rights to Quixote back," the director told IGN earlier today. "I mean, I've been hearing this for the past six months, and I'm getting a bit impatient. But when we get that back, that would be the thing I would just dive in [on]. First thing I would do is make one phone call: 'Johnny, when are you available?' And that would dictate when I do it."

The Johnny in question is, of course, Johnny Depp, the planned star of the first version of Quixote. Gilliam says that the actor is still onboard the film. "He's on, he's on," the director said, before adding with a laugh, "He's the man… I hope he's still my best friend!"


As for how much of the original version of Quixote can be used for this new production, the helmer believes that there's little chance of actual footage being recycled from that shoot.

"We have to start anew," Gilliam confirmed. "We have to throw it all away. We do have things like costumes stored away. There's some work that's been done, but everything we shot is gone. It's such a dangerous thing, because the documentary was so good and people have got so many images in their own head of what the film will be like. Their imagination may be better than what I produce, so who knows."