Casting on Terry Gilliam’s long-gestating drama The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is finally beginning to pick up speed, with The Hollywood Reporter today bringing word that Olga Kurylenko has signed a deal to join both Adam Driver and Michael Palin in the film.
In attendance at the Cannes Film Festival, Gilliam solicited questions about Don Quixote, revealing that he’s finally ready to build a cast around The Force Awakens‘ Adam Driver after all these years.
“It’s a funny thing along the way there have been so many version of this story in my mind and it changes with each cast. Finally we have the perfect cast. Driver is the guy I’ve been looking for all these years. Thank god for Star Wars, Adam Driver is bankable!”
Flirting with development ever since Terry Gilliam announced the project back in 1998, many feared that The Man Who Killed Don Quixote would remain on the director’s back-burner in perpetuity, but the casting of Driver, Palin and now Kurylenko has offered the project a refreshing new lease of life.
An official synopsis seen below introduces Driver as the central advertising executive, along with Palin’s titular Don Quixote.
“There was a time when Toby was a young film student full of ideals. So he decided to shoot a film adapted from the story of Don Quixote in a pretty Spanish village.
“But those days are gone and now Toby is an arrogant publicist, libidinous and jaded. Money and glitter have corrupted him, and while he is in Spain where he finishes filming an ad, he has to juggle with his boss’s wife – Jacqui – a calamitous weather, and his own ego. This is when a mysterious gypsy comes to find him with an old copy of his student film: Toby is upset and decides to go in search of a little village where he had made his first work a long time ago. He discovers with horror that his little film has had terrible effects on this quiet place. Angelica, the girl full of innocence, became a high-class call girl; and the old man who played Don Quixote lost his mind, convinced in his delusion of being the real “Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance.”
Eyeing an October shoot, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is expected to bow in theaters at some point in 2017.
