WHAT WENT WRONG - The Man Who Killed Don Quixote

Episode Date: August 4, 2020

Adam Driver stars in a film conceived only 6 years after he was. This week, Chris & Lizzie learn the tale of director Terry Gilliam’s 29 year battle against F-16s, prostate infections, and insubordinate horses on his (perhaps) misguided quest to finish The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I will read the first text that you sent me as you were watching it. Oh, M.G. Chris, what is this trash movie? I'm 20 minutes in and I'm so confused. And also, feel like this is maybe racist? Still better than Fantastic Four. Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong. I am your host, Chris Winterbauer, here with my co-host, Lizzie Bassett. Lizzie, how are you doing this week? Chris, I'm thriving. I think there was a three-day period this week where I did not leave my house and I didn't realize. it until the third day. And then I went for a walk. And you know what? What a treat. Just like Jesus. All right. So this week we have a film that is very close to my heart. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,

the Little Scene 2018 Terry Gilliam film starring Adam Driver that he filmed in between Star Wars and Marriage Story and everything else that he had going on. Lizzie, you watched this for the first time last night. What were your thoughts? First of all, did not know that this movie existed. Yep. It's one of the most confusing movies I've ever seen in my entire life, and not in like a cool, let me break down this Christopher Nolan mind trick way, but in a, I don't think I need to watch this way. Right, right. Very fair. I agree it was confusing, and I knew a lot about the movie going into it. I will attempt to describe the plot for you. The shortest version of Adam Driver is a jaded commercial director who, after hooking up with his boss's girlfriend, reconnects with a Spanish, cobbler who played Don Quixote in his student film production of the text 10 years prior back when Adam Driver was not jaded.

To Driver's horror, this old man played by Jonathan Price has become convinced he actually is Don Quixote in the interim 10 years. The two then go on a string of loosely connected adventures that require the guiding synopsis from Wikipedia to track throughout the story. The man who killed Don Quixote is for. famous for one specific reason, and that is it took Terry Gilliam 30 years to make it. Stop. And it is unusual in film, unlike sculpture, painting, or even installation art, filmmaking is an

endeavor that cannot be accomplished alone. It requires the cooperation of hundreds, if not thousands of creative people in the service of ultimately one man or woman's vision. Film productions are therefore tightly scheduled. they tend not to run into the multi-year realm of these other works, specifically due to the astronomical costs involved, and when they do, we tend to hear about it, like Apocalypse Now, for example. However, there are some occasions when making a movie becomes a truly Sisyphian task, driven forward only by a director's dedication and maybe delusion in this case. And it is the case for the man who killed Don Quixote, a movie that Terry Gilliam sought out to make in 19, and finished in 2018.

So, let's dive in. So Terry Gilliam is the only American-born member of Monty Python. I did not realize he was American. He is American. He was born in Minnesota. He trained as an animator and a strip cartoonist in Los Angeles. And eventually, he started animating segments for Monty Python after working with John Cleese on a separate project.

He has a successful stint with Monty Python. He's brought in as a full member, but after the breakup of Monty Python, Gilliam moved into feature filmmaking. So he'd co-directed Life of Brian, and he clearly had an affinity and skill for this craft. And so he explodes onto the scene with his wildly inventive second feature, which is called Time Bandits. And if you haven't seen Time Bandits, I highly recommend it. It is insane. It's like this 1980s, like really dark family film.

that follows a young boy who joins a renegade troop of dwarves on an unpredictable journey through time. And the movie features like Tears in Space Time. They go to Italy during the Napoleonic Wars. They go to Greece. They're on the Titanic. Robin Hood is featured. There are giants, like minotaur monsters, a ridiculous amount of explosions, cheesy effects. It's got Sean Connery, John Cleese, Shelley Duval, Ian Holm, and Terry Gilliam shot it for $5 million.

So he pulls off this insane. epic for almost no money, relatively speaking. And the movie is a huge success. It grossed 42 and a half million dollars in North America alone. And with it, Terry Gilliam's able to then go and make the movie that he'd wanted to originally make, which is Brazil. Probably the movie he's most famous for. It's a dystopian satire. It's kind of like 1984 meets Dr. Strange Love. It's absolutely nuts. And Brazil did lose money at the box office, but it was like a huge critical hit. It's considered one of the greatest British films ever made. And Gilliam's like two for two at this right in time. He's, he's killing it. And he decides he's going to complete what he calls his

imagination trilogy with a movie called The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which is again, like wildly whimsical, absurd. And once again, a critical darling. It got four Academy Award nominations, unfortunately, it's Terry Gilliam's first box office bomb. So released in 1988, the budget of the film was just over $46 million and grossed $8 million at the box office. Ouch. Due to what appears to be protissorial negligence, Gilliam is accused of going massively over budget on Munchausen, as opposed to the first two. So basically, Columbia Pictures expected the budget to be $23.5 million. and it seems like the producer lied and said they could do the movie for that amount,

which Gilliam didn't believe. And then within six weeks of shooting, they were $10 million over budget, and they ended up being, like, double the budget by the end of the shoot. So regardless of the details, Terry Gilliam comes out of this movie being in the hole. And he's basically tagged as you're a fiscally irresponsible director.

