As my time with Terry Gilliam films comes to an end, it may have made sense for me to watch Don Quixote again. Instead, I thought it might be more interesting to watch the documentary following the film’s troubled history. Like many shows of the past, such as Macbeth, it seems that a Don Quixote movie was cursed from the beginning. Lost in La Mancha briefly mentions that Orson Wells also tried making a movie that followed a similar path. Focusing on a director, such as Gilliam, that faces such a struggle against Hollywood makes the story even more impactful. It’s interesting, and almost poetic, to see the idea of making this film slowly bring Terry Gilliam into a state of insanity. Everything gets thrown at them for this filming. And I mean, everything. I’m sure if I looked up ‘signs of the apocalypse’ on Google, almost every sign would have come to this film.
As for the method of telling the story itself, this is the only place I have an issue with the documentary. The story itself is interesting, which is always convenient for a documentary, because you never know what’s going to happen. But my issue itself comes with the way things could have been built upon. I can’t even remember where the film was decided to be scrapped, one of the most important things in the film. I definitely would have liked seeing a bit more of what happened after the cancellation. Not just in Gilliam, but in everyone else. Part of the production’s issue was that there were quite a few over-ambitious people that caused the film to be focused on very specific things, as opposed to the large picture. I also would have liked if the documentary crew followed Gilliam as he started working on getting the script back from the insurance agency. I understand that the documentary crew can’t capture everything, but, there were also things that were dwelled upon just a little too much.
Overall, I truly enjoyed Lost in La Mancha, it’s premise shows how quickly everything can go wrong in film shoots, but, faces issues that come with actually filming as the events are happening. 7.6/10
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