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Eiichiro Oda has created a vast world in One Piece, and the amount of characters present in it is no joke. Every arc brings with it a new catalog of characters, and some of them look too similar to pop culture icons to ignore.

One character from the series looks so similar to Donald Trump that the resemblance just cannot be ignored. In fact, even One Piece’s animation studio, Toei, is involved with the plotting.

Eiichiro Oda Gave us a Trump Lookalike in One Piece Who is too Similar to Ignore Samosa in One Piece | Credits: Toei

One Piece introduced Samosa in the Levely Arc, a character who looks extremely similar to Donald J. Trump. Samosa has an average height with curly blond hair. He has a long face with sunken cheeks and thick lips and almost looks like a caricature version of Trump. He also wears a black suit,...

Nicole Garcia and Virginie Efira as mother and daughter in Disney+ series Everything Is Fine Photo: @ Disney+/Thibault Grabherr The role of matriarch is one that rather appeals to Nicole Garcia, one of the grand doyennes of French film and theatre, in both private and professional circumstances.

She has relished her role as head of the family in the Disney+ series Everything Is Fine (Tout va bien) in which her self-help guru character Anne Vasseur is plunged into emotional turmoil when her youngest daughter’s child Rose, seven, falls ill with leukaemia and has to undergo a bone marrow transplant. The trauma brings together Anne and her oldest daughter Claire (played by Virginie Efira) as well as other members of the family, including Sara Giraudeau as Marion, the mother of Rose.

Nicole Garcia on her character: 'I hope they keep offering me roles like this because they can provide a...

Claudia Squitieri with her mother Claudia Cardinale on Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo: “it’s one of her most adventurous experiences.” Photo: courtesy of Claudia Squitieri

In the second instalment with Claudia Squitieri we discuss more of the films her mother, Claudia Cardinale, starred in. Werner Herzog, Klaus Kinski, Mick Jagger, Jason Robards, Thomas Mauch, My Best Fiend, and filming Fitzcarraldo; encountering Fernando Trueba (The Artist And Model) in Deauville and reconnecting with Jean Rochefort; Manoel de Oliveira and an “atmosphere of mysticality” during the making of Gebo and the Shadow with Jeanne Moreau and Michael Lonsdale, shot by Renato Berta; Blake Edwards and The Pink Panther, the problem with sequels and playing Roberto Benigni’s mother in Son Of The Pink Panther all came up in our conversation.

Claudia Squitieri from Paris on Roberto Benigni with Claudia Cardinale: “He was going “Claudia!!!!” Jumping around every time he saw my mother.

Mehran Karimi Nasseri, an Iranian man whose time living in Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport inspired the Steven Spielberg film “The Terminal,” died of a heart attack Saturday in the airport’s Terminal 2F.

His death was confirmed by the Associated Press, which wrote that police and medical professionals were ultimately unable to save Nasseri. The report indicates that officials stated that Nasseri had been living in the airport again in recent weeks.

Nasseri, who also went by the name “Sir Alfred,” lived in Terminal 1 of Charles de Gaulle Airport. He first settled in the space in 1988 after Great Britain refused him political asylum as a refugee, despite stating that he had a Scottish mother.

After declaring himself stateless, his residency in the airport became a deliberate choice. Nasseri reportedly always kept his luggage by his side, spending time reading, writing diary entries and studying economics. He first left the...

Gilliam’s epic travails filming Don Quixote are well worth seeing again – and should be on the syllabus at every film school

The creative heroism of Terry Gilliam is saluted once again in this 20-year-anniversary rerelease of Lost in La Mancha, the documentary by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe about Gilliam’s incredible ordeal in the late 90s in trying to make a movie version of Don Quixote: a salutary warning about the physical and mental nightmare of independent film-making. Gilliam’s leading man, veteran French star Jean Rochefort, suffered a herniated disc midway through shooting and was unable to carry on, dealing a death blow to an under-funded, over-ambitious production already traumatised by biblical floods that swept away their equipment in the Spanish desert, Nato jets overhead which ruined the soundtrack, and insurers who wouldn’t pay out on Rochefort’s illness and became the obstructive legal owners...

