Lost (and Found) in La Mancha
by Brandon Judell
The next film you’ll see directed by Monty Python alumnus Terry Gilliam probably will be Good Omens, a light-hearted fantasy about Armageddon and a misplaced baby Antichrist. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be.
Gilliam, the creative genius behind Brazil, The Fisher King, and Twelve Monkeys, was planning to entertain us first with The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, his adaptation of the Cervantes classic. Budgeted at $32 million and starring Johnny Depp plus French legend Jean Rochefort in the title role, filming did begin in Spain with astounding sets, costumes, and cast all in place. But not for long. Illness, acts of God, including torrential rains, plus nasty insurance companies, all got into the act to put the stops on the action. Consequently, in all likelihood, you will never, ever see Gilliam’s take on Quixote’s impossible dream.
But you can enjoy Lost in La Mancha: The Un-Making of Dn Quixote.
Documentary directors and lovers Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe unintentionally captured this disaster on film, and eventually made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. The duo had originally been contracted to capture the making of the film as they had done previously for Three Kings, Insomnia, Ghost World and 12 Monkeys. The result, completed with Gilliam’s ironic blessings, has already been declared one of the best films about filmmaking ever made.
“Extremely entertaining, and every film director’s worst nightmare!” cooed Woody Allen. “Truly heartbreaking and emotionally satisfying,” Robert Altman has opined. And “it’s comparable to witnessing a traffic accident,” David Gritten of The Los Angeles Times raved.
The filmmakers, together for eleven years, flew in from their Silverlake home for some East Coast publicity the other week. Keith, tall and solidly built with a shaved head, a pierced left ear and basso voice, is the more somber of the two. The slighter, more angelic Lou, with thick black locks and full lips, is the accordion player in the family and the more “obsessed” one. So obsessed, he almost completed reading Don Quixote.
“The thing is it’s too long,” Lou moaned. “Each volume is like 750 pages. So I didn’t start reading it until we had finished shooting in Spain.”
“We weren’t the guys supposed to read it, ” Keith argues. “Terry was supposed to read it.”
“But even without having read it, we thought ‘Quixote and Gilliam,’ ” adds Lou. “Quixote is like an alter ego for Terry. He’s always this dreamer battling reality so we certainly had that component to it in our minds. Of course, the big joke was that if we had read all 1500 pages, we would have seen on the very last page of the second volume, there’s this curse that Cervantes casts on anybody who resurrects the tired old bones of Don Quixote and takes him out on further adventures.”
Curses aside, gay couples who make films together appear to be a growing trend. There’s Rob Epstein/Jeffrey Friedman with The Celluloid Closet, Oliver Ducastel/Jacques Martineau with The Adventures of Felix, Fenton Bailey/ Randy Barbato and Party Monster, plus the Merchant/Ivory team. Is this a plus for a relationship?
“It probably creates such an intense, mutual dependence,” Keith explains, “we’ll probably always stay together. I mean through the harder times of the personal aspects of the relationship, there’s always been the work. If we break up the relationship, the work’s going to go down with it. So in way you can say there are a lot disadvantages to working together but there’s a lot of advantages. One less person to hire.”
“I imagine it must be like what our parents went through in terms of having kids,” Lou notes. “Our projects are the same kind of thing. You’re doing something that brings you together, creating this film. There are times when things in the relationship are bad, and you say, ‘Well, there’s this thing.'” So whatever our differences are, we still have to take care of our baby. Then you get to enjoy the successes of the film together or you get to try and solve the problems together.”
“We started working together before we started sleeping together,” Keith puts forth.
Lou nods, “We met in graduate school and we started working on each other’s projects, and the relationship developed afterwards. I think that’s an accurate representation.”
Talking about representation, have the two started an Oscar campaign for Lost in La Mancha?
“There is an L.A. publicist working on it,” Keith replies, “but there are 73 films that qualify so we’ll see. Like we’re trying not to think about it too much. The best way to deal with the Oscars is to ignore them.”
One can easily ignore the Academy, but an accordion player within the house would seem more difficult. “I play in the garage so he does have to hear it,” Lou protests. Polkas? “Well, I have been taking lessons so I mean I play polkas because they’re good dexterity exercises, but I prefer tango/folk music. You know, Italian/French cafe music.”
Does Celine Dion lend herself to an accordion?
“I’m not a Celine fan,” Lou huffs. “By the way, Keith is a gardener.”
“Used to be when I had time to do it,” Keith bemoans.
“We also have a cat named Mrs. Gaskell after the Victorian novelist,” Lou adds. ” Our friend was joking about people who name their pets after literary figures, how pretentious it was. Then he said we should think of the most obscure literary figure to name our cat after. He said, ‘Mrs. Gaskell,’ and it stuck.”
Well, after the cat litter is cleaned and “La Vie en Rose” is played once too often, the lovers will start directing their first narrative, Living and Breathing.
“It’s a small scale drama,” Lou reveals. “It’s kind of quirky. It’s about a small Western town sheriff who finds some guy wandering naked down a desert road who was trying to commit suicide. The problem now, besides financing, is casting someone whom we want to see naked.”
“Yeah,” Keith agrees. And with the couple in total agreement and smiling, the interview ended.
