VENICE — Terry Gilliam, who completed his “The Zero Theorem” last week, is anxious to get back in the director’s chair with famously long-gestating “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” first and foremost on his mind.
At Venice, where “Theorem,” widely pre-sold by Voltage, bowed Monday to mixed reviews, Gilliam revealed that just two days ago he re-read the “Quixote” script and hasn’t given up on the pic, which he’d like to shoot in Spain.
Previous attempts to shoot “Quixote” were memorably captured in Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s 2002 doc “Lost in La Mancha.”
“I am retreating to the safe harbor of ‘Quixote,'” Gilliam said.
“If we get the boats floating, we’ll head out; but of they don’t it will be something else.” Either way, he’d like to get back behind camera in autumn 2014, Gilliam added.
Meanwhile, the 72-year-old helmer will be busy directing an opera, Hector Berlioz’s “Benvenuto Cellini,” scheduled to play in June 2014 at the English National Opera in London.
Regarding “Theorem,” a reflection on the human condition in the Internet age toplining Christoph Waltz as a reclusive computer genius, Gilliam hopes it will play well to youth auds.
“The young people who’ve seen it all react to it. They get it, because they are living their lives like that: they are totally connected, for better or worse,” said the helmer with a cross-generational cult following.
As for the pic’s significance, “people become alienated because of not knowing what to do, and then communicating with the Web and feeling it’s easier to do than with real people,” Gilliam lamented.
“You can almost understand it. But porn is almost half the traffic on the Web; it’s crazy!”
