The Johnny Depp movie that was never finished
Starring in a movie that never gets released is a waste of time, talent, and effort, but it’s something Johnny Depp has been forced to contend with on more than one occasion, if for entirely different reasons.
The actor’s directorial debut, The Brave, was famously withheld from the general public following a premiere that saw it savaged by anyone present at its first screening, with the backlash proving so vociferous that the star simply cut his losses, actively sabotaged its planned theatrical and home video release, and locked it away in the vault somewhere never to be seen again.
An entirely different situation unfolded several years later, though, when he was poised to lead Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote as Toby Grummett, a marketing executive who ends up being transported through time. It had been the filmmaker’s passion project for decades already by that point, but it took a herculean effort to drag it across the finish line.
Gilliam has become intimately familiar with the concept of a troublesome production for a variety of reasons, but even by his standards, Don Quixote took the cake. He’d first read Miguel de Cervantes’ source novel in 1989 and immediately began developing it as a feature, but the end result wouldn’t grace the silver screen until 20 years later, by which point it was completely unrecognisable.
Entering pre-production in 1998, the Monty Python veteran had Depp secured in place as Grummet, with his then-wife Vanessa Paradis as the female lead and Jean Rochefort as Quixote. Cameras began rolling in 2000 before a borderline biblical series of events began to plague the shoot.
Sets and equipment were destroyed by flooding, Rochefort dropped out of the part due to illness, and insurance issues prevented things from running anywhere close to smoothly, which ultimately saw The Man Who Killed Don Quixote paused, indefinitely suspended, and then cancelled outright.
Admirably, Gilliam persevered, but by the time the project began to show since of life once more, Depp was out of the picture. “I can now honestly say that I’m not working with Johnny on Don Quixote,” he said in 2009, per Empire. “He’s booked himself up on a lot of other films. I want to shoot Don Quixote next year. He said he’s not available and we have both agreed that I’m going to die soon, so it would be nice to get this film under my belt.”
The closest Depp’s version of the film came through Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha, which digs into the nightmarish set of circumstances that repeatedly ripped the movie from the grasp of both its originator and prospective star, even if Gilliam did get there eventually.
