Terry Gilliam on the movie that took him three decades to make.
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Terry Gilliam doesnt have an office; he has a lair.
My eyes, however, are immediately drawn to the many props from Gilliams movies.
On one table sits the helmet Sean Connery wore as King Agamemnon in 1981sTime Bandits.
Butpersonaldoesnt come close to describing the bizarre hold his latest film has had on him.
On April 19, it will open in limited theatrical release, as well as on VOD platforms.)
Gilliam has been working on it for three decades.
As the film spun out of control, the insurance company shut it down.
Just keep fucking shooting, you jerks!
I had to shout at them from the depths of my encroaching despair, Gilliam writes.
I started with the money long ago.
Ive got two names for you.
One isQuixoteand the other isGilliam.
He says, Done.
It was as simple as that.
I finally sat down and read it, Gilliam says, and I thought,Fuck me.
Where do we even begin?The problem with all of it was always trying to escape the book.
In 1998, Gilliam started working with hisFear and Loathing in Las Vegasco-writer Tony Grisoni from a new angle.
There, the aging knight-errant mistakes him for Sancho Panza, his faithful sidekick.
That was the script that went into production in 2000, with Depp as Toby and Rochefort as Quixote.
Gilliam may sometimes seem like the worlds unluckiest director.
The results were surprisingly seamless, althoughParnassusitself got mixed reviews.
And these are just the movies thatdidget made.
(Its a romantic comedy, by the way.)
Material like this makes Gilliam unlikely to command big budgets.
This can cause problems, to say the least.
Everybody says, Just lower the budget, even after weve lowered the budget considerably, says Amy Gilliam.
It had begun to smell like last weeks fish, he says.
Everybody was telling me, Stop.
Dont keep working on this.
Some were, according to the director, well-meaning fanboys who didnt quite know what they were doing.
Others were more mysterious.
That involved setting up an offshore company, to get access to this money.
And he, for whatever reason now, fancied her.
And he was coming over to London.
And then he didnt come over to London.
Then he had a heart attack.
So he was delayed a bit.
Then he suddenly did come to London.
But then he decided to trigger the financing of the film through his daughters bank account.
I mean, this is getting crazy!
And of course the next day his lawyer calls and says, That document means nothing!
By Gilliams estimate, he has made seven honest-to-goodness efforts to getQuixotemade over the past 25 years.
(The 2000 attempt was actually the third.)
Each time, there was money lined up, some semblance of a cast, and a start date.
Thats how stupid I am.)
In 2005, he planned to shoot with Depp and Gerard Depardieu.
By 2009, Robert Duvall was considering playing Quixote, and by 2010, Ewan McGregor had replaced Depp.
That was a good moment, says Gilliam, gesturing out the window.
I still have the tapes of John and Jack in my garden rehearsing stuff.
Hes wistful about the fragility that Hurt would have brought to the part.
He would have been a small mans Quixote, Gilliam says.
His face, his voice.
He wouldnt have been as funny or as mad as Jonathan, but he would have been more tragic.
Just a couple of lines that he said, I thought,Fuck.
In June 2015, Amazon joined the project as a distributor.
The two hit it off and Driver signed on to play the part of Toby.
Things finally seemed to be going Gilliams way.
But just as cameras were ready to roll, Hurt announced that he had pancreatic cancer.
(He would die in January of 2017.)
Out of respect for his friend, Gilliam waited to recast the film.
Despite the dire prognosis, he says, I wouldnt even consider looking at anybody else.
I delayed everything for six months.
Money had already been spent and sets had been built, so the director kept going.
(In earlier versions of the project, Gilliam had considered casting him in a smaller supporting part.
)The actor remembers receiving a text from the director in the middle of the night.
It said something like, Well, I suppose youd better do it, then.
But Gilliam was still $3 million short.
Miraculously, Alessandra Lo Savio, a producer friend of Amy Gilliams, offered to put up the money.
Elated, Amy and Terry went to meet her.
And then Terry Gilliam had a stroke.
Amy was driving me back home and suddenly pulls out into the middle of the road, he remember.
I said, What are you doing?
She said, Im going around that bus.
And I said, What bus?
So Im less of a visionary director now, he jokes.
In some ways, he had to be.
Pandoras box has been opened, and we are living in a time of chaos and madness.
From Trump to Brexit, this is madness!
This matches rather well with Cervantess caustic, surprisingly modern portrait of class and aristocracy.
A film crew, were like Vikings, Gilliam says.
Or locusts, maybe.
He recalls shootingMonty Python and the Holy Grailin a Scottish village in 1974.
A film is like a bad disease.
I thought,Lets play with all of that.
He remembers one man duringHoly Grailwho took a bus to come up to Scotland to work on the picture.
He paid his way up there.
He just arrived on set one day and was like, Can I be in the movie?
And he was wonderful.
He doubled Graham [Chapman] for a while.
He was doing stunts that other people couldnt do.
Thats the siren call of cinema.
Some people crash on the rocks and drown.
Other people take off and fly.
It could be argued that Gilliam has done a bit of both.
The final shoot ofQuixotewas remarkably smooth.
But mostly, Gilliams challenges had to do with the projects overwhelming legacy.
One pleasant surprise was Pryce, usually modest and reserved, who turned out to be quite the showman.
Jonathans a great comedian, and Quixote deserves humor, Gilliam says.
Hes a great ham.
But, of course, this is Gilliam, and nothing he does is ever easy.
But the legal problems took their toll.
Just before the Cannes premiere last year, Amy Gilliam noticed that something was off with her father.
Your whole left face has dropped down, she told him, though he hadnt felt anything.
Another medical checkup confirmed that Terry had experienced a blocked perforated medullary artery.
Reports suggested he had suffered another stroke, but he insists thats not accurate.
Theres been a blockage of things, but I seem to be okay, he says.
At the end of the screening, the Cannes audience gave him a 10-minute standing ovation.
(He writes almost all of his own posts, in case youre wondering.)
I hate people telling me not to do something, he says.
Im still like a kid who wont listen to his betters.
I can be perverse.
I can be obsessive.
Why does Quixote himself keep getting up?
I cant explain it.
