The most affecting programme of the week was Lost in La Mancha, a film shown as part of the Storyville series on BBC 2 (Sunday). It was about Terry Gilliam, who used to do the cartoons for Monty Python and who now has a reputation for being a ‘maverick’ director. This means that sometimes he works outside the Hollywood system successfully (Brazil) and sometimes disastrously (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen). He often refers to the catastrophe of Munchausen. We all have events that define our sense of ourselves; how awful it must be when the central incident in your life was a devastating failure.
But Gilliam can never do anything the easy way. He wanted to make a film of Don Quixote but he couldn’t let even this huge story speak for itself. The movie was titled The Man Who Killed Don Quixote and the Sancho Panza figure was to be played by Johnny Depp as a time traveller from the present day.
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