Yeah. And to make matters worse, with every project, his budget's gone up and his, box office receipts have gone down. Yeah. And so it's kind of a weird like M-night Chamelon situation where he came out too hot out of the gate, maybe, and things are slowing down a little bit. So shortly after the release of Munchausen,

Gilliam reads Don Quixote, which is Miguel Deservantes's famous novel from 400 years ago that follows Alfonso Quijano, an aging gentleman from La Mancha in Spain, who, after reading too many chivalric romances loses his mind and decides he's a knight-errant destined to revive chivalry under the moniker Don Quixote de la Mancha. That's the original Don Quixote

that we get very little of in Terry Gilliam's eventual adaptation. Honestly, I've never read Don Quixote and I was too lazy to look up exactly what the plot was, but that does shed some light on the movie that I viewed. Yes, that's a little bit of a helpful backstory. I'm going to give a little more credit back to Terry Gilliam, now that I know that the original story is about a man losing his mind.

Yes. That helps. And Gilliam's affinity for the material makes perfect sense. Here is a man passing through middle age, fighting to tell stories that are considered by those around him to be too large, too fantastic, and ultimately too unrealistic to produce. The world tells Don Quixote that he's insane, and we love him for defiance of this fact. The world tells Terry Gilliam that he's insane for trying to make these movies. Gilliam's style and his skill is showing us how maybe the lunatics are actually the sane ones, right?

That's kind of his consistent theme that he brings to his films. Gilliam isn't the first director to be enamored by this property. Of all the older famous directors, who do you think spent a large chunk of their life trying to make this movie happen, an adaptation of this movie happen? Was it Stanley Kubrick? No. Orson Wells. Oh, that's right. Oh, no. Orson. Once again, Orson Wells famously spent the last 30 years of his life attempting to adapt Don Quixote. He eventually produced over a thousand pages of screenplay for the project, shot dozens of reels of film with a lead actor who passed away before he could ever finish the project. And he tinkered with it and it was unfinished at the time of his death in 1985. So once again, we have a famous property that bested Orston Wells. And we have this new.

director attempting to bring it to life. Brief sidebar, but have you seen Orson Wells' champagne commercial from, okay. Yes. It is one of them. For anybody, if you don't know what we're talking about and you haven't seen this before, do yourself a favor and just search Orson Well's champagne commercial on YouTube. And you will, it's a wild like two and a half minute ride. Yeah, that is actually relevant.

He took those types of projects actually to try to finance. pickup shots of Don Quixote late in life. That's sad because he's just like hammered drunk in this thing. Yeah, so like Hollywood had disowned him and he would do commercials in attempt to scrape together funds. So in 1990, Terry Gilliam signs a deal with Phoenix Pictures to produce a movie called Don Quixote. But things sour quickly between the two when Phoenix Pictures wants Sean Connery to play Don Quixote, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Weird. Given he's supposed to be an older Spanish man. and they refuse to give Terry Gilliam the amount of money that Terry knows he'll need to make the project. So Gilliam's reluctant to make it for less than what he needs after the Munchausen experience. Right. So Gilliam walks away and Don Quixote moves forward with another director at Phoenix Pictures, and it seems like, unfortunately, that's it. So in 1991, Gilliam released the Fisher King with Robin Williams and Jeff Bridges.

He followed it up with 12 Monkeys, which is my favorite of his films. Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, time travel science fiction film. It rocked the box office and it brought him roaring back. It made $170 million worldwide on a $29 million budget. Gilliam stayed under budget and delivered a studio success. It was also the first movie he did that he didn't write. Unfortunately, he then jumped to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the Hunter S. Thompson fever dream of a movie that despite

despite starring Johnny Depp and Cameron Diaz, it did lose money at the box office. quite know what to think about it. I feel like that's become, like since become a bit of a call classic, for sure. It has, yeah, like a lot of his films. However, good news in the interim, in 1997, the Fred Shepisi directed version of Don Quixote

that Phoenix Pictures was financing falls apart. They ditch the property and all the sudden, it's back on the table. So eight years after Gilliam first tried to mount it, he re-secures the rights to the project and tired of Hollywood and all the shenanigans, he and his producers say, we're going to put together European financing for the film. So they somehow cobbled together a $40 million budget, which is one of the biggest budgets ever to not have any United States financing attached.

