By Josef Arbiv
After making the excellent doco, The Hamster Factor, about the making of his 1995 sci-fi startler, Twelve Monkeys, idiosyncratic auteur, Terry Gilliam (Brazil, The Fisher King), invited directors, Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, back on set, this time to chart the progress of his next film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a surrealistic take on the old legend. With Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort tapped for the leads, the film looked like a fascinating piece. And then everything fell apart. Like guerrilla filmmakers or rebel war correspondents, Fulton and Pepe were there every inch of the way, catching each fresh disaster that tears at the fabric of the film, from Depp’s late arrival on-set to Rochefort’s quickly revealed health issues, and the twin attacks of natural upheaval and lack of preparation. As heartbreaking as it is darkly funny, Lost In La Mancha stands as a truly compelling peek behind the curtain of modern movie making.
Since Lost In La Mancha was released to wide acclaim in 2002, there have been constant rumblings that Terry Gilliam will remount The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, with different actors and in different locations. When FilmInk spoke recently with Louis Pepe about his new documentary with Keith Fulton, The Bad Kids, we asked him about the rumours. Will we actually see a Don Quixote film get made? “I hope so,” Pepe replies. “But I am a firm believer in the curse. Let’s put it this way. It is the essence of the Don Quixote story, which clearly has a deeper archetypal human resonance with us, that one must keep trying, and when you stop trying, you die. I would like for it to happen. Keith and I have already said to Terry, ‘By the way, we’re happy to do the sequel!’ And he said, ‘Fine. That would be fun.’ But one might argue that after this many years, how could anything ever put on celluloid match the things that we’ve all imagined it to be. But, it is the role of the artist that Terry Gilliam is to keep trying.”
And what of Fulton and Pepe’s classic un-making of documentary, Lost In La Mancha? How exactly did they craft that classic? “That was more of an issue of life giving you lemons and you make lemonade or, even better, you make a lemon meringue pie with it,” Pepe laughs. “It about following the story. You go into a documentary thinking that you know roughly what kind of story you’re going to follow, but part of the essence of documentary filmmaking is being open to the story going anywhere. With the film that became Lost In La Mancha, the story went some place that we certainly weren’t expecting it to go, and there was a period of time where we didn’t know what to do. Terry Gilliam actually said to us, ‘Look, this is the story, so stop worrying about the fact that it doesn’t conform to what you thought was going to happen and just tell the story.’ That’s a very liberating thing to be told by someone you look up to when the story is their life falling apart around their ears.”
The Bad Kids is screening as part of The Human Rights Arts & Film Festival, which runs from May 5-June 8. For all venue, session, and ticketing information, head to The Human Rights Arts & Film Festival. For more on The Bad Kids, check out FilmInk’s interview with Louis Pepe.
