Don't listen to the negative reviews

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Director Terry Gilliam tries to film the classic "Don Quixote de la Mancha" as his "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote". He struggles with financing and moves from Hollywood to Europe. It's a big production but the budget is scaled back from $40 to $32 million. Jean Rochefort is playing Don Quixote joined by Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis. As the production gets going, problems mount and the filming process sputters. This is basically a behind-the-scenes featurette that would be included in the DVD if the movie actually was made. Except this is much better. It's not all sunshine and roses. It shows the struggles and tribulations of a real visionary under the stress of the real world. The material is not quite as epic as "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse" but it's still quite compelling.

I thoroughly enjoyed Chris Smith's documentary American Movie, but this is Terry Gilliam (Brazil, 12 Monkeys, The Fisher King) trying to make a $30+ million movie, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, starring Brad Pitt, Vanessa Paradis, and Jean Rochefort. You know the law: What can go wrong, will go wrong. This is that story.Orson Welles worked thirty years to bring Quixote to the screen, and failed. Gilliam worked 10 and had to start with about $8 million less than planned. This affected the ability to pay actors, and they agreed to work for less than usual. That meant they had to fit the filming in their schedules. Getting them to Spain for rehearsal was to be a real challenge. A week before production was to begin, they still did not have Depp or Paradis on set.Finally, it is production time and the rains come. Nothing seemed to go right. After five days of production. you could see the frustration in everyone's faces. Then Rochefort leaves to see his doctor and they do not know what will happen next.In the end, the plug was pulled because it could not go on without Rochefort, who was seriously ill.A fascinating tale of the travails of film-making.

"The Man who Killed Don Quixote" was to have been visionary director Terry Gilliam's latest film. With his usual imaginative flair, a story with Gillian's typical sense of humour and a starry cast that will attract the target audience for Gillian's unique film. Despite the usual challenges with making such a film on a budget without losing the ability to produce the sets, costumes and such needed to make the vision reality, things get off to a good start in preproduction. However, the difficulties of getting all the actors in during this stage are only the start of the problems that go on to include military aircraft, Rochefort's back pain, torrential storms. Two directors, employed to film a "behind the scenes" for the DVD suddenly found themselves with a "making of" about a film that was never made.As the comments of Alan Mount have already shown, only an idiot would take this film as an attack on Gilliam personally – either on his style, his vision or his abilities as a director. Instead it is an interesting look at the process of taking a vision onto film, followed by a look at the collapse of the production that shows what a fragile beast that a film production is – in this case brushing off a rainstorm as a week lost but eventually brought to a close by the back pain of one actor. In regards both aspects, the film is interesting even if it is unlikely to grip the casual multiplex viewer who doesn't are how the films are made. The publicity for this film suggested that the whole thing was a mess and that the events that stopped the film were amazing, but in reality it is the loss of one actor that is the problem, although there are other issues too. As someone interested in cinema, this is still enough for me to justify watching because of what it does well, but, like I said, some viewers might think that this is not a subject worth their time.Gilliam comes off pretty well in my opinion – nothing is really his fault and the only thing that could be levelled at him would be that he knows what he wants – although this is something that nobody minds when he pulls off things like Time Bandits, 12 Monkeys and such. Actually, none of the cast and crew are to blame and really it is just one of those things. For that reason this will probably appeal mostly to those involved in making films because it is a good look at how little things can go wrong. It is interesting and funny in turns and generally it is worth seeing because it is a rather unique documentary, I know I have not seen any other "making of" films where the subject film was never actually made.Overall, an enjoyable documentary but one that may have a limited audience due to the nature of the material and problems covered. The cast and crew come off looking good and the film does manage to make the limited footage of Don Quixote look like a film that would have appealed to Gilliam's fans; meanwhile this film provides a hint at what might happen while also showing us the nuts and bolts of pre-production as well as how basically filmmakers can expect things to go wrong from day one.

Personally, I'm not a great fan of Terry Gilliam's movies, which are typically visually overloaded and stacked with incoherent ideas. So I might have thought that a documentary about his disastrous attempt to film Cerventes' famous novel about mad idealism, 'Don Quixote', would see the director cast as a mad idealist himself, especially as this was not his first project to have gone so terribly wrong. In fact, Gilliam (and most of his crew) come out of a painfully honest account with some credit: 'Lost in La Mancha' serves as a fascinating expose of quite how hard it is to make any sort of movie, let alone one as ambitious as a typical Gilliam shoot. It's amazing to watch the team attempt to bring so many pieces into position; and tragic to see them all fall apart. What sinks the film is a lethal combination of a budget barely adequate to do the job, even with the best of luck; and on top of that, the worst of luck (which ensures that, instead of making a ramshackle movie, Gilliam and his team failed to record any more than a few moments footage). Incompetence only reveals itself in the complete lack of a contingency plan (or even, it seems, adequate insurance) when everything goes wrong. Gilliam, who ploughed several months of his life into the project, is apparently now trying again to bring it to life; if he succeeds, I'll probably hate it, but having witnessed his earlier efforts, I sincerely hope he does.