Johnny Depp tries to lead his horse in "Lost in La Mancha"
“You really had the feeling the film was gonna be great. REALLY great.” – Johnny Depp, talking about what Lost in La Mancha could have been
The wonder of YouTube (thanks safetymousejdtv) comes through again as we share with you this FOUR PART interview with Johnny Depp on his role in Terry Gilliam’s Lost in La Mancha. We bring this to you in anticipation of this Tuesday’s (October 18) screening of this Louis Pepe & Keith Fulton documentary which chronicles Gilliam’s futile attempt to bring the story of Don Quixote to the screen. Depp is his cool, introspective self, of course, as he shares some great movie nuggets on what it was like to work with Gilliam and his lunacy on the set, watching the film’s production fall apart, plus the future of the project and the “curse of Quixote.” Gilliam’s failed movie was TRULY the most remarkable film never made!
Grab a seat, get comfortable, and hear all about Gilliam’s lost dream project from the star of the film himself. The entire interview is fascinating, but pay special attention to PART 3 as Depp goes into detail on the insanity of the unexpected flash flood the crew experienced on set. Ah, the movies … we absolutely LOVE ‘em.
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!
Director/animator/screenwriter Terry Gilliam
“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
7PM
Celebrate the LFC’s 3-Year Anniversary with delicious cake & social time!
7:30PM
“Lost in La Mancha” film screening
Join us for the FINAL film of our 2011 “Film & the Arts Series AND help us commemorate the LFC’s 3-Year Anniversary! Friends, to put it simply, Lost in La Mancha is a fabulous must-see and we’re quite excited to be showing it to the public this month. In addition to screening this great film, we’ll break out the birthday cake as we celebrate the 3-Year Anniversary of the Lowell Film Collaborative! Please help us mark the moment and allow us to THANK YOU for your support and encouragement these past few years — before our screening of Lost in La Mancha, we’ll all share in some delicious birthday cake!
ABOUT THE FILM
For years, one of filmmaker Terry Gilliam’s great dreams was to make a screen adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s classic tale Don Quixote, and in 2000 it looked as if his dream was to become a reality. In collaboration with Tony Grisoni, Gilliam had written a script called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, in which a 20th century advertising man accidentally travels back in time and is mistaken by Don Quixote for his faithful companion, Sancho Panza. After ten years of shopping the project to American studios with no success, Gilliam and his producers had secured financing for the film from a consortium of European sources and Johnny Depp had been cast as the time-tripping adman with the venerable French actor Jean Rochefort as Don Quixote. However, as the production moved closer to its start date, more and more things began to go wrong — contracts went unsigned, key cast and crew members had not yet arrived, and the carefully prepared budget seemed stressed to the breaking point. Nevertheless, Gilliam soldiered on, but after a mere six days of shooting, during which Spanish Air Force jets ruined several takes, flash floods destroyed several sets, and Gilliam struggled to keep his dream afloat, Rochefort suffered a severe back injury. The film’s financiers decided to cash in their chips and pulled the plug in order to cash in on their insurance, though Gilliam struggled for months afterward to find a way to put the production back on track.
Documentary filmmakers Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe had been invited by Gilliam to make a film about the production of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and after shooting 80 hours of footage of the chaotic pre-production process as well as the aborted shooting schedule, they instead created Lost In La Mancha, a look at the UN-making of the film, which along with the story of the project’s brief rise and messy collapse, featured a look at several completed scenes from the film as well as animated versions of the film’s storyboards which offered a glimpse of the look and scale of the film Gilliam was attempting to create.
Amidst all of the chaos of Terry Gilliam’s failed production is an up-close-and-personal look at one of today’s creative forces in film as well as an insider’s look at the Hollywood machine, which Gilliam straddles. We hope you will join us for this FINAL film in our 2011 Film & the Art Series — we’ve had SUCH fun bringing this great series to Lowell and can’t think of a better way to cap it off than with a behind-the-scenes look at The Movies. Please join us on October 18 as we wrap up this film series and pay our sincere thanks to all of you for making the past three years truly special for us.
Who knew we could transform the 2nd floor art gallery of a bank into our very own screening room? Well, we did! Out of necessity comes GREAT things!
It will give us great pride and pleasure to let director Chris Ordal and our distribution partner Shadow Distribution know about the success of last night’s film screening of Earthwork — we can’t wait to give them our update! Thank you ALL for coming out to support this great film AND sincere thanks to our venue hosts, Jeanne D’Arc Credit Union. An LFC shout out goes specifically to JDCU staff Steve and Bethany, who tended bar and welcomed our guests with big smiles. We were delighted to see bank President and CEO Mark Cochran in the house as well, enjoying the film and extending greetings.
Our thanks to Steve and Bethany, our smiling event hosts at Jeanne D'Arc Credit Union!
What we loved the most was that overwhelming sense of film community that came with each person that arrived. Greeting and welcoming our film guests is one of our greatest joys, right up there with that moment when the lights go down and opening credits roll. Thank you to all our faithful ‘regulars’ for joining us and for bringing friends, and hearty thanks to all those first-timers who got a chance to see how we manage these fabulous guerilla-style screenings. Not having our own indie theater forces us to be creative, and last night, it worked out marvelously.
Happy movie-goers being charmed by the one-and-only Steve Jones, bartender extraordinaire!
For those of you who couldn’t make it out, never fear, more film is on the horizon, including our Tuesday, October 18 screening of the Fulton & Pepe documentary on Terry Gilliam, Lost in La Mancha(the next film in our 2011 Film & the Arts Series), and our highly anticipated showing of Of Dolls and Murderon Tuesday, October 25. We’ve also got a treat coming up in late November that we’ll be sure to spring on you when the time is right!
The crowd patiently waits for movie time!
So thank you all once again for your support, whether by attending our screenings or helping to spread the word. Someday we hope to reward you with our OWN indie theater — till then, we’ll do our best to keep bringing great films to YOU at special places in and around the area.
