• 1 David Sterritt and Mikita Brottman, “Lost in La Mancha: The Making, Unmaking, and Remaking of Terry (...)

1“It’s a sad, sad world” (51:41): this off-camera comment fits to a nicety the “case” of Fulton and Pepe’s Lost in La Mancha, but only ironically so. Their film is – or was supposed to be – a documentary (what we now call a making of) shot about and around Terry Gilliam’s long-expected adaptation of Miguel Cervantes’s Don Quixote, but when the film was eventually abandoned both directors turned it into something quite different, the record of what critics would call the unmaking of Terry Gilliam.1 The result was not that sad since it led to the production of a very unexpected kind of film, telling how the adaptation whose production it was supposed to document turned out not to be made. This “unmaking” of both Gilliam and the film lends a very particular, autonomous status to Lost in La Mancha, which it could never have claimed as a mere making of. It stands at the threshold of two cinematic genres, being both a potential making of relating the production of the film (until we realize the film is not going to be made eventually) and a documentary about the failure to make it – hence it occupies an uneasy position at the crossroads, which is itself thematised in its narrative construction. My aim here is to research the way the film deals with this status and manages to maintain an ambiguous attitude both towards its topic (whether or not Gilliam’s film will be completed) and towards its very nature (partly realistic documentary, partly metafictional comment on the way a film is – not – shot and produced). By this study I mean to show how Fulton and Pepe’s film plays out our beliefs as to how a postmodern film (necessarily) stages its own reflexive nature (as cinema on cinema) and also how this belief is manipulated so as to point to the limits of our “knowledgeable” approach of postmodernism. This study of the surprisingly reflexive quality of the documentary will be organized around three points: the way it mixes reality with fiction; the way it adopts a self-conscious mode of representation; and the way it repeatedly introduces shows within the show to embody this reflexive discourse. In all these cases, the documentary stands at the intersection between a mere realistic record and an aesthetic reconstruction.

• 2 Lost in La Mancha. Directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe. With Terry Gilliam, Johnny Depp, Jean R (...)
• 3 Brigitte Adriaensen, “Getting Lost in La Mancha: The Unma(s)king of Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Do (...)

2Before tackling the core topic of the treatment of the in-between status of the film, a few words ought to be said about the story it relates – the story of the failure to shoot a film.2 When director Terry Gilliam decided to shoot an adaptation of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, co-starring Johnny Depp and entitled The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, he had intended to suggest a very personal view of the source work. For instance, the character of Sancho Panza was supposed to be replaced by Toby Grisoni, a twenty-first century marketing executive thrown back through time, whom Quixote mistakes for Panza. Filming first began in 2000 but was blighted by an eerie sequence of accidents. Military flyovers drowned out the dialogue, flash floods washed away the set, and then one of the film’s stars, French actor Jean Rochefort, was taken ill, having to be airlifted to hospital after suffering a hernia. Insurers decided to stop the shooting, making it one of the costliest cinematic projects of all time never to reach completion. Clearly, the status of the film changes when it becomes obvious that Gilliam’s project is about to fail. A crucial question remains – does it really fail or is it not somehow transferred onto the documentary? What I mean is that as we gradually come to understand that the project is not going to be made, the film consistently comes to equate the image of Gilliam fighting the “windmills of reality” (a phrase he will coin himself at the end of Lost in La Mancha) with his subject matter, Don Quixote himself. This analogy is not simply suggested, it becomes a literal message from the film, conveyed for instance when the production designer Benjamin Fernandez explicitly compares Gilliam to Cervantes’s hero, on the ground that he is too idealistic (17:23). Thus, there seems to be a constant intrusion of fiction upon reality, as if the role of the missing Don Quixote (Rochefort being taken ill) was performed by Gilliam himself. Beyond this explicit comparison, I wish to show more specifically how the film visually includes this dimension, which is unanimously acknowledged in the critical debate on the film.3 In the scene which follows the episode where Gilliam understands that there is something wrong with Rochefort, we see his gradual disappointment and anger at the situation as he knocks into stones; then we have a shot of Johnny Depp dressed as Sancho Panza/Toby Grisoni looking at Gilliam’s attitude, and seemingly sharing in, sympathizing with his discouragement. This scene clearly points to the equation between Don Quixote and Terry Gilliam, as Depp seems to pity him as a thwarted director – just as Sancho Panza pities Don Quixote as a thwarted idealist.

• 4 Ibid, 104.

