You have to give this guy credit. Terry Gilliam tried to make this film a decade ago and it fell apart in a truly grandiose fashion, but he hasn’t given up. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote first went into production in late 2000 only to quickly have sets ruined by flash flooding and Jean Rochefort, who was playing Don Quixote, suffer a double herniated disc. The result was a whole lot of legal wranglings and insurance claims, along with Lost in La Mancha, a documentary that tracked the production’s collapse.
Now Gilliam and Tony Grisoni, both of whom wrote the original script, have completed rewrites and have producers on board. Johnny Depp is in discussions to play the Sancho Panza character. Scheduling is said to be the key obstacle in getting Depp back on board, as he had the role originally too. He’d play a filmmaker who is swept up in Don Quixote’s quest and mistaken for Sancho Panza. The original film had Depp’s character traveling through time to arrive at this, and while it’s not mentioned in Variety’s piece, I’d assume it’s the same deal here.
Gilliam’s set to screen his latest, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, in a few days at Cannes. That film marks the last role of Heath Ledger, who died during a shooting hiatus after finishing the film’s real world scenes. The film was saved when Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law came in to play Ledger’s character in the film’s parallel worlds. That film doesn’t yet have a domestic release date.