When thinking of the best French movies of the 21st century, there are some titles that leap to mind immediately, even if the past 22 years haven’t appeared to be as creatively fecund as the heady heights of the New Wave period. Celine Sciamma, Francois Ozon, Bruno Dumont, and Julia Ducournau have all produced stunning, instantly canonical works. But what’s interesting is to consider how expansive the idea of “Frenchness” in cinema has been this century: on the list below, Austrian Michael Haneke, Iranian Abbas Kiarostami, and American Julian Schnabel appear, with the main criterion for inclusion being simply the use of the French language.

Their inclusion does call into question a bit the idea of national cinemas. And yet, even in this highly interconnected, global 21st century, France singularly remains one of the medium’s most essential guiding lights. From the pioneer era of the Lumiere brothers, to...

Editor’s Note: On Nov. 14, 2005, Variety published the following interview with Mort Sahl. The revolutionary comedian, who died on Oct. 26, provided an unfiltered view on the entertainment industry, from Depression-era cinema and the Hollywood blacklist to how current films tackle race, politics and culture.

For half of the last century and on into the next one, Mort Sahl, 78, has been the comedic conscience of America. Since 1968, when he debuted at San Francisco’s legendary Hungry i nightclub, he’s been walking onstage in his trademark V-neck sweater, a newspaper tucked under his arm, serving notice to every pundit and politician from Eisenhower through Bush that there was nowhere to hide.

He was the original truth-teller, pioneering a new kind of stand-up — barbed bipartisan political humor — paving the way for everyone from Lenny Bruce to Woody Allen to Chris Rock.

In 1958, he co-hosted the Oscars. In 1960, Time magazine put him on the cover,...

Portuguese producer and Alfama Film Productions sought almost €1m in damages.

The UK’s Recorded Picture Company (Rpc) has won a high court case in London over a long-running rights dispute over Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

Portuguese producer Paulo Branco and French production company Alfama Films sought almost €1m in damages due to a breach in an agreement giving them the option to make the film. The damages would comprise pre-production costs and a producer’s fee.

But the claims were dismissed as the UK court concluded Alfama Films and Branco never had a substantial chance of making the film,...

Portuguese producer and Alfama Film Productions sought almost €1m in damages.

The UK’s Recorded Picture Company (Rpc) has won a high court case in London over a long-running rights dispute over Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

Portuguese producer Paulo Branco and French production company Alfama Films sought almost €1m in damages due to a breach in an agreement giving them the option to make the film. The damages would comprise pre-production costs and a producer’s fee.

But the claims were dismissed as the UK court concluded Alfama Films and Branco never had a substantial chance of making the film,...

Terry Gilliam’s “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” has endured its latest legal hurdle.

The U.K.’s Royal Courts of Justice have ruled in favor of the Jeremy Thomas-owned Recorded Picture Company (Rpc), and against France’s Alfama Film Productions and CEO Paulo Branco over a rights dispute relating to Gilliam’s 2018 film, which starred Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce.

The dispute dates back to 2016, when Rpc first entered into a deed with Alfama, giving them the option to produce the project. However, Branco and Gilliam’s relationship soon broke down and Rpc eventually gave the option to Spanish company Tornasol, who went on to produce the film, resulting in years of disputes over who owned the rights to the project, amid an attempt by Branco to disrupt the film’s release.

However, in a ruling on Thursday, Deputy High Court Judge Hacon sided with Gilliam and the film’s producers,...

Screenwriter-playwright Christopher Hampton, who won an Oscar for “Dangerous Liaisons” and was Oscar nominated for “Atonement,” has penned a screen version of his one-woman play “A German Life,” about the life of Brunhilde Pomsel, the infamous secretary of Nazi Joseph Goebbels. Maggie Smith is set to reprise the role she played to great acclaim at The Bridge Theatre in London’s West End, with leading stage and opera helmer Jonathan Kent to make his feature film debut.

“A German Life” is based on a series of interviews that Pomsel gave when she was 103. The plan was to take the play to Broadway, which was curtailed by the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.

“What with Covid, Maggie decided that she didn’t really want to go back and do it again on stage, which was a great shame because it meant that an enormous number of people hadn’t seen it and her great performance,...