4The film then stages a blurring of fiction and reality, which works as a compensatory movement. As Don Quixote cannot be adapted into The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, then it seems the elements of fiction which were to be present in the projected film have found a safe harbour in the documentary. Fiction has migrated into the once realistic making of. Yet it should be noticed how the fictional elements that are integrated into Lost in La Mancha do not stem only from Cervantes but also from Gilliam’s past œuvre. Chief among these are the cartoon-like episodes which are taken up from his Monty Python period and which are present in Lost in La Mancha through two main devices. First, the animated sequences which pop up in the film from time to time refer to this period; they appear either when Gustave Doré’s illustrations of Don Quixote are used to comment on the scenes about to be shot by Gilliam, to explain the context of these scenes in the novel or when the past career of Gilliam is alluded to. According to Donnell, this may have a soothing effect on the spectator: “The Gilliamesque animation offers viewers comic relief from what is otherwise a realist documentary that dissects the misery of failure.”4 This significantly realigns Gilliam on the fictional level since his past is dealt with formally in the same way as the story of Don Quixote is reminded to the viewers – as if Gilliam was a fictional character like Don Quixote in fact. More significantly still, the whole of the film is punctuated by episodes which I would define as contaminated by a cartoon aesthetics, when for instance assistant director Phil Paterson mimics masturbation to express his utter helplessness in front of the situation which is getting out of control – or when he slaps his own face (58:58) or again, when Gilliam looks so flabbergasted by circumstances that he adopts a very cartoon-like pose. This is again an invasion of reality by fiction: as if the Monty Python aesthetics had become a normal standard of representation, as if people behaved in reality as in cartoons.

• 5 Ibid, 105.
• 6 François de La Bretèque, « Lost in la Mancha d’Orson Welles à Terry Gilliam: Se perdre dans la Manc (...)
• 7 Adriaensen, “Getting Lost in La Mancha,” 258.

5The topic of fiction and reality is helpful to present the in-between status of Lost in La Mancha, which is both a fiction on Gilliam as a Quixotic figure and a realistic account of his attempt at adapting Cervantes. But we should not forget that this topic is not necessarily where the two directors are most reliable, since their presentation of Gilliam as Quixotic is also a biased presentation, as critics recognized and as the film itself suggests; at one point (1:25:21), co-writer Tony Grisoni even says: “No director is gonna start a picture saying, ‘We may never get through this.’” Yet, the extent to which Pepe and Fulton distort reality to fit a predetermined Quixotic vision of Gilliam is also in itself a thorny issue. Donnell for instance thinks the initial scene shows Gilliam as a helpless director lost in his creation,5 whereas Adriaensen, following La Brétèque’s contextual explanations,6 identifies this incipit to a scene of open-air theatre that relates the film to a Spanish background.7 However we may choose to read the invasion of fiction in the film – as a total or partial distortion of reality by the filmic discourse – the topic of this blurring of the limits between fiction and reality puts to the forefront, in a reflexive way, the filmic discourse as a discourse on the manipulation of images and by images.

• 8 Donnell, « Quixotic Storytelling, » 98.
• 9 Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature. From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard, New York: Col (...)

6The specific narrative discourse held by the film is defined as “Quixotic” by Donnell;8 this refers to the polyphonic, multiple narration it evinces and which results in an indeterminacy of meaning which according to Donnell, conveys and “adapts” Cervantes’s narrative mode. To some extent, the film is metafictional, it deals not with film in general, but with cinema as an “addiction” and an escape from reality into fantasy. But it is not metafictional if we apply the term strictly, i.e., as a work of art dealing with its own construction, as Robert Stam suggests9 – here, Lost in La Mancha exposes the making of another film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, but it does not do so for itself, for the documentary we are watching:

• 11 Patricia Waugh, Metafiction. The theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, London: Routledge, (...)

9At no time do the directors try to downplay their direct interference with the enunciation of the film because they want this enunciation to appear. Similarly, the editing of some scenes points to this self-consciousness of style in the film. In a particular scene (1:12:27), a secretary is answering the phone and keeps repeating that they “don’t know” the date when the shooting will be taken up. This staging of failure as repeated is hardly innocent and passes for what it is: an emphasis laid by the filmic discourse on what the directors deem a crucial expression of Gilliam’s “fight against the windmills of reality,” to take up a phrase appearing later in the film. Lastly – but examples abound – the fast forward effect visible when tourists are playing around and being photographed on Don Quixote’s statue at the end of the film (1:23:31), right under, it seems, Gilliam’s apartment, has a definite aim: by this shot the film seems to mock the standstill to which Gilliam’s project has come. But the main point to be made in my perspective is the following: Lost in La Mancha does hold a reflexive discourse on its own nature and construction by making such explicit statements as to its style and by forsaking so obviously the realistic, “objective” prerequisite to the documentary aesthetics. As such, it cannot but be associated to metafiction as defined by Patricia Waugh as an exposure of the artificial, constructed nature of fiction, as a “laying bare [of] the device.’11

• 12 Donnell, “Quixotic Storytelling,” 102.
• 13 Adriaensen, “Getting Lost in La Mancha,” 267.

