We want to keep you titillated on our upcoming Lowell screening of the Fulton & Pepe documentary Lost in La Mancha, which we are incredibly excited to share with all of you on Tuesday, October 18 at 7PM! The film is a tragic (albeit morbidly humorous) study on how NOT to make a Hollywood movie with famed director and ex-Python member Terry Gilliam at its core. In the film, we see Gilliam’s dream of bringing the story of Don Quixote to the big screen implode before our eyes, thanks to the ironic presence of filmmakers Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe who captured every painful step of the production. In the following 2001 interview with Terry Gilliam in The Guardian, the Minnesota native and animator extraordinaire opens up about the film shoot — we consider this interview to be a great companion to what you’ll see at our October 18 screening. For complete details on our event, just click on the Lost in La Mancha icon at the right of this article. We hope to see you there!
“My latest is a disaster movie.
But it wasn’t meant to be. Terry Gilliam’s £32 million film about Don Quixote, starring Johnny Depp, fell apart after illness, finance problems and floods. Here the director tells all to Sean O’Hagan:
Making a film’, Terry Gilliam tells me, ‘is essentially about two things: belief and momentum. You need those two essential elements, one feeding the other, or things fall apart.’ There speaks the voice of experience. Last September, just five days into an ambitious shooting schedule, Gilliam’s film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a vision he had nurtured for 10 years, collapsed in the most cruelly ironic fashion. A full five months later, the director, whose belief in the project had propelled its often tortuous progress from script to shoot, is still in grief: more than once he refers to this interview as ‘a kind of therapy session.’ ” … Read the full interview
lowellfilmcollaborativema.org 