Gilliam later admitted that he realistically needed $60 million to make the project, but they were going to go for it with $40. They have enough money to make something, so it's time to go. He leverages his relationship with Johnny Depp off of Fear and Loathing to bring him in as the film's lead. He casts a 70-year-old French actor, Jean Rochefort as Don Quixote himself, and John Rochefort, after joining the movie, would spend seven months of prep learning English for the part. So he actually didn't speak fluent English before signing on to the movie.

He was so dedicated to it that he learned English for the part. Now, this next section that I'm going to talk about, a lot of the clips I use and much of the information that I'm pulling is from an excellent documentary that's called Lost in La Mancha. So initially it was supposed to be, as all of these are, a behind the scenes video thing that they're going to include for the financier or put on the VHS or DVD eventually, and it becomes a slow motion recapture of this thing falling apart. unfortunately the bumps in the road start very early so while in pre-production eight million dollars of financing falls through so the budget drops from 40 million to 32 million dollars that's a big jump it's a big jump they just lost 20% of their budget when they were already 40% under budget of what gilliam really thought he needed this means that while it's still possible to complete the movie Terry Gilliam has to nail it.

Everything needs to go exactly to plan, which, as we know, covering these movies, literally never happens. And he has a history of the opposite happening on his projects. A tighter budget adds innumerable issues to the production, not the least of which is that the actors are all doing the project for reduced rates. So as a result, they're trying to schedule the movie between other projects that take priority. So when an actor is attached to multiple projects, they have to define the order of priority in their contracts.

So like, for example, hypothetically, let's say Adam Driver is working on Star Wars. Star Wars is going to take what's called first position to, let's say, a marriage story, the Noah Bomback indie movie that he wants to do. When your movie is not the first position movie on any of your main actor's schedules, it means you're left at the whim of all of the other productions that are happening that they're attached to. That's a nightmare. So Gilliam is in prep for nine, ten weeks in Spain, and he can't get his actors to Madrid for rehearsals, costume fittings, or makeup tests. Who else outside of Johnny Depp was a really big name attached to this? Because I imagine that French actor probably didn't have like a ton of projects.

Jean Rochefort was a big name in Europe. And it was European financing. So that's why I think, you know what I mean, it was good. And so Johnny Depp was the big name, obviously. Gotcha. Also, this is peak Johnny Depp, right? What's the actual year we're looking at right now? It's right before peak Johnny Depp. So this is in 2000.

So we're just before Pirates of the Caribbean. We're two years out from Pirates of the Caribbean. Yeah. Yeah. The person in a production that has to deal with the schedule is the film's first assistant director. In this case, a man named Phil Patterson. So the first assistant director, to those of you who don't know, is responsible for the organization of the film production.

He or she ultimately determines the schedule. They maintain the order and communication between departments. They basically have to make sure that things aren't falling behind. They have to protect the director from wasting too much time on any particular scene, shot, setup, etc., knowing that it'll cost them down the line. It's, in my opinion, the most difficult and underappreciated job on any film set. You're the de facto bad guy, the strict parent, the traffic cop. And Patterson, going into this project, has concerns to say the least. Here is one of my favorite clips from Lost in LaMancho of Phil Patterson talking about the stress of having no actors during pre-production.

Every film is different. It's very hard to compare a Terry Gilliam film to anybody else's films. It's very hard to say what's right or wrong with it. but this film is in, I'd like to say, complete disarray, absolute and faffing total disarray. But it is absolutely the correct way it should be, given that it's Terry, given that it's a Gilliam film,

because Captain Chaos is completely in his element at the moment. Oh, no. Captain Chaos is not the name you want a director of a multimillion-dollar movie to have. Captain Chaos is in. In his element is one of my favorite quotes. Working outside of Hollywood, which is why they went to Europe in the first place, has come with some serious costs. Not the least of which is the fact that the movie, like any movies of this size, needs a soundstage to build its interior sets in.

So a soundstage is an enormous warehouse-sized space that has been soundproofed and rigged for lighting and massive amounts of electrical draw. It turns out that there's only one left in Madrid that's available for their shoot window. So in Los Angeles, there are hundreds of sound stages. In Vancouver, there are a lot, not quite as many. And now in Atlanta, there are just an absurd amount of soundstages. Well, but somewhere like Madrid, that's a medieval, you know, city. Like, there is limited, even open, available space to build an airplane hanger-sized facility. You just can't do it.