Following substantial delays, anticipation is sky-high for Tenet and the new Bond, No Time to Die. But from Eraserhead to The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, plenty of movies have made their audiences wait

Terry Gilliam began filming his twisted Cervantes adaptation in 2000, but the production was derailed by endless problems, chief among them a storm that destroyed sets, as well as the admission to hospital of its title-role actor, Jean Rochefort. Revived and finished in 2017 with Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce, the film’s troubles were not over: there were legal challenges to its premiere at Cannes (and health hiccups), and Gilliam weighed in unhelpfully on the topic of #MeToo while promoting the movie.

Some movies are willed into existence, some organically happen by chance, and some are severely birthed and Oscar-nominated filmmaker Terry Gilliam has been through it all, especially in the two-decade-plus production of his cherished The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. His first go-round with the project starred Johnny Depp but was besieged by financial and production problems including a flash flood, Nato aircraft buzzing the set and star Jean Rochefort suffering a herniated disc. Gilliam resurrected the project in March 2017, battling with the pic’s financier Paulo Branco, the controversies of which the former Brazil filmmaker details extensively here in today’s Crew Call.

While many filmmakers and studios in this social media era are notorious about hiding or downplaying their production problems, Gilliam is unashamed, and an open book providing life lessons which the town can learn from. Today we cover a number of areas with him including his run with Monty Python,...

Terry Gilliam spent 30 years chasing his passion project and finally completed “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” last year. The seriocomic saga folded in on itself, as Gilliam seemed to be trapped in his own Quixotic delusion that his ambitious Spanish production would ever be completed. The first chapter of that struggle was documented in directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s 2002 “Lost in La Mancha,” which itself became an unfinished story as it captured the forlorn Gilliam through a series of frustrating creative and practical challenges — from ruined sets to injured actors — until the project collapsed.

“He Dreams of Giants” completes the narrative, finding Gilliam several decades older but no less committed to his ambitious saga, now starring Jonathan Pryce and Adam Driver in roles that once fell to Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort. “Don Quixote” stumbled to the finish line at Cannes last year as its closing-night selection,...

Jean-Pierre Marielle played in more than 100 films Photo: Unifrance

The death of veteran French cinema and theatre actor Jean-Pierre Marielle, at the age of 87, leaves another gap in the group who became known as “the band of the Conservatoire” whose ranks included his late life-long friend Jean Rochefort, as well as Claude Rich and Jean-Paul Belmondo.

He played in more than 100 films, both comic and tragic, with such directors as Michel Audiard, Bértrand Blier, Claude Sautet, Bértrand Tavernier, Claude Miller and Alain Corneau for whom memorably he created the role of Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe (opposite Gérard Depardieu) as the musician Marin Marais in All The Mornings Of The World (Tous Les Matins Du Monde) in 1991.

With his warmly distinctive deep vocal timbre, imposing stature and pepper and salt beard and moustache, Marielle – who was born in Paris on 12 April, 1932 and died yesterday (24 April) in hospital after a long illness –started his career.

Terry Gilliam’s near-mythical movie finally arrives on the screen. Was it worth the wait?

We’ve all experienced that sensation of something sounding or looking good in our heads -- a note we wanted to write to someone, a story we wanted to pen, perhaps even a film we wanted to make -- and then the disappointment of it actually coming to existence on the page or screen and the thing not being exactly how we envisioned it in the seclusion of our minds.

In a strange way, Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote -- a film that the maverick director of Brazil and 12 Monkeys has been attempting to make for three decades -- engenders the same sensation in the viewer. After all these years, and with the movie’s almost legendary status as the one that kept getting away, one can’t help but wonder if all the time,...

Terry Gilliam wonders if The Man Who Killed Don Quixote can live up to its larger than life production trouble. The trouble is due to the insecurities Quixote faced being an independent production, but that independence is also how Gilliam’s kept the project alive long after a studio would have scrapped it.

The movie’s storied production history is well-documented, including Amazon’s last-minute decision to pull out of the project when producer Paulo Branco claimed rights to the film, which nearly derailed their 2018 premiere at the Cannes Film Festival.

In our conversation with Gilliam we discuss how Jonathan Pryce’s Don Quixote built his own ramshackle armor, how directing is like being “an ignorant peasant who knows no better,” and his feelings about Fathom Event’s one-night-only screening strategy.

The Film Stage: I found Quixote’s costume so beautiful. It looks like a leftover costume from the movie within a movie,...

Terry Gilliam has tried to make his film “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” for over two decades and barring some final unforeseen tragedy, his film will open in theaters on April 10 for one night only as part of a release with Screen Media and Fathom Events.

