He Dreams of Giants (15.)
Directed by Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe.
Featuring Terry Gilliam, Adam Driver, Jonathan Pryce. Available on Demand from March 29th. 85 mins
I interviewed Terry Gilliam just over a decade ago and just under a decade later the one essential question I should've asked him occurred to me: “So, Mr Gilliam - being a film director, is it worth it?” Because though he's made some remarkable films it always seems to have been done at great cost and pain. With his talent he could have had a nice Steadman/ Scarfe type career as a cartoonist or illustrator and had a much easier time of it, living comfortably with his family in Hampstead. Would that have been preferable? Is being a film director worth the grief? I think, this documentary gives the answer and I think that answer is basically, “Nah, but what are you gonna do?”
Fulton and Pepe may not be directors in Gilliam's league but they have done something truly remarkable - made a behind the scenes making-of documentary (one of the most despised genre in all cinema) that is truly, even profoundly, revealing about film making and the artistic process. And they've done it twice. And both times have been about Terry Gilliam trying to make his dream project The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. In 2002 their Lost In La Mancha followed the production collapsing after six days of shooting due to finance problems, the illness of lead actor Jean Rochefort and a torrential downpour destroying the set. You literally saw Gilliam's dream being washed away before his eyes, and it was crushing. Two decades later, they are back to chronicle a second attempt and this time there is an even crueller ending – he gets to finish it.
When it finally got released in 2019, a couple of years after it was shot, Quixote was received with indifference or polite attempts to cover up our disappointment. (My one criticism of their film is that Fulton and Pepe skirt around this by ending it with Gilliam and his film getting a 20-minute standing ovation at Cannes.) But the film's box office failure is almost irrelevant: what comes through most clearly is that by the end of the thirty-year struggle to make it, the project had become a situation where there was no possibility of a happy ending. As Gilliam himself puts it, "This is not a film, it's a medical condition."
The question that hangs over the production is whether the film should have stayed in Gilliam's head, where it would always be perfect. Whatever their field, every artist is aware that the finished work is never quite as good as the vision that inspired it but none have as many hurdles between conception and realisation as a film director. But there is something else at work here, a realisation from Gilliam that he has missed his moment, that the optimal time for making this has gone. It's a Chronicle of a Disappointment Foretold: not just the director but everyone involved secretly knows that it's not going to turn out well but they need to put it out of its misery; it is their sad but noble duty to be the cast and crew that killed The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.
Pepe and Fulton do get inside the film making process and the insane pressures imposed by the lack of time and money but overall, this is much more a portrait of an artist than a Making Of. In his late seventies, Gilliam is acutely aware of his failing abilities, that he doesn't have the energy or the vision of his younger self. The film skips back over his whole career from Python and Brazil and Baron Münchhausen and has an odd fixation with an interview with Wogan he gave around the time of the latter's fractious release. There is a sense of regret at what he has and hasn't achieved. Fellini's Eight and a Half is a recurring reference point. Gilliam says it defined for him what a film director was. Lots of directors cite it as a favourite and I wonder if maybe its vision of the film director as ringmaster in a circus he can't control has become a self-fulfilling parody for a generation of creative people, a trap they are conditioned to walk straight into.
The cruellest part of He Dreams of Giants is that finishing the film is Gilliam's biggest fear because he won't know what to do then. He probably won't get to make another and since the first version of Quixote fell apart at the start of the century his output has been a shadow of the giants of the first part of his career. (Though I rather like The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.) The young Gilliam had a talent for subversion and rule-breaking that seemed liberating. At the end of his career, all those flights of fantasy seem like a trap to contain him. Even being a creative visionary is a rut to get stuck in.
Directed by Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe.
Featuring Terry Gilliam, Adam Driver, Jonathan Pryce. Available on Demand from March 29th. 85 mins
I interviewed Terry Gilliam just over a decade ago and just under a decade later the one essential question I should've asked him occurred to me: “So, Mr Gilliam - being a film director, is it worth it?” Because though he's made some remarkable films it always seems to have been done at great cost and pain. With his talent he could have had a nice Steadman/ Scarfe type career as a cartoonist or illustrator and had a much easier time of it, living comfortably with his family in Hampstead. Would that have been preferable? Is being a film director worth the grief? I think, this documentary gives the answer and I think that answer is basically, “Nah, but what are you gonna do?”
Fulton and Pepe may not be directors in Gilliam's league but they have done something truly remarkable - made a behind the scenes making-of documentary (one of the most despised genre in all cinema) that is truly, even profoundly, revealing about film making and the artistic process. And they've done it twice. And both times have been about Terry Gilliam trying to make his dream project The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. In 2002 their Lost In La Mancha followed the production collapsing after six days of shooting due to finance problems, the illness of lead actor Jean Rochefort and a torrential downpour destroying the set. You literally saw Gilliam's dream being washed away before his eyes, and it was crushing. Two decades later, they are back to chronicle a second attempt and this time there is an even crueller ending – he gets to finish it.
When it finally got released in 2019, a couple of years after it was shot, Quixote was received with indifference or polite attempts to cover up our disappointment. (My one criticism of their film is that Fulton and Pepe skirt around this by ending it with Gilliam and his film getting a 20-minute standing ovation at Cannes.) But the film's box office failure is almost irrelevant: what comes through most clearly is that by the end of the thirty-year struggle to make it, the project had become a situation where there was no possibility of a happy ending. As Gilliam himself puts it, "This is not a film, it's a medical condition."
The question that hangs over the production is whether the film should have stayed in Gilliam's head, where it would always be perfect. Whatever their field, every artist is aware that the finished work is never quite as good as the vision that inspired it but none have as many hurdles between conception and realisation as a film director. But there is something else at work here, a realisation from Gilliam that he has missed his moment, that the optimal time for making this has gone. It's a Chronicle of a Disappointment Foretold: not just the director but everyone involved secretly knows that it's not going to turn out well but they need to put it out of its misery; it is their sad but noble duty to be the cast and crew that killed The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.
Pepe and Fulton do get inside the film making process and the insane pressures imposed by the lack of time and money but overall, this is much more a portrait of an artist than a Making Of. In his late seventies, Gilliam is acutely aware of his failing abilities, that he doesn't have the energy or the vision of his younger self. The film skips back over his whole career from Python and Brazil and Baron Münchhausen and has an odd fixation with an interview with Wogan he gave around the time of the latter's fractious release. There is a sense of regret at what he has and hasn't achieved. Fellini's Eight and a Half is a recurring reference point. Gilliam says it defined for him what a film director was. Lots of directors cite it as a favourite and I wonder if maybe its vision of the film director as ringmaster in a circus he can't control has become a self-fulfilling parody for a generation of creative people, a trap they are conditioned to walk straight into.
The cruellest part of He Dreams of Giants is that finishing the film is Gilliam's biggest fear because he won't know what to do then. He probably won't get to make another and since the first version of Quixote fell apart at the start of the century his output has been a shadow of the giants of the first part of his career. (Though I rather like The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.) The young Gilliam had a talent for subversion and rule-breaking that seemed liberating. At the end of his career, all those flights of fantasy seem like a trap to contain him. Even being a creative visionary is a rut to get stuck in.