Exactly. So they, you know, this is one of the instances where they lack the infrastructure to support this project necessarily. So it turns out there's one left in Madrid that's available. The team goes to visit it and it is a shithole. They walk inside. It looks like there's just dirt all over the floor. There's this like just awful like weird Dexter style like murder like cellophane hanging down from everything. And the minute they walk in, the first thing that you notice is the echo. So they, Terry Gilliam, clicks his tongue, and it sounds as if he has clicked it down the world's largest cave. And it is just echoing back, back, back, back, back. You can't record dialogue in an environment that sounds like a cathedral. These sound stages are designed to deaden sound. So you get very clean, low reverb sound that you can affect however you want in post-production. It's going to be nearly impossible in this space. But unfortunately, it's all they have. So not wanting to lose momentum, they book the soundstage, and they keep trucking along with pre-production. The next big hurdle is

one week out from production, which is September of 2000. The actors are supposed to arrive for fittings and rehearsals, and Jean Rochefort set to play Don Quixote, the man who has spent the last seven months learning English for the part, fails to board his. scheduled flight from Paris. Apparently, while he was at the airport, he felt a pain in his lower abdomen and became convinced that he had prostate cancer. So he goes to see a doctor, and this pushes back, Gilliam's already impossibly tight schedule. So the fact that actors aren't showing up at prep is starting to cause slight panic amongst

other department heads who have been working overtime with limited resources to try to make this project work. One of my favorite characters in the documentary Lost in La Mancha is Gilems' long-time cinematographer, Nicola Pecorini, who is an Italian cinematographer with one eye. Oh my God. And he's great. And he's got like a glass eye. And he says like some, maybe like some pretty like politically incorrect stuff throughout

the documentary. But he is so. Sure. One is one eye. Yeah. He's so funny. So here is Nicola when he's asked about. the state of things. This is when they're a week out from shooting and their main cast member

who's playing Don Quixote has not arrived on set yet. How would you describe the state of things? Shear panic? Like taught the panic? You know, chickens with no heads running around. I mean, it is real panic now. You know what he sounds like? He sounds like, he sounds like Quint and Jaws when he knows that like crazy laugh. Yeah, and that's what Nicole is thinking at this point in time. And he's not wrong. So, Jean Rochor is diagnosed with a prostate infection. Oh, he's right.

It's considered mild enough that he can work. So he flies to set the next day. The new concern is simple. Can an elderly man with a prostate infection ride a horse? Yeah, that seems like a problem. Don Quixote. Spends the whole movie on a horse. Gilliam's going to have to roll the dice because pre-production is over and production has arrived.

The first week of the shoot is set to take place in the Bredenas Reales Preserve. Pardon my accent. It's a desert region that's four hours from Madrid. Due to the distance, the cast and crew have to be housed nearby, adding considerable expense, So they cannot, under any circumstances, spend more than a week at this location. They're shooting it first for a reason. It gives the production design team time to finish building the sets. They'll shoot their exteriors first.

They'll get it when they have good weather. This is September 25th that they start shooting, so they want to be in the desert before the weather turns for the winter. They need sunlight. They get out there. They set up to film a scene in which Don Quixote saves Johnny Depp's character from a Spanish chain gang. And just to clarify, the original storyline for this version of the man who killed Don Quixote featured Johnny Depp as an ad executive who somehow travels back in time to become Don Quixote's Sancho. So they shoot, you know, kind of the first master opening shot and then they move

into this choreographed sequence where one of the guards falls over and all the extras in the chain gang like work together to get the keys from him. But it turns out that none of the extras know the choreography because the production team didn't have the extras at the rehearsal, where they were supposed to learn the choreography, which is news to Gilliam, giving us my favorite Terry Gilliam outburst on set. So Terry Gilliam is a very kind of bubbly, funny, laughy guy until he gets super stressed, at which point the F-bombs start coming out, and I will play that for you now. You need X's do the rehearsal. If you don't get him, you better tell us. so we know in advance that we're fucked.

We are fucked, and we don't, didn't know it. I want to know when we're fucked in advance, not in the middle of a shoot. I want to know when we're fucked in advance. That's classic. I want to put it on a T-shirt. So, so Gilliam and Patterson, the first AD pivot,

and they decide, okay, they don't know the choreography. Let's move on to the dialogue portion of the scene that follows it. You know, we'll give them time to learn the choreography to the side. We'll shoot Jean Rochefort on the horse. Don Quixote walks up. I am Don Quixote de la Mancha. You need to let these men go. You know, he does his, it's like this great introduction.