It’s the classic production from hell, complete with on-set injuries, lost funding, natural disasters and outsized ambitions worthy of the hero of Miguel de Cervantes’ classic novel. Even after it wrapped, a lawsuit threatened to derail the film from screening at Cannes, and Amazon Studios pulled out of a deal to distribute the film in the U.S.

So the irony isn’t lost on anyone that Gilliam’s quest to make a movie about Don Quixote has been nothing if not quixotic. Here’s a not-so-brief timeline of every step on the road to Gilliam getting his film made.

Also Read:...

It’s been 30 years since Terry Gilliam first dreamt of making a movie about the foolish, windmill-chasing knight Don Quixote — and it’s been roughly 29 years since it became his nightmare. As the tragicomic documentary Lost in La Mancha proved, Gilliam’s Quixote picture is the dictionary definition of a cursed movie, plagued by financial troubles, ailing actors and noisy fighter jets flying overhead. But now he’s finally broken the spell, and The Man Who Killed Don Quixote last year received a marathon standing ovation at Cannes.

Although the filmmaker,...

Matthew Schuchman Apr 10, 2019

We spoke to Terry Gilliam about the decades-long process of bringing his The Man Who Killed Don Quixote to the screen.

I became a film fanatic at the early age of 10. No, it wasn’t after watching Star Wars for the first time or from gorging on Back to the Future. It was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest that drew me in. However, what really changed my entire world were the works of Terry Gilliam. Whether it was the stylized brilliance of “The Crimson Permanent Assurance” (the short film that plays before Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life) or the whimsical journey of Time Bandits, I started to realize that deep and meaningful stories didn’t need to be told strictly through dark and dour dramas. And then I saw Brazil, and nothing else mattered anymore. I don’t have to run down the rest...

It has taken Terry Gilliam 30 years to bring “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” to the big screen. His most notable attempt to make the film starred Johnny Depp and involved a doomed six-day shoot, captured in the documentary “Lost in La Mancha,” that ended in the set being washed away in a flash flood and Gilliam’s then-Quixote, Jean Rochefort, suffering a medical emergency and unable to ride a horse.

Though the failed 2001 shoot was the most dramatic, Gilliam has been painfully close to finishing the film countless times, as the project has constantly evolved with new players ever since he was promised $20 million in 1989 to tell his adapted version of Miguel de Cervantes’ novel. Just last year, the film was completed with the help of Amazon Studios — which pulled out days before the film premiered in Cannes, leaving Gilliam once again searching for a home. Now, the filmmaker...

A cynical ad man and an old Spanish shoemaker take up Don Quixote’s age-old quest to restore the age of chivalry in the new trailer for Terry Gilliam’s long-awaited film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

The clip teases Gilliam’s outrageously meta take on one of the most meta books of all time: Adam Driver stars as Toby, an advertising director working on a Don Quixote-based project who gets sucked into the delusions of a cobbler – played by Jonathan Pryce – who’s convinced he’s the real Don Quixote.

After spending decades in the worst kind of development hell, Terry Gilliam's passion-project The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is finally complete. Over the years, Gilliam had dealt with budget issues and a parade of actors coming and going; he even began shooting the film in 2000 (with Jean Rochefort as Quixote and Johnny Depp as Toby), but natural disasters, destroyed…...

Screen Media has bought North American rights to Terry Gilliam’s troubled “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,” starring Adam Driver, Jonathan Pryce, Stellan Skarsgard, Olga Kurylenko, and Jordi Molla.

The film had its world premiere as the closing night film at Cannes 2018. Directed and written by Terry Gilliam, the film is co-written by Tony Grisoni and produced by Mariela Besuievsky, Amy Gilliam, Gerardo Herrero, and Gregoire Melin.

Amazon had been set to handle U.S. release of the film, which was embroiled in an ongoing legal dispute over its ownership, but backed out earlier this year. Gilliam started shooting the picture in 1998 with Jean Rochefort as Quixote and Johnny Depp playing a marketing executive who is sent back in time. But shooting stopped after Rochefort became ill and the film was riddled with financial difficulties and insurance problems.

The movie was the subject of a 2002 documentary “Lost in La Mancha.

