Terry Gilliam has mixed emotions about finally releasing his labour of love, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, because he spent a quarter of a century getting it to the big screen.
The British moviemaker's latest movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in France over the weekend, after Gilliam spent 25 years wrestling with on-set location disasters, casting issues and financing problems, and mixed with a sense of relief is the realisation he no longer has his Cervantes adaptation to turn to in between film projects.
"I have nothing in my life anymore," he laughs in a new Deadline interview. "It’s true, my mind is a blank now. There was always that thing where you’d look over and there was this old guy (Don Quixote) standing up going, 'What about me?'
"It’s all gone. I'm wonderfully free. What that means, I don’t know yet. I haven’t been able to process it yet. It’s been so concentrated on this, and all the s**t we’ve been doing in the past few weeks."
That includes a last minute bid to keep the film from screening at Cannes by a former producer.
Gilliam admits the business dramas linked to each film he makes has prompted him to consider retirement.
"My problem is it’s always been a bit like this...," he adds. "Right now I have to process this and decipher whether I ever want to make a movie again. But luckily my memory is so bad I forget all the s**t and remember the good bits, so I march off again like an idiot."
And one of the good bits is working with Adam Driver, who replaced Johnny Depp and Ewan McGregor in the film.
"He’s not at all like an actor," the director explains. "He’s not a standard good-looking leading man. But I just knew it, even if I had no idea he would be as brilliant as he was. Every day he was coming in and being funnier and funnier."
Terry credits his daughter Amy with introducing him to his leading man, adding, "She said, 'You’ve got to meet this guy'. I don’t even know if I'd seen the Star Wars with him. I went and I met him and it was one of those totally instinctive moments."
