Lost in La Mancha

1) Who picked the locations for the film? How did they not do their homework on the weather conditions/air rights, etc? How in the world did they not even look at the sound stage the production planned to use? Inexcusable, and entirely on the shoulders of the production team, which includes Gilliam.

2) This is the second big-budget project that Gilliam has blown--is there any other director with a comparable record? The documentary gives us no idea of where Gilliam falls within a spectrum of production failures. Is he truly a poor manager of productions, or does this kind of thing happen more often than we know?

3) The second disk betrays Gilliam's cavalier approach to paperwork and contracts. Gilliams's not settled on his own deal days before the shoot, Vanessa Paradis hasn't finalized her deal on the eve of her scheduled appearance, and Depp and Rochefort seem to show up on their own schedule, not the production's. And, when it really matters, no one seems to have a handle on the insurance issues. Maybe this is the normal course of things on a movie set, but the documentary doesn't let us know, and to an outsider, it sure looks like Gilliam ignores the details until the consequences prevent him from doing whatever he wants to do whenever he wants to do it.

4) In the interview extras, Gilliam chats blithely about wanting to do Quixote for a decade, then lets slip the fact that HE DID NOT READ THE BOOK UNTIL AFTER HE'D LANDED A DEAL. I couldn't get over this one...the hubrus of complaining about Hollywood/European executives keeping a tight rein on his budget (a not inconsiderable $32 million) when HE HADN'T EVEN INVESTED THE TIME TO READ WHAT HE WANTED TO FILM. As interesting as his work has been, Gilliam, thanks to the second disk, looks more like the kind of product of the sixties and seventies that everyone's come to hate, persistently placing blame for his shortcomings on the system, complementing his own independence (when no one's asked), and believing that he's entitled to extravagant resources for his artistic vision. In the film and the extras, poor Gilliam spends a lot of time telling the camera/assorted interviewers that he's a responsible person, a responsible manager of a film set, but he looks more like someone who's saying it aloud to see if it sounds true than someone who really believes it.

So if you're going for LILM, make sure you watch the second disk, and for a comparison film, watch Raising Victor Vargas--made for NOTHING, with no stars, no elaborate sets, and packed with more feeling and drama than Gilliam, for all his costumes and pyrotechnics and effortless self-aggrandizement, has ever produced. Maybe Gilliam's roaring about not having much to say...