10Between fiction and reality, then, Lost in La Mancha is also stylistically trespassing the border between objective documentary and reflexive artefact. I wish to make two other developments that will help explain how the film does situate itself in a middle ground stylistically speaking – and most importantly how that situation can be considered to be a sign that it shares essential concerns with the postmodern approach concerning the blurring of frontiers between reality and fiction. First, it must be noted that apart from its style, the film can be considered from a higher vantage point to be an oddity in terms of its very nature and status, beyond the ambiguity between documentary and fiction which we already noticed. The oddity results from the fact that the voice over comment never actually reveals the fact that the film was eventually abandoned until the last scenes, more precisely until assistant director Phil Paterson says he quits (1:20:25). Donnell even claims that the spectator is bound to enjoy the film more fully if he or she is ignorant of the fact that the film was eventually abandoned.12 It is clear that the suspense-driven “plot” does work a lot better if the spectator does not know the ultimate fate of Gilliam’s plan but the consistent ambiguity which is maintained in Lost in La Mancha throughout as to the completion or not of Gilliam’s plan is an ambiguity which is to be felt by the spectator whether or not he or she knows (by reading the DVD cover, the film’s reviews, etc.) that it tells the story of a failed attempt at adapting Don Quixote. Of course, this film will be made later, and released in 2018 under the initial title The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, but this was not part of the reception context of Fulton and Pepe’s film in 2002. The point is that Lost in La Mancha as an œuvre presents itself (nearly until the end) as a comment on a film (The Man Who Killed Don Quixote) which never came into existence. In other words, as Adriaensen remarks,13 the comment has taken precedence over the original work – a phenomenon which is typical of post-modern aesthetics. Postmodernism does provide indeed many similar examples, if one thinks for instance of Jorge Luis Borges’s “fake summaries” of works which never existed. It is part and parcel of a general movement of disempowerment of authorial voices and anxiety over the authority of narratives which is, again, a crucial element in the definition of postmodernism.

• 15 Gérard Genette, Métalepses, Paris: Seuils, 2004.

17But how is this statement a feature of Lost in La Mancha as a reflexive work bearing not on another film but on its own status? In other words, is Adriaensen right when she claims that Lost in La Mancha is not truly metafictional because it examines cinema in general and does not question its own status? I think the critic herself has answered the question by noticing that the voice over in Lost in La Mancha is narrated by Jeff Bridges, the actor who performed in Gilliam’s Fisher King (265). By using Bridges in this part, Pepe and Fulton implement an underlying development of mise en abyme, or show within the show, i.e., the trespassing from one narrative level over another one, whereas logically (or in a more mainstream approach), both should have been kept separate. Using Bridges suggests that the actor from Fisher King has become real, has shifted levels from fiction to reality, just as Don Quixote keeps invading reality and “contaminates” Gilliam. This feature also often appears when the shot sequences from The Man Who Killed Don Quixote are inserted within Lost in La Mancha without the usual changes in lighting and image quality – as if the two levels had fused. This overlapping of narrative levels – in technical terms a metalepsis, according to French theoretician Gérard Genette15 – again inscribes Lost in La Mancha within a discourse that tends to deny narrative barriers, just as the duplication of the spectators’ position in the various instances of mise en abyme opens the path for precisely this kind of confusion. This is maybe the best way of showing what Lost in La Mancha makes of its topic in terms of questioning our spectators’ position not only towards Gilliam’s project, but also towards itself.

• 16 The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Directed by Terry Gilliam. With Adam Driver (Toby), Jonathan Price (...)
• 17 He Dreams of Giants. Directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe. With Adam Driver, Terry Gilliam, John (...)

18Terry Gilliam did make the film eventually. It was released in 2018 under the projected title and bears many similarities to the script that he was trying to shoot in the 2000s.16 Similarly, a sequel was given by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe in 2019 to Lost in La Mancha, through another documentary following the production of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and entitled He Dreams of Giants.17 Therefore, the story was not really over after all, once the relation of the doomed project had been made in 2002. What testifies to the continuous interest in metafictional content in the “finished product” confirms Gilliam’s intent to deal in that film with our sometimes fruitful, sometimes harmful, relationship to fiction in general and to cinema in particular. Thus, whereas Toby Grisoni/Sancho Panza in the 2002 attempt was supposed to be a marketing executive thrown back in seventeenth-century Spain, he is now (in 2018) a film director finding by chance a copy of his first student project film and meeting the former “star” of this project who now lives in the delusion that he is Don Quixote. The whole plot again revolves around the difficulty of combining the appeal of fiction and the hard reality of corruption and immorality, just as in the initial project. But the central change in the status of the main character Toby (Adam Driver) takes the metafictional dimension still further, since it becomes crystal clear that Gilliam is dealing not only with the status of fiction but with the role of cinema in reality. Such a move resonates significantly with Lost in La Mancha, as a work which questioned the interaction between documentary reality and fictional reconstruction. Yet the sequel to the documentary has been harshly judged by some critics like Caryn James, precisely due to the excessive stress on that question of the link between the real-life director and the idealism of Don Quixote: