“I’m trying to get out of his footsteps”: the filmmaker Terry Gilliam called “one of my heroes”
Wherever Terry Gilliam goes as a director, trouble seems to follow. It’s not like he intentionally made himself a magnet for disappointment and disagreements, but it’s been a recurring theme of his career nonetheless.
Never one afraid to speak his mind, Gilliam has spent decades railing against the establishment for a number of reasons, rubbing plenty of people the wrong way in the process. Is it even a true Gilliam production if there isn’t a setback or mishap of some description? History suggests not.
The Monty Python movies suffered their fair share of issues both in front of and away from the cameras, and Gilliam carried on in that vein when he went solo. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen went massively over budget and was a nightmare for several cast and crew members, while he was reluctant to cast Bruce Willis in 12 Monkeys because he thought the actor’s mouth looked like an arsehole.
Hunter S. Thompson wreaked regular havoc on the set of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the Weinstein siblings were a constant thorn in his side during The Brothers Grimm, and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was forced to contend with the tragic passing of star Heath Ledger.
None of them can compare to the most infamous shoot of Gilliam’s career, of course, which ended up taking almost 30 years from start to finish. He can’t be faulted for his determination anyway because many filmmakers would have abandoned The Man Who Killed Don Quixote when it quickly gained infamy as one of the most cursed films in history.
Anything that could go wrong did go wrong, and it went wrong on a number of occasions over many years. Gilliam wouldn’t be dissuaded from his passion project, eventually dragging it across the finish line and into cinemas in 2018, three decades after he first signalled his intentions to direct the literary adaptation.
He wasn’t even the first to try and adapt Miguel de Cervantes’ source novel, either, but he did at least get further than Orson Welles. The Citizen Kane creator worked on his own Don Quixote in fits and starts for a very long time, with principal photography dragging on for 12 years between 1957 and 1969. It was eventually edited together after his death in 1992, but it was hardly reflective of his vision.
That made them kindred spirits in a way, and Gilliam was happy to stand under the shadow of Welles. “He is one of my heroes, and I’ve always thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be a great filmmaker like Welles?'” he said to the BBC. “I was more interested in the first half of his career, but it sort of turns out that I have been inflicted with the second half, so I’m trying to get out of his footsteps right now.”
He did manage to get out of them eventually, but it took an excruciating amount of time. Gilliam may idolise Welles, but only one of them was alive to see their Don Quixote movie finally become a reality.
