It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

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

I came to this after watching the finally finished Gilliam's Quijote. It probably works better to watch this one, the "sketch", the "failed attempt", after you saw the finished product. That film, the finished one, is imperfect and chaotic. And that's good. It it as a film, what it was as a work in progress. It reveals Gilliam, and has a special place in his carrer. It's the final product of an obsession, and it follows the path of its very theme.This one is nice, because we see in it some of the anchors that were kept in the later finished film, and that would probably have worked better in the original, at least from a cinematic point of view. It is clear that Gilliam had in mind the replacement of the "book layers" of the original Quijote by the layers of films in films. In other words, he wanted a world where several layers of paralel realities would affect each other, contaminate them, blur them. This is something he has been doing all his life as a filmmaker, and as such it is apt that he adapts Quijote. In the book, at least in my reading, Sancho is the pivot, he is the articulation of all the layers, the one that keeps all the madness tolerable, and the one who places us, the "viewers" in the narrative. So having Johnny Depp play that role would have been magnificient. We can only imagine how it would have been, watching the few conversations between Gilliam and Depp in this documentary, watching the short bits of footage that were recorded (the fish fight is amazing) and trying to imagine Depp whenever we see Driver.I got the impression that Depp was the one who suggested what is in fact the beginning of the new film. At least the breaking of the 4th wall in the matter of "la nuit américaine". That shows he understands the layers. He is a very fine actor.Take this little film as a piece of a grander puzzle in the mind of an interesting guy. A Quijote film will probably always be better as a sum of bits and pieces, chaos and unreachable goals... This fits. I had a little too much of burocracy (whose fault, who's gonna pay, who should have done what...) and too little of Gilliam's mind. But these documentaries almost always fall on that trap."The Man Who Killed Quijote" was the first film in 2018 that completes a seamingly "lost project". We'll likely get Welles' The Other Side of the Wind later this year.. Year for completions, and probably for disappointments. Welles also had an ongoing Quijote project for half his life. Ah, those windmills...

* Contains Spoilers * Terry Gilliam is my second favorite director next to Steven Spielberg. And the film is a wake-up call. It shows the viewers that films are expensive and that filmmakers often have to deal with insurance salesmen and a crew which may or may not be competent. I myself had dreams of becoming a filmmaker when I was a teenager, and this film is helping me to be scared from taking that path. The film demonstrates how filmmakers have to consider the health of the cast and the locations they shoot the film in. One must always take weather and prospective noises into consideration before shooting a film. Practicability and feasibility must also be considered, especially if the filmmakers are dealing with foreigners.Not as funny as I thought it would be, but nevertheless entertaining.8/10

Maverick filmmaker Terry Gilliam may have been the mastermind behind such great works as "Brazil" and "The Fisher King", but he created his largest, most brilliantly conceived undertaking to date with 2001's "The Man who Killed Don Quixote". Oh, wait. You've never heard of it? The stellar documentary "Lost in La Mancha" will present precisely why Gilliam's big budget indie flick went from one cataclysm to another without missing a beat. Like Orson Welles before him, Quixotic director Gilliam struggled against immovable and unpreventable odds to get his vision of Quixote to the screen, even after having put more than a full decade's work into it. The film that began as an on-set making of featurette soon blossoms into a movie-making parody no one bothered to pen. It could be said that independent film-making constitutes the bulk of the actual output of the 'film industry', and this documentary rings quite true of those struggling in the trenches of it. It's a wonderful crash course in film-making for those prepared to see the darker, sadder side of it.

A brilliant documentary about what indeed can go wrong on a film and how fortunate we are too see many great films come to life. Making a film is like re-creating life, and this film show us how difficult it can indeed be. If ever, it's here where Murphy's law applies deeply.After reading the comments here I have little to add - All of them say what I want to say. I would have liked to see this film come out though! Since I am a great fan of Terry and all his films.I think there should be made a documentary on Gilliam, it's definitely something that I would like to see. His imagination and his self-destructiveness are what make him an excellent filmmaker.