Terry Gilliam says Time Bandits will steal onto TV broadcasts soon, hints Don Quixote movie to start shooting.
The man who killed The Man Who Killed Don Quixote says the resurrection is a hand and he’s not just tilting at windmills. Terry Gilliam announced that there is a TV series in the works based on his classic fantasy film Time Bandits and that his long-awaited film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, will start shooting in April.
Time Bandits (1981) was co-written, produced, and directed by Terry Gilliam. It starred Sean Connery, John Cleese, Shelley Duvall, Ralph Richardson, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Michael Palin, Peter Vaughn, David Warner. It was about a small band of miniature marauders who had a map to all the time holes in history and decided they could make a fortune in futures.
Time Bandits was the first of Gilliam’s "Trilogy of Imagination" movies that also included Brazil (1985), which starred Jonathan Pryce and Robert De Niro and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988).
The Guardian magazine hosted a webchat with Gilliam where he talked about his upcoming TV projects.
"We are involved in two possibilities: One, a TV series based on Time Bandits, another based on a script Richard LaGravenese and I wrote after Fisher King, called The Defective Detective," Gilliam told the webchat.
The Defective Detective centers on a private investigator looking into the disappearance of a young girl who appears to have reappeared in the fantasy land of story books. Originally envisioned as a feature motion picture that would have starred some combination of Danny Devito, Nick Nolte, Nicolas Cage, and Bruce Willis, The Defective Detective never moved forward.
Time Bandits was almost made into a TV series by Hallmark in 2001, but that also never moved forward.
But the Gilliam project that has been stalled the longest is his The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Johnny Depp was supposed to star as Sancho Panza in it 20 years ago. The film was windblown and thunderstruck until it was finally abandoned. A documentary film from 2002, Lost in La Mancha, told the story of how it unfolded.
“I’ve waited now for another year, and things go wrong, and the most tragic one is a couple months ago, John Hurt, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer," Gilliam told BBC Radio 4’s Front Row. "And I tried to somehow get it through the system, but we had one go where Don Quixote was carted off in a medical helicopter, and the insurance company is not going to let me get away with that twice.”
“We’re supposed to be shooting in April next year, and I’m waiting," Gilliam said. "It’s like I’m in a Beckett play, and just waiting for Godot. I’m waiting for the cast, I’m waiting for the money, I’m waiting for the organization, or I’m waiting for an actor. And that’s the worst thing about making films. I’m really not good at planning far ahead.”
SOURCE: INDIEWIRE