Terry Gilliam starts casting on revived “Man Who Killed Quixote”

PanARMENIAN.Net - In a move that is sure to prove a talking point at Cannes, Terry Gilliam and top Spanish producer Adrian Guerra are initiating casting on the resurrected “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote”, Variety reported exclusively.

Gilliam will meet with actors later this week. Guerra and Gilliam aim to go into production early 2015, shooting in Spain’s Canary Islands, Guerra told Variety Sunday.

Adrian Guerra’s Nostromo Pictures will lead produce; Jeremy Thomas, who licensed the rights of “Man” to Guerra, will take an executive producer credit with Thomas’ London-based Recorded Picture Co. associate producing.

Film’s storyline is a rewrite of the totally contempo Robert Duvall/Ewan McGregor re-launch that Thomas and Gilliam battled to finance over 2008-10, turning on an commercials director who is confused with Sancho Panza by a deluded actor who played Don Quixote in a movie the exec once shot.

They failed to raise the financing. The key difference this time round, Guerra said, is the state of Spanish financing facilities which, through of combo of tax-break finance, subsidies and TV coin could see the production raise about half its financing out of Spain.

“The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” famously went into production in 2000 with Jean Rochefort as the delirious hidalgo and Johnny Depp as an advertising exec shuttling between the present and seventeenth century La Mancha where he is mistaken by Don Quixote for Sancho Panza. Plagued by military jets fly-bys and a flash flood, the shoot was closed down after Rochefort’s double-disc hernia forced him off set.

A celebrated 2002 documentary, “Lost in La Mancha,” chronicled this first attempt to make “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,” helping to make the project more famous than 99% of films which do get made.

Adrian Guerra’s credits include Rodrigo Cortes’ “Buried” and “Red Lights” and “The Gunman,” with Sean Penn and Javier Bardem, which Nostromo co-produced.

The remaining half of production financing would come out of international. Even if the project is not packaged in time for Cannes, the sheer romantic endeavor of Gilliam will be piquing interest there.