..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

Lost In La Mancha
Directed by: Keith Fulton, Louis Pepe

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Ah, to dream the impossible dream.

While that may be too fine a line to impose on director Terry Gilliam’s pursuit of a film based on Cervantes’ Don Quixote, it is near impossible not to invoke it. Suffice it to say that several earlier film Quixotes have had checkered histories and the decade-long saga of Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote was fraught with drama, disappointment and doom. That a film was commissioned to chronicle the “making” of a difficult project and mutated into the “un-making of …” only further underlines the irony of the, ahem, quixotic pursuit.

The good thing about Lost in La Mancha by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe is that they were indeed there to capture the period leading up to filming and the rapid unraveling of the movie once the cameras began to turn. It is a first hand recounting of dreams dying hard, rife with seeming good guys and villains, of creative ideas evolving into moving images and the best-laid plans of men going awry by cruel happenstance rather than personal blindness, pride or misconception.

But there are nonetheless limitations to this endeavor. No one involved with the film or film-within-a-film could have foreseen the nasty turns of events looming in the shadows. And, charitably speaking, Fulton and Pepe remained cheerleaders, unable to ask the hard questions or connect the dots in a fashion that might have dug below the surface and retrieved more universal truths. The achievement is on the screen and all that transpired off camera remains conjecture.

The film nicely sets up the history of the project employing drawings by Gilliam and observations by co-screenwriter Tony Grisoni. Unable to secure American financing, Gilliam cobbled together European money, crew, cast and Spanish locations for his film. At $32 million it is expensive by European standards but the complex nature of the undertaking leaves very little leeway for snafus.

Opening two months prior to filming, one can see in hindsight the Herculean ambition of Gilliam’s Quixote colliding with the limitations of budget, talent and planning. The filmmaker comes off as somewhat cavalier but far from reckless or oblivious to the task at hand. He’s dedicated literally to turning men into giants while his assistant director, Phil Patterson, must make the hard decisions pertaining to cost and scheduling.

It’s clear, for instance, that they are banking on the principal actors  - Jean Rochefort as Quixote, Johnny Depp, Vanessa Paradis  - being generous. Repeatedly one hears someone asking when actors will arrive for costume fittings or makeup tests. What’s unclear is whether the cast is busy on other assignments, sticking to their contracted number of days or being temperamental because they can get away with it. When Rochefort delays his arrival to see his doctor about a prostrate problem, one senses it’s viewed as no more than jitters.

The pre-filming anxiety is nothing compared to what occurs during the initial shooting days. Almost immediately the production falls victim to inclement weather and the arid locations are flooded by unseasonable rainfall. The physical demands of the title role are all too evident on Rochefort who flies back to Paris (he’s diagnosed with a double herniated disc) and the filmmakers attempt to continue by filming other scenes and employing new settings while awaiting word on an insurance claim.

Though technically still filming, The Man Who Killed Quixote grinds to a halt. And in this period spanning three or four days the true drama emerges. Gilliam desperately and fruitlessly tries to keep the production afloat; his French producers maneuver to salvage their investment; and the completion guarantor perspires at the prospect of taking a financial bath. With the exception of Patterson, no one behaves honorably and, assuming Fulton and Pepe had access to these machinations, a unique opportunity to observe bad behavior has been squandered.

It’s impossible to say if the aborted film would have been successful, artistically or financially had it met with favorable conditions. Ultimately it was undone by the unforeseen and unexpected and there’s no way to prepare for the inconceivable. There simply might not be a lesson to be learned from this experience other than the curse of Quixote should not be discounted by mere mortals.

An IFC Films release of a Quixotic Films/Low Key Pictures production. Produced by Lucy Darwin. Directed and written by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe. Camera, Pepe. Editor, Jacob Bricca. Music, Miriam Cutler.

Narrated by Jeff Bridges.