Delusions of grandeur, old-fashioned ideals of romance and justice, the eternal clash between cynicism and dreams — these are the themes of not just comic hero Don Quixote, but also the career of director Terry Gilliam, for whom a film about the ostentatious knight-errant, seemed like the perfect match of artist to material, to the extent that he devoted a quarter century of his life to getting “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” made. After setbacks more epic than anything described in the novel itself, Gilliam’s magnum opus exists at last, and the sad truth is, the reality can never live up to the version that has existed in his (and our) imagination for so long. If anything, it’s what the director’s fans most feared: a lumbering, confused, and cacophonous mess.

Opening with a wink — “And now … after more than 25 years in the making … and unmaking” — the film...

At this point, the very existence of “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” is a triumph, and Terry Gilliam knows it. “After 25 years of waiting,” announces an opening credit for the director’s completed version of his Spain-set odyssey, which faced a pileup of production woes over the decades. “Finally … a Terry Gilliam film.” He could have rolled the rest of the credits right there and moved on.

As chronicled in the 2002 documentary “Lost in La Mancha,” Gilliam’s initial 2000 attempt to bring the project to fruition fell apart in several ways, from location shooting issues to injured star Jean Rouchefort dropping out, transforming the project into a catastrophe of mythic proportions. As it turns out, “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” sits alongside much of Gilliam’s late period work as a messy but singular achievement that strains to make its disparate parts fit together, but there’s a...

After a three-decade production ordeal Gilliam has delivered a sun-baked fable of money, madness and the movie business – and done so with trademark infectious charm

Terry Gilliam has brought to Cannes his long-gestated and epically delayed movie version of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, a biblical ordeal of wrecked sets, collapsed funding and bad luck that has outlived two of the actors once cast – John Hurt and Jean Rochefort – and which has been attended by colossal legal acrimony and brinkmanship right up to the red-carpet steps themselves, as the former backer Paulo Branco sought to injunct its showing here as closing gala. A French court found against Branco last week, but its screening here has been prefaced by a solemn lawyerly announcement respecting Mr Branco’s future claims. It’s a backstory of enormous drama, well told in Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s documentary Lost in La Mancha, all...

It would be all too lazy to compare Terry Gilliam and his attempts to make a movie about Don Quixote to its main character – an old man foolishly picking fights with windmills. A better comparison might be Sisyphus, the mythological Greek king whose deceitfulness was punished by forcing him to roll a boulder uphill repeatedly, arduously and monotonously. It's an analogy Gilliam has made himself over the decades since he first got the idea to make the movie.

Now, 29 years after he secured financing for the picture for the first time,...

At the start of Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a title card appears. “And now, after more than 25 years in the making… and unmaking… a Terry Gilliam film.” The history behind the director’s tortured attempt to adapt Miguel de Cervantes’ seminal novel is the stuff of legend, beginning in 1989. He first got it into production in 2000, when Jean Rochefort and Johnny Depp were cast as Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza. The derailing of that shoot through set flooding, insurance wrangles and Rochefort’s ill health became the subject of Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s Lost in La Mancha, which remains to this day one of the most important documentaries about the filmmaking process.

Shooting was finally complete on The Man Who Killed Don Quixotelast June. In this successful iteration, Jonathan Pryce plays Quixote with Adam Driver cast as Toby, a firebrand film...

French-based producer Paulo Branco says he believes Amazon has withdrawn from U.S. distribution of Terry Gilliam’s “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” because sales agent Kinology did not have the right to sell the movie.

At a news conference Wednesday afternoon in Cannes, Branco distributed a letter from Amazon’s lawyers, dated Feb. 14, saying that neither Kinology nor producer Tornasol Films owned the rights to “Don Quixote,” and that Amazon would be justified in canceling its deal.

Amazon had previously picked up North American rights to the film. It announced its withdrawal earlier Wednesday. Amazon also has rights for the U.K. and Australia.

Branco said Cannes’ decision to program the film as the closing-night movie May 19 had “polluted” the legal process. He described the festival as self-interested and called general manager Thierry Fremaux a “puppet.”

Branco spoke ahead of a Paris court’s expected decision on his...

Amazon is poised to pull out of distributing Terry Gilliam’s “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” in the United States, Variety has confirmed.

The film has been embroiled in an ongoing legal dispute over its ownership. A court decision on whether it can be screened at this year’s Cannes Film Festival is expected Wednesday.

