The creative heroism of Terry Gilliam is saluted once again in this 20-year-anniversary rerelease of Lost in La Mancha, the documentary by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe about Gilliam’s incredible ordeal in the late 90s in trying to make a movie version of Don Quixote: a salutary warning about the physical and mental nightmare of independent film-making. Gilliam’s leading man, veteran French star Jean Rochefort, suffered a herniated disc midway through shooting and was unable to carry on, dealing a death blow to an under-funded, over-ambitious production already traumatised by biblical floods that swept away their equipment in the Spanish desert, Nato jets overhead which ruined the soundtrack, and insurers who wouldn’t pay out on Rochefort’s illness and became the obstructive legal owners of the script by Gilliam and Tony Grisoni.
