After almost thirty years of preparations, Terry Gilliam could finally show his preferred Czech audience his film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. “If there is someone who should understand the film, it is you. You’re a smart and fun-loving people. The Czechs know how to live. You survived so many horrors, and despite all that, you’ve maintained your sense of humour. You could serve as an example to the whole world,” said the American native living in Britain in expression of his affection for the Czechs.
Also accompanying The Man Who Killed Don Quixote to the festival was the female lead, Joana Ribeiro. “What I like about Terry’s films is how they talk about the importance of imagination,” she said in praise of the director. Gilliam had once already started shooting his version of the classic tale about a man who was living out his fantasy of being a knight – at the time with Jean Rochefort and Johnny Depp. The reasons why production failed is the subject of the 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha. “Of course I was afraid at first that the film would not be as good as people imagined it would be after seeing the documentary. But as soon as we started shooting and I saw how good the actors were, I stopped thinking about that,” said Gilliam at the press conference about the pressure of expectations.
Whereas in the original version Depp was to go back in time to the 17th century, in the new version, the Quixote story remains in the present and Adam Driver plays a filmmaker who sold out. “It’s sort of a warning to young filmmakers not to let the world of advertising corrupt them,” said Gilliam adding that a person should only become a director when they know what they want to say.