“The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” has had a tortured production history. Gilliam started shooting the picture in 1998 with Jean Rochefort as Quixote and Johnny Depp playing a marketing executive who is sent back in time. However, shooting stopped after Rochefort became ill and the film was plagued with financial difficulties and insurance problems. Gilliam’s plagued production was the subject of a 2002 documentary “Lost in La Mancha.” The director tried to re-start the film at several different points, with the likes of Robert Duvall, Michael Palin, John Hurt, Ewan McGregor, and Jack O...

French newspaper Nice-Matin reports that a minor stroke prevented director and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Terry Gilliam from attending May 7 court arguments on whether his “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” will be permitted to close the Cannes Film Festival. A source in Cannes confirmed to IndieWire that Gilliam had “a kind of stroke” and “was in the hospital,” but the 77-year-old filmmaker is “at home now.”

A Paris District Court is expected to announce Wednesday if Gilliam’s decades-delayed undertaking can screen on the Croisette May 19, the date it is to be released in French theaters. Paulo Branco (“Cosmopolis”), a onetime producer on the project, sought an injunction to stop both, claiming he has held the rights to the film since August 2016.

“The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” was added to the Cannes 2018 program on April 19, a week after the rest of the lineup was announced. Festival president Pierre Lescure and...

After a tortured production process that lasted two decades, “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” was recently announced as the closing-night selection at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Anyone who knows how difficult it was for Terry Gilliam to complete his passion project inspired by Miguel de Cervantes’ timeless novel will be unsurprised by the news that it’s hit yet another snag, this time in the form of a lawsuit from a producer who claims he owns the rights to the film.

Paolo Branco and his company Alfama Films Production are seeking an injunction to prevent Cannes from screening “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,” with a statement claiming that its rights to the project “have been confirmed in three separate legal rulings.”

“Alfama Films Production has been granted permission to obtain a writ against the Cannes Film Festival and will ask the president of the Paris District...

A film twenty years in the making finally has a trailer! Terry Gilliam‘s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote has had a slew of misfortune since in production. Scheduling and budget issues, Nato aircraft target practice taking place in the area, flash floods and one of the original lead actors, Jean Rochefort, was injured and suffered a herniated disc halting the filming altogether. An award-winning documentary Lost in La Moncha was made about the problem ridden production.

The original attempt had Johnny Depp as the lead role of Toby but this time around Star Wars actor Adam Driver serves as lead co-starring with Jonathan Pryce. Check out the official trailer below.

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote tells the story of a deluded old man who is convinced he is Don Quixote, and who mistakes Toby, an advertising executive, for his trusty squire, Sancho Panza. The pair embark on a bizarre journey,...

Trailer emerges 18 years after bedevilled project first went into production – but a legal dispute could still prevent its release

The first trailer for The Man Who Killed Don Quixote has finally been released, 18 years after director Terry Gilliam’s long-gestating film first went into production.

Adapted from Cervantes’ “unfilmable” novel Don Quixote, Gilliam’s film has become one of the most famous examples of “development hell”. The former Monty Python man has attempted to make the film on eight occasions – most notably in 2000, when flash floods, Nato plane flyovers and a prostate infection that struck actor Jean Rochefort (who died last October) disrupted filming of a Johnny Depp-starring effort. That troubled production was the subject of a documentary, Lost in La Mancha.

After nearly two decades of financial troubles, casting issues and myriad other delays for Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, the film's first trailer has arrived.

Gilliam's infamously "cursed" take on Miguel de Cervantes' epic novel, Don Quixote, stars Adam Driver as a marketing executive, Toby, who meets a man (Jonathan Pryce) who believes he is La Mancha's defender of chivalry, Don Quixote. This Quixote mistakes Toby for his squire, Sancho Panza, and together, the pair embark on a surreal journey that jumps between the 21st and 17th centuries.

Other leading contenders include See You You There, Barbara and Bloody Milk.

Source: Cannes

‘Bpm (Beats Per Minute)’

Robin Campillo’s Aids activism drama Bpm (Beats Per Minute) leads nominations in France’s 2018 César awards which were announced in Paris on Wednesday morning (Jan 31).

Scroll down for the key nominations

The feature drama took 13 nominations including best film, best director and best screenplay and best male newcomer for its co-stars Nahuel Pérez Biscayart and Arnaud Valois.

