4. Lost In La Mancha
When suffering through a hellish film production - a lightning fast schedule, a dwindling budget - directors can at least comfort themselves with the knowledge that all their suffering will result in art that is eternal ("Pain is temporary, film is forever," as Robert Zemeckis once said). But what's even more demoralizing is to work incredibly hard on a project, only to see it go up in smoke. This is the nightmare Terry Gilliam finds himself in in Lost in La Mancha. Gilliam had spent many years thinking about and planning his great epic about Don Quixote, the mad adventurer who does battle with windmills, believing them to be giants. The whole story might as well have been a metaphor for Gilliam's own failed attempts to get the movie off the ground; as depicted in Lost in La Mancha, the production of "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote" is a mess almost from day one - the money seems to wax and wane, stage space threatens to be woefully inadequate for the necessities of shooting a big special effects film, Gilliam's lead actor suddenly becomes deathly ill...an adventure begun with high spirits and hopes simply dissolves away into nothing. Filmmaking, of course, is a collaborative art, but part of the collaboration people rarely talk about: the collaboration that has to occur between art and simple filmmaking sense. Gilliam has a clear artistic vision for The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, but the production apparatus backing him is clearly a house of cards. The film has scheduled itself into a corner: one thing goes wrong, and the entire film is jeopardized...and ultimately abandoned. An antidote to Hollywood's "dreams come true" wish fulfillment vision of itself as a dream factory, Lost in La Mancha shows that sometimes, film is the medium where dreams go to die.