They start rolling the scene. John Rolfsport comes up and then all the sudden, I kid you not, an F-16 fighter jet flies by overhead. And it's so loud that it's just destroying the microphone. Like, no one, you can't hear anything Joan Rosh for is saying. And so it turns out that this location is adjacent to a NATO-Bron-Rof-Ros-Fort is saying. bombing range. Oh my God. That one hour of every day they do these test flights with the F-16s, and today it happens to be the one hour where they pivoted to try to shoot dialogue at this point.

Oh my God. So Terry Gilliam has no choice but to quite literally in the documentary say, fuck sound, we keep rolling. And they decide to shoot through this. They basically have to what, just ADR the dialogue? They're going to either have to ADR it or hope that by the time they get to the close-up shots later in the day, the fighter jet will be gone, and then they can pull the dialogue from the close-up shots and use it in the wider shots. They start rolling on the next setup,

and the horse that Joan Rochefort is sitting on freezes up and refuses to walk forward as he makes his character's introduction. There's this incredible shot of Terry Gilliam in Video Village. F-16s are going, people don't know their choreography, and he's sitting there looking at the monitor, muttering to himself, somebody push the fucking horse push the fucking horse

like both fighter jets are going overhead it's incredible so they finally get the master of the scene and they call it a day they've at least rolled on something we then get to production day two the team returns through the desert they're eager to make up for the last time

from day one the choreography's been tightened the jets are nowhere to be seen or heard and they basically make it to lunch and they're like they're not too far behind so the weather report was sunny skies for the rest of the week. Then, during lunch, these, the darkest, most horrifying,

Ghostbuster-style clouds you've ever seen just roll in over the production. And Lizzie, what's the problem if you've been shooting with no clouds, and then all of a sudden these big dark clouds just roll in in the middle of your shoot? Every shot is going to look different. You've got different lighting and everything. You've got completely different lighting. So they have no ability to match the lighting of pre-year-term. previous shots, which is the cinematographer's nightmare.

So they move into close-ups where they can use enormous light banks to create the illusion of sunlight. Even then, it's not going to match what it looked like in the natural light. It's not going to look the same. But it's going to be close enough that they might be able to get by with it and they have to shoot something. So they start shooting these close-ups when all of a sudden thunder starts ringing out, which ruins the dialogue again.

And then lightning starts to strike. And so when lightning strikes, the first AD, Phil Patterson, has to shut it down because somebody could get hurt. He shuts down the production. They wrap up the equipment in tarps, but they leave it out. Everybody goes back to their trailers and their cars and they're thinking, we'll let the storm pass. Hopefully we'll be able to pick up some shots in the afternoon. Oh, my God. How much of the equipment gets struck by lightning?

What's the problem about storms in the desert? It's very dry and then it can't absorb the water? Exactly. Everything floods. There's nowhere for the water to go. There's no like runoff or irrigation. So the entire canyon they're shooting in floods, mud and water create these rivers sweeping the equipment away.

And these crew members are running around desperate trying to grab these bundles of equipment from getting swept away by the mud and water. Everything is destroyed. The set is destroyed. Everything's muddy. All of the equipment's going to need to be dried out. A lot of it's been damaged. Some of it might be irreparable.

worst of all, the rain has completely changed the topography and color of the landscape. So what before was like this bright, white, yellow, everything's monochromatic, has become red, green, brown, orange. The desert literally looks different and anything they film going forward won't match what they've already shot. To make matters worse, the insurance company is only going to cover the damage to the equipment, but it won't compensate them in any way for lost time on set. So they're not going to get any additional money to add shooting days to the production, which is what they really need. So that's day two. So then day three.

Oh, my God. So then day three, in an attempt to get something on film, they take a skeleton crew and they relocate to a new part of the desert to pick up a different scene when the fighter jets come back. By the fifth day of production, the equipment has dried out, the weather has turned back in their favor, the team is in fighting form. the team is in fighting form and they decide like let's shoot this sequence of johnny dep and don quixote john rushfort on horseback going through the desert talking to each other because we don't have to match you know the chain gain scene from earlier it's fine if it looks different well let's hear what went wrong from terry gilliam and phil patterson talking to each other shortly after rolling on one of these takes we're fucked did you see him sit on the horse fucking crazy the pain when you're

he sat down. He can't do it. It's just, it ain't going to happen. I was watching his face very carefully what he got on that horse. And it was just... Honestly, I want to go to the French and say, I'm going to refuse to shoot

with Jean-Rosford on a horse until he's medically fit. Jean-Rosch-Fort is fighting a lot of pain. He took two men to get him off of his horse. He had to sit and rest for 40 minutes before walking to his car. So that concluded the first week of filming.

