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If any major director could have been said to have spent part of his career tilting against windmills, it’s Terry Gilliam. Not that the adversaries he has taken on have been entirely imaginary: the studios he battled with over Brazil and the completion bond companies he tangled with on The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen were real enough. But his entire career, from Jabberwocky through to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, has had about it an atmosphere of single-mindedness bordering on the obsessive.
No surprise, then, that a version of the story of Don Quixote - European literature’s most memorable obsessive - has always been close to Gilliam’s heart. And it moved a little closer to reality a couple of months ago when Pathé in the UK, Studio Canal in France, KC Medien in Germany and the British National Lottery moved into position behind his $32-million movie, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. As befits its financing, the film will be an international affair, featuring French actor Jean Rochefort, US star Johnny Depp (who topped the cast of Fear and Loathing) and singer Vanessa Paradis - seen most recently in Patrice Leconte’s La fille sur le pont (The Girl on the Bridge). Producer is René Cleitman of Hachette Première, which is putting up the biggest chunk of money.
The script concept - by Gilliam and Tony Grisoni - is an ingenious one. Depp plays Toby, a modern-day commercials director working in Spain on a particularly naff campaign, who is approached by a strange old man (Rochefort) claiming to be the true Don Quixote. Transported back several centuries, Toby finds himself playing Sancho Panza to Rochefort’s Quixote, and also falling in love with Quixote’s beautiful daughter (Paradis).
The project has been around for most of the nineties, and should not be confused with two other versions of the story. There was a Hallmark TV movie starring John Lithgow and Bob Hoskins, which aired in the US this spring. And then there was a big-ticket feature film which surfaced briefly in the summer of 1996. That would have had John Cleese as Quixote, Robin Williams as Sancho Panza and Fred Schepisi as director. But it faded quickly from view, whereas The Man Who Killed Don Quixote - like most Gilliam projects - has plodded resolutely onwards to the point where it finally looks as though it will be made, on locations which will include Spain (for 18 weeks) and the UK (one week). Shooting is due to begin on September 18.
Meanwhile, Depp will be reprising his Fear and Loathing role of legendary gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson in a screen version of the latter’s The Rum Diary, which Depp will also executive produce. A highly coloured and doubtless somewhat enhanced slice of autobiography, the book is set in Puerto Rico during the sixties, when Thompson was Editor of the English-language San Juan Daily. The story, though, is described as “an erotic love triangle”. Nick Nolte will co-star, but a director has yet to be set.
TAKIN' ABOUT THEIR GENERATION
It was one of the defining books of the nineties. It made its author the spokeswoman for a generation. And it was only a matter of time before it was turned into a movie.
Unlike American Psycho, however, which passed via controversy into a long-drawn-out state of limbo before finally hitting the screens earlier this year, progress on the movie version of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s bestseller, Prozac Nation, has been relatively swift and smooth.
It’s an indie movie, mainly financed by Avi Lerner’s Millennium Films, the niche arm of genre outfit Nu Image, and it will mark the US directorial debut of Norwegian film-maker Erik Skoldbjærg, whose creepy thriller Insomnia - starring Stellan Skarsgård as a Swedish cop investigating a disturbing series of killings in a remote northern Norwegian town - was something of a hit on the art-house circuit a couple of years ago.
The film started shooting midway through May in Vancouver and Boston, with Christina Ricci as Wurtzel. Also in the cast are Anne Heche as the doctor who treats her for depression during her freshman year at Harvard, Michelle Williams as her best friend, Ruby, plus American Pie’s Jason Biggs and Jonathan Rhys-Myers.
TO HULL AND BACK
 The idea first surfaced about four years ago: Jim Carrey would star in a remake of a 1964 movie called The Incredible Mr Limpet, about a very ordinary guy - played in the original by Don Knotts - who drowns off the coast of Florida, is reborn as a dolphin and ends up helping the US Navy winkle out enemy subs, thus proving far more useful in the hereafter than he ever was in life. It doesn’t exactly figure among the Top 100 movies of all time - even the official Warner Bros history describes it as “part live-action, part animation and wholly a bore” - but someone obviously saw some potential in it, because Steve Oedekerk - who wrote the first Ace Ventura movie and directed the second - was to have been behind the cameras.
The movie was already in pre-production in the spring of 1999 when Oedekerk suddenly upped and quit in circumstances that no one bothered to describe as amicable. Warners were unable to find the right replacement, so Carrey pulled out too a few months later.
And there the project stayed - until mid-April of this year, when Mike Judge, creator of Beavis and Butt-head and King of the Hill and director of Office Space, attached himself to the project’s hull. Barry Levinson will produce the movie, to which Carrey may or may not return.
If he doesn’t, say studio sources, his place could be taken by either Chris Rock, Mike Myers or Adam Sandler. The underwater bits will not, however, involve any of them: as in the 1964 film, they will be animated.
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