The Don Quixote that Orson Welles never finished will finally take shape. Four film libraries have had to agree to achieve this
It took Welles almost thirty years to finish Don Quixote. It took Terry Gilliam another thirty and he got it, but the process was a nightmare that deserved its own documentary. Adapting Don Quixote has given us several minor classics and some other milestones (the historic Spanish animated series, without going any further) and now, four European film libraries are about to demonstrate that there is a third way, through the recovery and restoration of one of the most famous non-films in history. International collaboration. Four film institutions have decided to finish, to the extent that something like that can be finished, the work that Orson Welles left unfinished after his death. During the Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, the Spanish Film Archive, the Cinémathèque Française, the Italian Cineteca Nazionale and the Filmmuseum in Munich They confirmed the beginning of the reconstruction of their ‘Don Quixote’. The project is coordinated by Esteve Riambau, historian, filmmaker and former director of the Filmoteca de Catalunya. The objective, as explained by Riambau himselfis to have the reconstruction ready in 2028. An infinite shoot. In 1957, Welles’ friend Frank Sinatra invested $25,000 in the project. The original idea It was to function as a complement to the singer’s own television show, in the form of a short special for CBS. At that time it was scheduled to star Charlton Heston, but it couldn’t be due to scheduling issues. Filming took place in Mexico, Spain and Italy and lasted, with interruptions and returns, over almost three decades. The agreement with CBS ended up falling apart and Welles decided to turn the television special into the feature film that would never be finished and that would evolve bathed in pure chaos: in Mexico, for example, Welles worked without a finished script, filming improvised sequences in the street, and he himself was in charge of keeping track of the filming with obsessive detail. Neither the death in 1969 of the actor who played Don Quixote, Francisco Reiguera, nor that of the actor who played Sancho Panza, Akim Tamiroff, in 1972, stopped Welles, who also continued filming in color. In 1982, three years before he died, he was still making changes to a film he affectionately called My baby. A curse that spreads. Don Quixote has a reputation for devouring races. Terry Gilliam needed eight failed filming attempts and a lawsuit from his own producer to carry out ‘The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’, a project that started in 1998 and finally premiered in 2018. The disaster of the first attempt, in 2000, with Jean Rochefort and Johnny Depp, was portrayed in the documentary ‘Lost in La Mancha’. Before them, Peter O’Toole, John Lithgow and Rafael Rivelles had already given life to the gentleman in much more conventional versions. What material do we have? A huge and dispersed amount. The Cinémathèque Française preserves about 80 minutes in 35 mm positives that were exhibited at the 1986 Cannes Festival. The Spanish Film Archive bought 16 and 35 mm rolls in 1991, totaling 50,000 meters of film, in addition to the cultural exploitation rights, and is the researcher of the entire legacy. The partially unpublished block is in Rome: between 40,000 and 50,000 meters of negatives that the editor Mauro Bonanni kept in Cinecittà and that Oja Kodar, Welles’s last collaborator, recovered in 2017 after settling a dispute with the editor. What’s coming Riambau affirms that all these materials “no one has seen yet.” Added to that are more than 2,000 pages of script that Welles wrote over decades, although some of the material has been lost. Riambau will order a script that does not yet have a clear structure and in 2027 it will be compared with the images to census all the available material. There may be surprises on the thousands of meters coming from Cinecittà: this Quixote can still cause more headaches. In Xataka | 124 years later, the Lumière brothers’ 1896 classic is scaled to 4K 60fps using artificial intelligence