on this project. They fly Jean Rochefort back to Paris to see his doctor on Saturday, leaving the crew without their Don Quixote at the top of next week. Phil Patterson, the first AD, basically realizes this is no way to shoot a movie. We have to make some changes. And he attempts to get them to break up the production and then reconstitute themselves once they know what's going on with John Rushford. But the problem is, they can't do that because on Monday, they're getting a very special visit. 60 members of the core financing group that's giving money to the project are showing up on set on Monday for like that one day set visit that they're all excited about to get to see Johnny Depp and the movie that they're financing. So Terry Gilliam and the producers know they have

to put on at least some dog and pony show for these investors on Monday. And so, So basically to decide they're going to shoot some sequences that don't involve Don Quixote that are just Johnny Depp scenes. And so they go to Monastario de Piedra. This is like an incredible waterfall. I think it's actually where they shot the waterfall in the final film 20 years later. Yeah, that's beautiful. Yeah, it's this seemingly simple sequence where Johnny Depp pulls a fish out of his poncho,

smashes it on a rock. I know, it's totally wild. And his horse nudges him. This movie was like insane in a fun way. Yeah, everything you're telling me, I still, I kind of want to see this version. So with 60 of his principal investors watching, Gilliam is once again fucked, this time by a horse. And here is Terry Gilliam as the horse refuses to go along with its blocking. Horse, come on.

Come on, horse. Come on, horse. You want to fuck with me? And cut it, cut it. Cut. Let's do it again. Straight away. Fow. Action. Horse, come on, horse.

We're moving in. Is the horse about to move? Okay. Good, good, good, good, good idea. Good, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut. Turn the camera on this. Turn the camera on, Johnny looks in. Let's just dig it on with it.

Johnny's going to, we go into it. We don't have to be anywhere. Johnny can do it from here. Leave the camera there. He turns in the camera, walks out. We'll get some shots. This is fucking stupid. Jesus.

So, literally nothing is going right. Like, he's lost his lead actor, maybe forever. Well, also animals, like, there's a reason that that is incredibly expensive and difficult to shoot. And they're just not, you can't, as much as you want to be able to control them, you can't. Absolutely. So he makes it through his day with his investors. Weirdly, by the end of the day, the investors don't know that anything's wrong. The investors seem fine.

They, like, got their photo with Terry Gilliam and Johnny Depp. Terry Gillum is very charming. He, like, made a couple jokes. And then they went on their way. But the producers have just gotten. word from Paris, and it will be at least a week before Jean Rochefort is medically fit to travel. So that means they won't have him until week three of shooting at the earliest. So that evening, the insurance adjusters for the film arrive, and they basically say,

we need to shut down shooting for the rest of the week. When a studio film is in trouble, a studio can just shut it down. Everything's internal, and they have the funds to do so. They can halt production, pause cash flow. they can reorient as needed. But when an independent film is in trouble, basically something called the completion guarantor or a bond company gets involved.

So, you know, film productions are such an insanely risky investment that these bond companies come in and for a portion of the budget, three to five percent typically, they'll guarantee the delivery of a product that matches the screenplay and is delivered within the allotted schedule and budget. If the production fails to deliver within those parameters,

the bond company can actually take over the production, and they can fire the director and ring in other people as needed. So the bond company ultimately is responsible for the finances around the movie. So in this instance, this man, Fred Milstein, is the completion guarantor. He comes to Madrid and he's trying to help them figure out how to salvage the production. And it all depends on John Rochefort. They get word from Jean Rochefort's doctor, that'll be at least another 10 days now before he can fly. So the production has to keep paying people despite the disruption of work. And it turns out now that the insurance company is claiming that Jean Rochefort's

illness is a force majeure event, an act of God event, not covered by the film's insurance policy, which would leave the financiers completely exposed for the entire budget spent so far, even if Jean Rochefort can't complete the movie. So what's clear is that everybody involved can smell blood in the water and nobody wants to be stuck with the final bill. complicating things further, John Rochefort, along with Johnny Depp, is considered an essential element on the project.

So when you make a film project, essential elements are basically people on the project who are considered irreplaceable. If they try to recast him, they have to refinance the movie. Oh, my God. The financiers said, we agree to finance this movie.

Provided he plays Don Quixote. Exactly. And if you lose that guarantee, it gives them an out. The producers have their back. acts against the wall. They have no choice but delay the, delay the production until Rochefort is medically clear to return to set. And they basically have to furlough all of the cast and crew. Yeah, you have to release them. Point in time. They're hoping that'll be October 16th. This is

right at the end of the end of September. So they're basically saying, we hope it's two weeks, but all of these crew members are saying, there's no fucking way this guy's going to be able to get on a horse when he gets back. And so they're looking for other jobs because they've been planning on having jobs through weeks and weeks and weeks of production. Right, and it's clear that's not going to happen. Yeah, they've effectively been fired. So reality comes crashing down on Gilliam, and it's put into clarity by Phil Patterson.