France’s Academy of Cinema Arts and Sciences unveiled the nominations at its traditional news conference at the Le Fouquet’s restaurant on the Champs-Elysées.

The popularity of Campillo’s film among the academy’s members came as little surprise. Although ignored by Oscar and Golden Globe, the Cannes Grand Prix winner has been a critical and box office success in France where the film has drawn more than 800,000 spectators for Memento Distribution.

It also leads the nominations in the upcoming...

In typical dandy-esque pose: Jean Rochefort who, besides acting, harboured a life-long passion for equestrian pursuits. Photo: Unifrance Veteran French actor Jean Rochefort who only two years ago with his last screen appearance in Floride by Philippe Le Guay, received an honorary César (French Oscar), has died in Paris at the age of 87.

In Floride, he played an octogenarian former industrialist who is suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. In one interview about the film in which she shared the bill with Sandrine Kiberlain, he declared that he could sense his own demise on the horizon. “There are moments when I would be happy for it to happen … the body asks for it and some times the head as well. But I don’t want to cause sorrow to others,” he was quoted as saying.

In another quote on the subject he opined: “I don’t want to snuff it right...

French actor who made his name in sex farces of the 1970s and missed out on a starring role in Terry’s Gilliam’s Don Quixote film

With his lean, tall figure, his sunken, weary features, doleful eyes, moustache and prominent nose, the French actor Jean Rochefort, who has died aged 87, seemed born to play Don Quixote. Terry Gilliam thought the same when in 1998 he cast Rochefort as the idealistic and impractical Don in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which was also to have featured Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis in leading roles.

Everything was set up when Rochefort fell ill with prostate problems that meant he could not sit on a horse. Shooting was abandoned after a few days because Gilliam would not replace Rochefort. Despite many attempts to restart the project (which themselves became the subject of the 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha), with different actors as...

Rochefort, who scored a major international success in The Hairdresser’s Husband, was also cast as Don Quixote in Terry Gilliam’s ill-fated Cervantes adaptation

Related: After 17 years, has Terry Gilliam finally broken the curse of Don Quixote?

Jean Rochefort, the French actor who played a key role in one of the most ill-fated movie sagas in Hollywood history, has died aged 87, his daughter said on Monday.

Continue reading...

Perhaps forever to be known as “The Best Don Quixote Who Never Was,” French actor Jean Rochefort has died at age 87, according to Afp.

Rochefort was hospitalized in August and died overnight on Sunday, Afp reported, according to Deadline.

One of the most loved, iconoclastic figures of French cinema in the last 70 years, Rochefort first began appearing in films in 1955.

Both a romantic leading man and character actor, Rochefort was a three time César honoree equally skilled in dramatic and comedic roles. He starred in a number of successful, critically praised French films which attracted international audiences including Ridicule and The Hairdresser’s Husband.

An icon of elegance and comedy with an instantly recognizable mustache, veteran French actor Jean Rochefort has died. The prolific talent and three-time César Award winner was hospitalized in August and passed away overnight Sunday, his family told Afp. He was 87. Rochefort had nearly 150 films under his belt, including 1972 Cannes entry Hearth Fires opposite Annie Girardot, and that same year’s Le Grand Blond Avec Une Chaussure Noire (The Tall Blond Man With One Black Sh…...

He played iconic roles like Frankenstein's monster and Imhotep (aka The Mummy), but Boris Karloff also instilled life in so many other intriguing characters, including Morgan in The Old Dark House, coming to Blu-ray (in a 4K restoration), DVD, and digital platforms this October from the Cohen Film Collection:

Press Release: Charles S. Cohen, Chairman and CEO of Cohen Media Group, today announced that the landmark thriller The Old Dark House, starring Boris Karloff, will be released by the Cohen Film Collection on Blu-ray, DVD and digital platforms on October 24, 2017. The home video release features the dazzling new 4K digital restoration that was screened to wide acclaim at the 2017 Venice Film Festival.

Based on J.B. Priestley's popular novel Benighted, this legendary classic was directed by James Whale in the fertile period between his Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. In The Old Dark House, Whale puts a surprising spin on...

