I spent this weekend watching, or re-watching, these five interrelated
Terry Gilliam movies and docs...
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)
In a sane world
'The Adventures of Baron Munchausen' would've been one of the most beloved and famous films ever made, instead of a fairly obscure one, owing to the new studio regime at Columbia arbitrarily decided to barely release it, so they could blame it's consequent financial failure on the old regime and Director
Terry Gilliam, safe in the knowledge that hardly anybody was going to be able to see it and discover what a gem it was. It's true that due to an over-ambitious Producer (to put it kindly), the film had gone way over budget but every dime is up there on the screen. Where else are you going to see
Uma Thurman as the Goddess Venus, dancing a waltz through the air, in a volcano palace, serenaded by silver fountains and cherubs. The scale of the sets, the beauty of the costumes and the brilliance of the FX never fail to impress me. But it's not just a technical marvel, the characters are utterly charming, amusing and endearing. If I'm not gleefully smiling, ear-to-ear, then I'm roaring with laughter. Star
John Neville completely embodies the main theme in his performance, that the world of the Baron's ludicrous imagination is a place you'd rather live in, than the "real" world. Nobody else could deliver the line
"Ladies, I'll require your assistance. Kindly be so good as to remove your knickers." with as much loveable cheek, before the Baron escapes on a hot air balloon made of the undergarments. I love the character so much that near the end of the adventure, when Berthold rescues the Baron (Robin Hood style) by outrunning a sniper's bullet, simultaneously deflecting it back at the sniper and raising a flag of salute, I want to stand up and cheer.
Michael Kamen's romantic score adds immeasurably to the magic. The 2008 blu-ray transfer looks fine but wow would this benefit from a new 4K scan of the negative. Can we have one please!
The Madness and Misadventures of Munchausen (2008)
A very entertaining and info-packed documentary on the problems that beset the making of
Terry Gilliam's 'The Adventures of Baron Munchausen'. One I've revisited more than once before. Producer
Thomas Schühly gets most of the blame for the production problems, for seemingly promising the impossible (on the agreed budget), then disappearing when the proverbial hit the fan, leaving everyone else to try and sort out the mess. Schühly is interviewed too and he doesn't entirely disagree with that assessment, he comes across as quite blasé about everything. Gilliam unfairly acquired a reputation for extravagance from Munchausen but this doc makes clear that once the money problems started, he made creative compromises, negotiated prices down (hardly the Director's job) and significantly scaled back some sequences, plus he turned out a fantastic film that while expensive, looked expensive. The other (unseen) villain of the piece is
Dawn Steel, the new head of Columbia, who just dumped the film, as it was a project began by her predecessor
David Puttnam.
Eric Idle is quite the interviewee, talking about his friends, the way others talk about their enemies but with a mischievous grin.
Lost in La Mancha (2002)
Apart from it's specific subject, I'd forgotten what a good general primer this is for how a film is made, financed and organised, who does what on a production and why, while
Jeff Bridges' informative narration explains a lot of technical and logistic terminology.
'The Adventures of Baron Munchausen' looms large over this documentary about a film which fails to complete.
Terry Gilliam and some of his long term collaborators refer to Munchausen like
"The Scottish Play", fearing
'The Man Who Killed Don Quixote' is going to be a repeat of that situation but it's much worse. At least the Munchausen debacle left a beautiful finished movie. Here, apocalyptic floods, missing actors, military jet flybys and a lead actor who can't act for medical reasons, doom the film. The footage we do see of
Johnny Depp in the few completed shots always looks fascinating. A glimpse of what might have been. This doc is essential viewing.
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018)
Terry Gilliam hasn't made a real masterpiece in 20-years but I haven't disliked any of his recent work either, so that was the level I was expecting from the much delayed
'The Man Who Killed Don Quixote' and it was what I got. When he was originally shooting this film with
Johnny Depp and
Jean Rochefort in 2000, it would have been the 7th film, after a row of six back-to-back masterpieces, at the top of not just his usual critical acclaim but some big commercial Hollywood hits too. After this was abandoned it feels like everything went wrong for Gilliam, first was his horrible experience working on a big-budget film for the tyrannical
Weinstein brothers, then three more films compromised by lower budgets, little fanfare, or his star actor actually dying mid-production. Then when he finally gets 'The Man Who Killed Don Quixote' made in 2018, a vindictive former Producer ties the film up in legal trouble, so it never really gets properly exhibited and I eventually find it today, tucked away on a streaming service, 4-years later.
While I could imagine a young Depp having been better than
Adam Driver (although Driver is good), I can't believe Rochefort would've been better than
Jonathan Pryce as Don Quixote. He's heroic, endearing and sad. It's clear the script has been updated to bring it into 2018, with thematic subplots around undocumented migrants, Russian oligarchs and Islamist terrorism. Plus I'm almost sure the originally intended script involved literal time-travel, where as this uses dreams, illusions and a costume party to make it merely feel like the characters are slipping through time. This aspect feels like a budget compromise. Gilliam and co-writer
Tony Grisoni also changed the protagonist from a cynical marketing executive, to a cynical but once idealistic, film-maker who is making a grubby commercial in Spain (near where he shot a b&w art-film called
'The Man Who Killed Don Quixote'). This change links much better with the Don Quixote story but I'm not sure the other ideas gel so well. The finished movie is good but the story doesn't hang together as smoothly as I'd like and I'm not sure it was worth Gilliam going through all the pain over 18-years to get it made, when he could have put all his energies into other projects. Thematically it's very similar to
'The Adventures of Baron Munchausen' but it doesn't have the same lightness, grandeur, or joy and doesn't so clearly put across it's message about the pleasures of imagination.
He Dreams of Giants (2019)
This follow up to
'Lost in La Mancha' is less of a straight making-of about
'The Man Who Killed Don Quixote' than the previous documentary, it's more an examination of the psychological impact on a film-maker striving to get his work made and fearing that it won't be. I had no idea that
Terry Gilliam had tried to remount 'The Man Who Killed Don Quixote' several times over the last two decades. Including being near to start filming in 2015, when then lead actor
John Hurt had to sadly bow out due to his terminal cancer. So much time and energy from Gilliam's career has been wasted on the project but Gilliam's dogged persistence is admirable. It's cool to hear that they used the original 20-year old costumes, which had been carefully kept in storage, plus they needed to save that money on a limited budget. Gilliam remained loyal to the original crew, using some of the same designers, actors and cinematographer. Unfortunately the documentary prematurely ends on the upbeat Cannes premiere, so doesn't cover any of the subsequent legal troubles caused by former producer
Paulo Branco. Whether this is a true reflection or not,
'He Dreams of Giants' makes it seem like the effort to finish 'The Man Who Killed Don Quixote' took everything Gilliam had, physically and mentally, to get it over the line (including a heart condition). It leaves the sad impression that at 81, it might have been his last movie. I hope not.