Terry Gilliam
After failing to get the film out of production hell for so many years, it’s no surprise The Man Who Killed Don Quixote feels world weary and cynical.
In The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (directed by Terry Gilliam), a disillusioned advertising executive, Toby (Adam Driver), becomes pulled into a world of time jumping fantasy when a Spanish cobbler believes him to be Sancho Panza. He gradually becomes unable to tell dreams from reality.
Twelve Monkeys is Terry Gilliam’s dystopian vision of time travel, in which everything that happens is inevitable, probing into questions of the meaning and purpose of life.
In some ways, the cinema is the closest thing we can experience to travelling through time – certainly the closest of any art form. In the dark room of a movie theatre, an audience can be transported to the distant past or spectacular visions of the future, and even in watching films from the 30’s and 40’s we can look at the lives and faces of people who died many years ago. Time travel became popular as a literary device with HG Well’s The Time Machine – published in 1895, the same year that the Lumière Brothers made Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat.
It’s always interesting to learn random movie trivia; it’s especially interesting when you learn that a classic or celebrated film tanked at box office upon its theatrical release. If these films are so great, how come they only sparked a mere fizzle when they hit the silver screen? Sometimes the director’s vision is trampled by the producers, and the film is re-edited, compromising the film.