After 17 years, Terry Gilliam’s “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” has finally turned the corner from cursed film project to completed movie, a historic and improbable milestone that has many people asking, “Is it really true?” One of the most troubled productions in the history of cinema, the project has been tormenting Gilliam for more than 25 years, since he first started tinkering with a screenplay adaptation in 1991.

Read More: Cannes 2016: Terry Gilliam on ‘Continual Failure’ and ‘The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’

Despite several false starts over the years, Gilliam never bought into the idea that the project was doomed. “The curse is bullshit,” he said during an interview with IndieWire at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016, a year that also marked the 400th anniversary of the death of “Don Quixote” writer Miguel de Cervantes.

Starring Adam Driver, Jonathan Pryce, Stellan Skarsgard and Olga Kurylenko, the film tells...

Way, way back in 1998, Brazil and Twelve Monkeys director Terry Gilliam embarked on making The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, a very Gilliam-esque take on Miguel de Cervantes’ 16th century novel Don Quixote. With the original novel concerning an insane Spanish nobleman thinking himself to be a knight bringing back chivalry and justice to the world, Gilliam’s vision saw Johnny Depp as a 21st century marketing executive thrown back in time, and being mistaken for Quixote’s sire, Sancho Panza. Production began in September of 2000, quickly becoming one of the most disastrous shoots of all time. As chronicled in the documentary Lost in La Mancha, weather problems, nervous investors, and even the Spanish military added to the movie’s production woes. The final nail in the coffin came when Dox Quixote himself, Jean Rochefort, was diagnosed with a double herniated disc after attempting to act while riding a horse,...

Terry Gilliam is tilting at windmills no more. Last week, the director wrapped production on “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,” a fantasy-adventure that the writer-director memorably had to scuttle mid-shoot back in 2000. The ironically quixotic project — which then starred Johnny Depp, Jean Rochefort and Vanessa Paradis — fell apart and became the subject of a 2002 documentary, “Lost in La Mancha.” That film chronicled how flooding in Navarre destroyed the sets, Rochefort fell ill and left the project mid-shoot, producers struggled to secure insurance and financing to keep the project afloat. But producers announced Monday that Gilliam had...

After 17 years of pre-production, principal photography has finally wrapped on Terry Gilliam’s embattled The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Gilliam has been working on the project since 1989 and originally began shooting the film back in 2000 when Johnny Depp was involved. That ill-fated go was memorably captured in the feature documentary Lost In La Mancha, which cataloged the series of catastrophes that hit the production, including leading man Jean Rochefort having a…...

Simon Brew Jun 5, 2017

Nearly 17 years after he first started making the film, Terry Gilliam has wrapped production on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote...

It would be correct to say it’s been a bit of a journey for Terry Gilliam, this one. He first started trying to make his film of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in earnest back in 2000, when production was abandoned following the illness of actor Jean Rochefort. This particular lost take on the project was documented in the excellent film, Lost In La Mancha. To this day, that remains one of the best documentaries about making a film that you'll ever see.

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Since then, Gilliam has tried on numerous occasions to resurrect the project, but to little avail. Well, until this year. Filming began once again...

Terry Gilliam finally knocked down the windmill. After nearly two decades of work, several failed attempts and any number of different actors attached to the project, “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” has finally wrapped production. Gilliam — whose efforts to loosely adapt Miguel de Cervantes’ timeless novel inspired the documentary “Lost in La Mancha” — marked the occasion with a celebratory Facebook post.

“Sorry for the long silence. I’ve been busy packing the truck and am now heading home,” he wrote. “After 17 years, we have completed the shoot of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Muchas gracias to all the team and believers. Quixote Vive!”...

“The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” has had so much trouble getting made that it would almost be a letdown if the long-gestating project ever sees the light of day. Terry Gilliam has been tilting at windmills for nearly 20 years at this point, and now the film has hit a new snag: Alfama Films released a statement on Friday deeming it “patently illegal.”

Read More: Terry Gilliam Has Begun Shooting ‘The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,’ For Real This Time

Alfama’s Paulo Branco spoke to the Hollywood Reporter at Cannes, accusing Gilliam of “clandestinely” working on the film behind his back and even “pursuing the production with other partners.” Whether true or not, such a strange state of affairs is certainly apropos of the Cervantes’ charmingly (and tragically) out-of-his-depth knight errant.

“The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” first entered pre-production in 1998 and, at one point or another, everyone from...