According to The Playlist, a production deal that director Terry Gilliam has made with Amazon Studios will include his long delayed film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. The film has been in production hell for nearly two decades, even prompting the documentary Lost in La Mancha, which chronicled the delays. If all goes according to plan, the movie will shoot in early 2016, with Jack O’Connell and John Hurt as the two leads.
Amazon plans on releasing the film theatrically for a brief time, after which they will be available for streaming on Amazon, which the director seems happy about:
“I’m intrigued by their way of doing it. They go into the cinemas first and then a month or two afterwards they go into streaming. And I think that’s good because you get a chance to see it on the big screen, and yet I know that more people have seen my films on DVD than they have in the cinemas and that’s the reality of life now.”
He also seems happy working with a new studio like Amazon:
“Amazon and the like are interesting because they are all still in their formative stages. They’re not a bureaucracy that has been around for years like the studio system, and so they’re full of people that are open to new and fresh ideas. So it’s a good time to be working with people like that.”
The Amazon deal will also allow Gilliam to dust off some other older projects he has wanted to get off the ground as well.
“I’ve got a couple other things I’m playing with. A couple of old scripts that have been wallowing within the studio system; we’ve got them out, so we’re going to stretch them out. So what was going to become a two and a half hour movie will now become a six-eight part TV series.”
One of those mini series will be an adaption of Defective Detective, a screenplay Gilliam and Fisher King screenwriter Richard LaGravenese wrote.
“Many of my films I’ve had to compress them more than I would have liked. So things like Defective Detective and Quixote, they’ve all been sitting around for quite a long time and to me the trick is a way of invigorating me about them so they still have a life.”
The fact that this new form of film distribution is giving a genius director like Terry Gilliam another avenue to pursue to get his films produced is fantastic. But after almost twenty years, it damn well better be the best film he’s ever made. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote better make Brazil look like Freddy Got Fingered.