To film the impossible film

Nobody knew if Terry Gilliam, world-class filmmaker and longtime member of the Monty Python comedy team, would show up at the Toronto Film Festival last fall.

Most movie folks are eager to tout their newest effort at the prestigious venue, and Gilliam is both star and main character of "Lost in La Mancha." But the subject of this hugely entertaining documentary, made by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, is something Gilliam feels very sensitive about.

In 2000, Gilliam traveled to Spain to begin preproduction on his dream project, "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote." It had taken 10 years, but he had managed to raise the $31 million needed to start filming. His cast was assembled:

Jean Rochefort would don the Spanish knight's suit of armor, and Johnny Depp would play a modern man who ends up in the idealistic Don's world.

The entire project fell apart after less than a week of shooting.

The unraveling was as swift as it was unforeseeable. The movie was beset by a host of problems almost biblical in proportion. The only thing missing was the locusts.

His star left to seek medical treatment, and never returned. One location had to be abandoned, thanks to noise from US military planes, whose pilots remapped training flights to get bird's-eye glimpses of Depp. Even the weather seemed to conspire against Gilliam: A flash flood washed away the sets and scenery.

"Lost in La Mancha," opening in theaters today, chronicles the "Quixote" tragicomedy in detail, capturing the grandeur of Gilliam's vision and the heartbreak of its collapse. Nobody would have blamed Gilliam if he'd turned down the festival's invitation and stayed quietly at home.

But once a showman, always a showman. Gilliam not only trekked to Toronto, he ballyhooed "La Mancha" to the press and made a surprise appearance at its première - waving and smiling with such enthusiasm that you might have thought the documentary was a celebratory "making of" film, not an "un-making of" movie fueled by the greatest disappointment of his career.

"Every time I watch it," he said in an interview, "it takes at least a week to recover.... It brings back all the nightmare and anxiety. It's that weird thing of thinking I'd got over it, but then realizing I hadn't got over it."

So what brought him all the way from his London home to watch the collapse all over again?

"I do think it's a really good film," he says. "People get excited and moved by it [because] it's ... the first time they're seeing something truthful about filmmaking. It isn't all about how wonderful everything is and how happy we all are."

He wanted to support the documentary for a practical reason, as well.

"It's the best sales tool a guy could ever hope for," he says with enthusiasm, "to get 'Quixote' up and running again!"

As optimistic as his windmill-jousting protagonist, Gilliam is still working on ways to get the camera rolling again. He talks about the possibility of shooting beginning again next September.

If this actually happens, it will add yet another twist to one of the movie world's quirkiest careers. If it doesn't, it could hamper future projects, and reinforce the view of some studio executives that Gilliam is the most unmanageable maverick since Orson Welles (who also tried unsuccessfully to film "Don Quixote") walked down Sunset Boulevard.

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