A number of great directors have spent large portions of their careers working on widely ambitious passion projects that never see the light of day. Famously, Stanley Kubrick spent years of his life working on a sprawling biopic about Napoleon Bonaparte, the project failing to materialise again and again before his death.
Image: Amazon Studios
For a long time, Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote looked like it was heading in the same direction. Since 1998, Gilliam, best known for his work on Monty Python and the brilliant sci-fi satire Brazil, has had his efforts to make this film thwarted several times, even culminating in a documentary called Lost in La Mancha detailing the struggles and disappointments.
This went on until 2017, when, finally, the film actually got underway. Earlier this year, production finished, and now, we might know when it’s coming out. The news comes from French film site AlloCine, which reports that it Gilliam’s epic will finally premiere in France in May 2018.
L’homme qui tua Don Quichotte de Terry Gilliam avec Jonathan Pryce et Afam Driver sortira en salles en mai 2018. #fncf2017 @OceanFilmsFR
— AlloCiné (@allocine) September 28, 2017
If true, that will make it his first released film since 2013’s The Zero Theorem, a sci-fi film starring Christoph Waltz that met with a fairly mixed critical reception.
No word yet on an American release for the film, which will star Jonathan Pryce was an old man who becomes convinced he’s Don Quixote and Adam Driver as an advertising executive turned reluctant Sancho Panza (a far cry from the plot outlined in Lost in La Mancha, which was set to feature time travel and Johnny Depp).
With that said, Amazon Studios has acquired distribution rights as of 2015, when this iteration of film was first being financed, so Amazon’s streaming platform, at least for now, seems like a safe bet.
[Twitter, via Screen Rant]