Lost in La Mancha
Dir: Keith Fulton, Louis Pepe
2002
***
Lost in La Mancha, the documentry about the troubled Terry Gilliam motion picture adaption of Cervantes' Don Quixote is interesting to a point and educational for those who want to be film makers but ultimately it's quite a dull film to watch. Gilliam's film suffered everything from nearby NATO aircraft target practice making the sound recording impossible to flash floods, hail storms and then finally the lead actor breaking his back while falling off a horse. This documentary captures none of these catastrophes. It is quite obvious that this was always intended to be a 'Making of' extra for the DVD but in the loss of the final film, it's all they had. I believe the plan was to try and make enough money from the documentary to re-start production but alas, it never happened. It's a shame really, as the only really good bit of the documentary were of the parts of the film that had been recorded, each one being absolutely brilliant, in particular a bizarre scene of Depp under a waterfall with a fish on his head. A sad loss to cinema I'm sure.