Riders on the storm

Terry Gilliam's film about Don Quixote had all the right ingredients: Hollywood stars, a big budget and, of course, a great cinematic story. So why did it all go so wrong? Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, who filmed the whole mess as it unfolded, tell the story of the movie that never was...

It's often the case in documentary film-making that the story you set out to tell is not the story that you ultimately capture. Instead of starting with a clear vision which may become more and more elusive as it funnels its way through the practical realities of film-making, "reality"-based film-making commences with chaos (it's why financiers are loathe to finance it). If you're at all lucky, it ends with a vision.

Lost in La Mancha ­ our documentary about Terry Gilliam's calamitous attempt to film Cervantes' Don Quixote ­ was a case of tragic serendipity. Unfortunately for Gilliam, and for an avid and expectant Gilliam audience, the failure of his film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, found life imitating art: Gilliam as Quixote, the impossible dreamer.

It's eerie for us now to look at our fundraising proposal from June 2000, something which, at the time, seemed so metaphorical and academic: "Terry Gilliam has been tilting at windmills ever since Universal Studios held Brazil captive in 1985. His more than 15-year history of battling the Hollywood machine has cast him, like Quixote, as a visionary dreamer who rages against gigantic forces. And now, with The Man Who Killed Don Quixote ­ one of the most expensive productions to be mounted without Hollywood money ­ Gilliam is finally tackling his alter-ego." Driven by the same obvious metaphor between Gilliam and Quixote, many journalists have accused us of having the foreknowledge that Gilliam's production would collapse. Had we known, making Lost in La Mancha would have been a lot easier. The fact is that we were, like Quixote, enchanted by an illusion: $32m, a stellar cast, a crew of seasoned professionals. How could such a seemingly infallible project go south? We truly thought we'd be telling the story of a director's triumph. Instead, this is what happened:

April 1999

At lunch with Gilliam in his Highgate home, we initially poo-poo his wife Maggie's suggestion that we embark on a documentary about Gilliam's Quixote. We've made a documentary about Terry before (The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of 12 Monkeys, 1996) and we're trying our best to make the transition to fiction. We tell Terry about the script we're writing, Taft's Navel Pond, a story about a team of "making of" documentarians who get their big break in Hollywood. The catch is that they become pawns in the hands of a producer who's intentionally handed them a sure-fire flop. And the producer intends to make his fortune on the "making of" film which chronicles our heroes' failure. Terry encourages us to get to work.

June 1999

Reminding ourselves that a second go with the same documentary subject often proves more rewarding than the first, we've agreed to take on the Quixote documentary. We've already spent a month working on budgets and proposals only to receive some bad news from Terry. Turns out that his principal financier doesn't really have the money that he committed to the project. Quixote defeated by another evil enchanter.

May 2000

Quixote rides again. New producer, new financing. Pre-production slated to begin in Madrid in August. After just finishing work on a big budget Hollywood "making of" with big budget paranoia, we're intrigued to see if Gilliam's entirely European-financed production will be less paranoid. But we're still not sure we should take on another film about a film. It can be dangerous for the film-maker's soul to hold a mirror up to the process. We bring our producer, Lucy Darwin, on board. We figure if she can track down the money, we'll go to Madrid.

July 2000

So far no one's interested in financing the documentary. Lucy receives the typical response to documentary proposals: "We'd love to see it when it's done." (Read: "Reality isn't real until it's happened.") We try a new spin on the proposal to distinguish it further from the average "making of." A film which will chronicle the rarely documented aspects of pre-production ­ the mechanics of how a major film production gets off the ground. We wait, suspending ourselves in a not very interesting aspect of pre-production. We set a deadline of 24 July to at least get the money for some plane tickets. We're pretty sure it won't happen.

25 July 2000

The deadline's come and gone, and still no money. Our friend Ian Kelly, a Gilliam crew veteran since The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (formerly the most quixotic episode of Gilliam's career) convinces us to gather up our credit cards and get to Madrid. "It's Terry! You know something interesting is bound to happen." Six days and $10,000 of debt later, we touch down in Madrid.

23 August 2000

Three weeks into our documentary shoot, we have nothing but shots of nails being hammered, extras being cast, and people talking on the telephone in a variety of languages we don't understand. No movie stars, no "Gilliam raging against gigantic forces," no money to ease our growing concern that maybe pre-production is never documented for a good reason. And Terry doesn't seem himself. Years of trying to get Quixote off the ground have brought him to Madrid less a Don Quixote than a Sancho Panza. A grumbling realist.

25 August 2000

Good news. Lucy, with the help of our lawyer, Andrew Curtis, has found the financing for our documentary. And two days earlier, we've videotaped what looks like the first quixotic bump in the road for Terry's film. An angry meeting between Terry and his executive producer about the fact that there are still no contracts with some of the lead actors. Terry's finding his battle and we're finding our drama.

5 September 2000

Terry's film is scheduled to begin shooting in less than three weeks, but things don't seem to be falling into place. Terry can't get Jean Rochefort (who plays Quixote) and Johnny Depp (a Sancho Panza-like modern-day ad exec) in the same place to do a read-through of the script. The Babel-like mix of French, Spanish, Italian and English in the production office creates communication mayhem. The new prior of San Juan de Los Reyes, a church in Toledo that Terry wants for a key location, has rescinded the permission, fearing Gilliam's reputation for heresy. Rochefort, who has to ride a horse for a third of the shoot, is complaining of prostate troubles. Terry's prospects and the dramatic value of our documentary begin to have an inverse relationship. On tape, Terry looks straight into our lens. Jokingly calls us vultures.