Remember, first assistant director of the film, when Patterson quits the movie. Yeah, look, I'm going to go back to Al Hete, and I'm going to tell the French producers that I'm not going to continue in the project the way it is, and explain to them the reason that I'm leaving the film that I don't have confidence in the producers to support me in the decisions that need to be made

in terms of making the film. We can't make the film. Not the film you want to make. Shortly after Patterson quits, Gilliam and the producers learn that Rochefort has been diagnosed with a double herniated disc in his back. He needs at least another month to recover.

Basically, the production is over. The rights revert to the insurance company. The producers walk away from the project. They don't have any connection to it. Basically, over the next. next nine years, Gilliam again and again attempts to wrestle the rights for the story back from the insurance company. He, you know, made other projects, Tide Lamb, Brothers Grim, excuse me, the Imaginarian of Dr. Parnassus, many of which were plagued with other troubles. Like,

He fledger died a third of the way through, Imaginarium. Gilliam, though, in the back of his mind, always wants to return to Quixote. And so finally in 2009, he gets the rights back from the insurance company. Johnny Depp has remained attached to the project since this entire time. They pull together financing. Actually, Johnny Depp is so busy in 2010 that once they pull the financing together, they actually replace him with Ewan McGregor. And Ewan McGregor comes on to the project to take on the Johnny Depp role. That's a weird replacement, but I'm still on board. I love Ewe and McGregor. And Jean-Rush for is not available, so Robert Duval is cast as Don Quixote. It seems like they are ready to go. And then once again, financing falls apart in August of that year. Fast forward

four years, August of 2014, Terry Gilliam reveals that he's reworked the story, he's ready to dive back into it. It's going to be set in contemporary times and will reflect the ways in which, quote, movies hurt people. I think part of the reason he said it in contemporary time was budgetary, and I do think part of it is that it's become so layered with his own trauma around the project that he's writing himself into the movie. He's putting himself in the picture frame. So in September of 2014, it's announced that John Hurt is coming on to play Don Quixote. And in July of 2015, Amazon officially joins the project as a financier. Full disclosure, Amazon does employ Lizzie through IMDB.

Yeah, go IMDB. Also, if you guys haven't gotten a chance, listen to the IMDB podcast. It's also pretty good. Amazon also charges me a lot of money for their services, and I'm unemployed. We will gladly take your money.

Production is supposed to start in the fall, but John Hurt is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Yeah, poor John Hurt. Just brutal. So production is once again delayed. In March of 2016, it's announced that Ewan McGregor has moved on from the project. I think he was doing Fargo at this point in time.

Yeah, that sounds right. Jack O'Connell comes in to take over that role. And then at Cannes that year, Gilliam states that they've actually brought Adam Driver in now as the lead. And because John Hertz, health is deteriorated, he has left the project, and Michael Palin of Monty Python is coming in to, play Don Quixote. So, so like the casting changes just keep happening. They're all interesting so

far. They're all great. One of them have been particularly bad. It turns out that Paolo Bronco, the Portuguese producer that Gilliam has teamed up for for this newest, newest effort, basically lied about the financing that he had access to. We don't have time to get into the details. Basically, this guy sounds shady to say the least. He's just a slender. He, he, he, consistent, I mean, he's produced a ton of movies, but he also, it sounds like consistently was attempting to pull a fast one on Terry Gilliam to get him to like sign away all creative control and all rights, just like a lot of power play stuff. They're supposed to start production in September of 2016, so that's 16 years after they first went into production, and the money never

shows up. So Gilliam takes the project away from Paulo Bronco, and then Bronco sues him saying, if you go try to make that movie without me, you're making it illegally because we have a contract to make it. Even though he's been working on it for 20 years, 25 years. Based on my research, it appears that one reason that Amazon ended up distancing itself from the project was the presence of Paula Bronco on the project and his litigious history. Yeah, well, that makes sense. But by March 9th of 2017, production begins on what will prove? to be the final version of Terry Gilliams, the man who killed Don Quixote. They shoot for three months.

They wrap in June. They're sued again by Paula Bronco. He still claims to own the rights to the project. And he actually files in French court to try to prevent the man who killed Don Quixote from playing at the Cannes Film Festival, where they've been invited to come into competition. The ruling takes so long that they are not included in the competition. segment, but they are granted some sort of injunction, and basically they get the ruling at the last minute and they premiere the man who killed Don Quixote as the closing film to the Cann Film Festival in 2018, 29 years after Gilliam decided to make the film. It ultimately made $2.5 million at the box office against, I think, an $18 million budget. It received mixed to positive reviews. Ultimately, I think it's very tempting, and I was tempted coming into this episode,

to romanticize Terry Gilliam's journey with this project. His refusal to let go of this dream. You know, it's a Kehoe-de quest in and of itself. But I think if we take his own words at face value, that's clearly not what happened. So in 2013, Gilliam told the Hollywood, reporter about Don Quote. Quote, it's been around too long, and it's like a tumor. I want to get it out of my body. I don't even know if it will be a good film. I just want to get rid of it.

