Captain Chaos makes a movie

I just saw Lost in La Mancha which showed during Deep Ellum Film Festival. It’s a documentary about Terry Gilliam’s attempts over the last decade to make a movie about Don Quixote. The documentary starts off with Gilliam and others gushing about how perfect Don Quixote is for a Gilliam film. His movies all contain some kind of dreamer who lives in a fantasy world, and doom awaits them as they gain their sanity and settle into reality. The movie seems cursed near the beginning of pre-production and “force majeur” settles in during shooting in the form of illness and floods to make things really hard.

What survives is a particularly effective document of the creative process, and a lot of the mechanics involved in making a movie. I would put it alongside John Sayles excellent commentary on the “Limbo” and “Secret of Roan Innish” DVDs for how movies get made. Gilliam’s giddy, or is it deluded, determination to drive the project forward after calamity captures the chutzpah it takes to transfer images in your head to film. It’s also in stark contrast to what you see from a director like say Darren Aronofksy who comes across as very technical and in constant consultation with his director of photography Matthew Libatique. Gilliam is much more about creating a canvas and letting chaos play out inside it.

Another point the documentary makes, which left me a bit melancholy, is how Adventures of Baron Munchausen has overshadowed Gilliam’s career. It is the text book example of how not handle a production. It made him a bit of a pariah in Hollywood, despite the fact that his movies not only win critical acclaim but have all been hits (except Baron M). (“The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” is solely funded by European investors) I wonder what we might have seen from Gilliam if some movie making process could better handle Gilliam’s chaotic visions.