23 September 2000

All of the principal actors ­ Rochefort, Johnny Depp, and Vanessa Paradis ­ have arrived in Madrid. Their screen tests look great. A magical army of human-size puppets rehearses in the production design warehouse. And shooting begins in two days. On tape, we capture Terry's closing words after a productive script reading with Johnny. "It's going to be beautiful and terrible." He's referring to his film, not the impending experience of making it, but months later in our editing suite, the words will seem eerily prophetic.

30 September 2000

The first week of shooting in northern Spain is beset with misfortunes: uncooperative horses, unrehearsed stunts, NATO bombers flying overhead, and a massive flash flood that has turned the desert location into mud. We're expecting to break out into boils or for frogs to fall from the sky. But we're reminded that the first week on any film is often cursed and chaotic. At breakfast with Terry we tell him we're headed back for Madrid to take stock of our footage. He tries to dissuade us. "Oh, c'mon. Don't you want to be here on Monday when the bus load of German financiers arrives on set?" We're reminded of Marcello Mastroianni in 81/2 being chased around by producers and financiers who want to know what his film's about. But we drive back to Madrid anyway.

2 October 2000

Less than 48 hours later, we're in the car driving back to re-join the crew. An urgent call last night from Terry's assistant, Ella von Schreitter, has us baffled. "Terry really, really wants you to be here," she pleaded. It seemed that something was up. We arrive on location to find that Jean Rochefort has taken ill and flown back to Paris. No one knows when he'll return. There's not much for the crew to shoot without him, and the members of a German mutual fund, whose investment represents about half of Gilliam's budget, are roaming around the set looking for some "lights, camera, action." The irony is almost too rich. As painful as it is for him, Terry has practically directed the scene for us.

4 October 2000

On the drive back to Madrid, we panic. If Terry's film is really coming apart, then what are we going to tell our financiers? We're going to have to deliver something. But we're in no way confident that we have enough material to tell a story that can stand on its own. We call our friend Lisa-Marie Russo in London. She's made documentaries. She'll know what to do. "Shoot anything you can! Interview anyone who'll talk to you about what's going on. Just follow it wherever it leads, and keep shooting!" It sounds simple, but it's hard to pull off. We lurk around the production office, shooting any conversation we can catch, knocking on the door of any office where a meeting is going on. But people look at us funny. "Why are you still shooting?" Now we do feel like vultures.

We call Terry and explain that shooting under these circumstances goes against every ethic we've learned about documentary film-making. Terry laughs. "Screw ethics! Keep shooting! The past 10 years of trying to get this film going have been nothing but misery and shit. Somebody's got to get a film out of this process, and it doesn't look like it's going to be me. So it better be you!"

2 November 2000

With Terry's blessing providing momentum, we've spent the past three weeks chronicling the production's gradual unraveling. Force majeure, insurance claims, "essential elements", completion bonds ­ it's been hard to make much sense of what's happening. Confused by the not very poetic morass of detail, we want to stage a shot that tells a story. Like the shot at the end of Citizen Kane with a warehouse full of packed crates ­ the remnants of a life, in this case, of a film. Before we know it, news arrives that Rochefort isn't coming back. Props are getting packed in a cavernous warehouse. We have our shot. Two days after returning to Los Angeles, Lucy calls to tell us that the insurance company has officially shut down Terry's film.

5 January 2001

The past two weeks viewing 80 hours of footage have played out like an autopsy, turning up all sorts of hints and clues that have only made sense in retrospect. We're confident that we have the material for a unique feature-length documentary that can stand on its own. We just need some more time and money.

12 March 2001

Lucy has convinced our investors to put up the additional money we need to finish the film. We officially begin editing.

8 August 2001

Getting the documentary into the proper shape has proven much more difficult than expected. Test audiences don't respond well to all the bits of foreshadowing that we've been so excited to find. We've had to stop thinking of it as a "true" story and begin approaching it like a fiction film ­ building up the characters, pacing out the plot strands, and shaping the story arc so that the audience wishes for the best before the worst happens. Reality needs a lot of work.

25 August 2001

We discover a single shot that tells it all. It's a shot of Terry, one week before production. Actors have still not arrived, and Terry sits in the costume department voicing his angst. He's laughing and joking that he doesn't care anymore, that he's feeling fatalistic. But something betrays him: it's the child-like way he places a small paper cone on his nose ­ a mask to hide what he's really thinking. It's a shot straight out of 81/2: Marcello Mastroianni, as the director stuck in a creative rut, tunes out a barrage of questions with a small diversion ­ he sticks a green pepper on the end of his nose and plays the fool. Life imitates art.

In a favourite scene that we'd already cut, Nicola Pecorini, Terry's director of photography, also hits the phenomenon on the nose: "I mean, if you tried to write a script and think of all the things that could go wrong, you just couldn't..." Our screenplay, Taft's Navel Pond now looks pale in comparison.

12 February 2002

After the premiere screening of Lost in La Mancha at the Berlinale, a reporter chimes in with our best review to date. "If I didn't know better, I'd say that this was the film that Terry had always intended to make." A clever thought. Had we scooped Gilliam by making the ultimate Quixote adaptation? Or had Gilliam orchestrated the whole fiasco? If only one of us could take credit for such a grand conceit. It was one fiction that would have been more interesting than the sorry truth.

'Lost in La Mancha' is released on 1 August