When your cast members are getting prostate infections and dying and the financing is falling through 25 times, like at a certain point, it's time to let it go. Yeah. And I think what's interesting about what Gilliam says here is that perhaps this is kind of a more reasonable default hypothesis for the types of people who seek to tell stories in general. And I guess what I mean by that, the more I thought about what he said, this idea of it being like a tumor, I think inspiration can be pleasant, but the gestation of a project is always

painful. The translation from idea to script to screen is painful. Consuming what you've created in any way is painful because the final product is more a reflection of the roads not taken the mistakes and compromises you've made than it is a completion of the initial seed that sparked all of this. So I think like at best the storyteller gets some sort of catharsis. Like it's done. It's no longer inside of me. I can move on. I think it's also worth taking a minute to mention the movie itself like there's some really problematic elements to it. There are a part of it that are truly offensive. There are some racial stereotypes that are like very heavily played on in a way that it surprised me. This movie was from 2018 because it felt it felt very out of touch. It's interesting how much Gilliam's path on this mirrors the actual story of Don Quixote, which I'm glad you explained at the top of this. But, you know, as with Don Quixote, it can be charming to, look to the past as this sort of better time and a time when, you know, chivalry was a thing

and a time when pursuing what you love at all costs without regard for anything or anyone else is the right way to go. However, there's another way of viewing both this path and also, I think, the story of Don Quixote, where it's not so much charming as it is delusional and someone who is unwilling to let go of the past. Yeah, I agree. And I think it's clear that the film feels rooted in the past as a result. And the dated aspect of the humor and some of the characterizations and certain elements of maybe racism and definitely sexism permeate the story in a way that I think would have passed in the early 2000s, but don't cut them up.

today. Thankfully, no. I would just like to reiterate, though, that we remain enormous fans of many of Terry Gilliam's other words. Oh, yeah. I'm not saying he's, I'm not saying he's Don Quixote. I'm just saying. I do think he lost his mind making this movie in a Quixote way. As always, we like to conclude each episode with a brief but hopefully positive segment on what went right in this project. So Lizzie, please start us off with what went right. Okay, so there is a scene in this movie where in the waterfall area that Chris had mentioned earlier, where in order to like save himself, I'm not even sure what this plot was here. Adam Driver bursts out into the most insane musical number that I've ever seen.

And it was like, it was amazing. Like I could not look away. I was horrified. is drawn to me. He goes for it. His giant six foot four like handsome horse body is like twisting around in weird ways.

And it was really fun. I was like, oh, I want more of those moments in this movie. But it was so few and far between. Yeah, but anyway, that, I loved that. Yeah, I think, you know, I think for me what went right, I am sympathetic that he got his

catharsis. He got this movie. Oh, I get it completely. I think went right. I do think that what I'll say generally about what went right is that someone like Terry Gilliam is continuing to be able to make movies. And what I mean by that is he is such an uncompromising weirdo. He makes the most nuts original stories that are so different. And they, tend to have larger budgets to be spectacles. And those movies have started to disappear. The $40 to $50 million, dark fairy tale, adult imaginative fantasy. It's either a micro budget or it's massive budget. Exactly. And that ecosystem seems to have died. And so I look at this and think, hopefully, not just for Terry Gilliam, but for other directors who like to tell stories in that space, we continue to support.

them and help them get financing for their projects because I would be sad if we lived in a world where the only two things we can consume are the incredible but limited in scope and budget, you know, indie darlings and the next Marvel or DC or Star Wars film that gets released. Just want to end it by saying, still better than Fantastic Four. Yes. 100%. Not as good as showgirls, though.

No, nothing will be. Thank you again, guys, for listening to this week's episode of What Went Wrong. I would like to give a shout out to a good friend of mine, Federico, who gave me the recommendation for covering the man who killed Don Quixote. Thank you for listening, Fed. As always, send us options through Instagram or email, What Went Wrong Pod at gmail.com. Speaking of which, we actually have gotten a couple of submissions from people

that want us to cover some things. So greatly appreciated. You are seeing, you are heard, and we are working on those ideas. So thank you. Thanks, guys. We will talk to you next week. Bye.

What went wrong is a sad boom podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman with cover art from Euthonoi.