Not since 2013’s oddball sci-fi The Zero Theorem has the illustrious Terry Gilliam stepped behind the lens, but that’s all about to change very soon.
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, Gilliam’s own white whale, has finally started to display signs of tangible progress in recent months, a streak that can be traced back to the casting of the so-hot-right-now Adam Driver. Fast forward a few weeks and both Michael Palin and Olga Kurylenko have closed deals to star, and now production company Entre Chien & Loup have seemingly let slip that Willem Dafoe and Stellan Skarsgard are on the verge of signing along the dotted line.
No official statement to relay at this time, but it’s clear that Gilliam’s long-gestating project – one that has been retooled to focus on an arrogant publicist, who evokes old memories by returning to the village where he filmed his student project, “Don Quixote” – has finally garnered some much-needed momentum.
For more, you can check out the plot summary below:
“There was a time when Toby was a young film student full of ideals. So he decided to shoot a film adapted from the story of Don Quixote in a pretty Spanish village.
But those days are gone and now Toby is an arrogant publicist, libidinous and jaded. Money and glitter have corrupted him, and while he is in Spain where he finishes filming an ad, he has to juggle with his boss’s wife – Jacqui – a calamitous weather, and his own ego. This is when a mysterious gypsy comes to find him with an old copy of his student film: Toby is upset and decides to go in search of a little village where he had made his first work a long time ago. He discovers with horror that his little film has had terrible effects on this quiet place. Angelica, the girl full of innocence, became a high-class call girl; and the old man who played Don Quixote lost his mind, convinced in his delusion of being the real “Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance.”
Terry Gilliam is poised to fire up production on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote come fall, with Netflix on board to distribute the adventure movie at some point next year.