One pos­si­ble response to the tan­ta­liz­ing notion of a Ter­ry Gilliam film about Don Quixote: How has­n’t he made one already? Anoth­er pos­si­ble response: Wait, has­n’t he made one already? The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which pre­miered at Cannes last month, arrives 29 years after Gilliam first start­ed work­ing on it — and 16 years after Lost in La Man­cha, a well-received doc­u­men­tary about one of his failed attempts to shoot it. Long the per­fect sym­bol of a “cursed” pro­duc­tion doomed to an eter­ni­ty in “devel­op­ment hell,” it has some­how come back from the dead, res­ur­rect­ed by the sheer dogged­ness of Gilliam and his col­lab­o­ra­tors, time and time again.

The movie even sur­vives John Hurt and Jean Rochefort, two of the stars pre­vi­ous­ly signed on to play Quixote him­self. (The list also includes Robert Duvall and Gilliam’s fel­low Python Michael Palin.) Jonathan Pryce, best known at the moment as Game of Thrones’ High Spar­row, has ulti­mate­ly tak­en on the role, hav­ing been attached to play oth­ers in the project over the pre­vi­ous decades. But just as Gilliam’s film does­n’t straight­for­ward­ly adapt Cer­vantes’ clas­sic of Span­ish lit­er­a­ture, Pryce does­n’t straight­for­ward­ly por­tray Cer­vantes’ icon­ic char­ac­ter. He does it, rather, through a Span­ish shoe­mak­er who tru­ly believes he is Cer­vantes’ icon­ic char­ac­ter, hav­ing played him in a stu­dent film years before.

The stu­dent film­mak­er has grown up to become a cyn­i­cal adman, one meant to be played in pre­vi­ous ver­sions of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote by Robin Williams, John­ny Depp, Ewan McGre­gor, and Jack O’Con­nell. In the trail­er above you’ll see the char­ac­ter played by Adam Dri­ver, who in recent years has fast ascend­ed into the realm of indie-film roy­al­ty. Where­as ear­li­er scripts flung him back through time from mod­ern day into 17th-cen­tu­ry Spain, this one stays in the present and forces him to con­front the out­sized impact of his small film on the even small­er vil­lage in which he shot it. And so the sto­ry of the film, not just the sto­ry behind it, takes on themes of the unpre­dictable com­pli­ca­tions, con­se­quences, and even dan­gers of film­mak­ing.

Those com­pli­ca­tions have ground on for The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. The lat­est man­i­fes­ta­tion of the film’s sup­posed curse takes the form of a law­suit by a for­mer pro­duc­er, Paulo Bran­co, who insists he still owns the rights to it. Gilliam’s cur­rent pro­duc­er says oth­er­wise, but their recent loss in the Paris Court of Appeals has giv­en the noto­ri­ous­ly force­ful Bran­co rea­son — valid or not, nobody seems quite able to say — to pub­licly declare vic­to­ry. Whichev­er par­ty will final­ly have to cough up how­ev­er much mon­ey to set­tle all of this, the epic jour­ney of Gilliam’s Don Quixote project looks as if it has entered its home stretch. How­ev­er the world receives the film itself, Gilliam’s fans can almost cer­tain­ly look for­ward to anoth­er acclaimed doc­u­men­tary about it as well. 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ter­ry Gilliam Reveals the Secrets of Mon­ty Python Ani­ma­tions: A 1974 How-To Guide

Watch “The Secret Tour­na­ment” & “The Rematch,” Ter­ry Gilliam’s Star-Stud­ded Soc­cer Ads for Nike

Yale Presents a Free Online Course on Miguel de Cer­vantes’ Mas­ter­piece Don Quixote

Gus­tave Doré’s Exquis­ite Engrav­ings of Cer­vantes’ Don Quixote

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The field jack­et, the mohawk, the “real rain” that will “wash all this scum off the streets,” the vir­tu­oso track­ing shot over the after­math of a mas­sacre, “You talkin’ to me?”: so many ele­ments of Taxi Dri­ver have found per­ma­nent places in cin­e­mat­ic cul­ture, and almost as many have found per­ma­nent places in the cul­ture, peri­od. Thanks to its wide-rang­ing influ­ence as well as its pres­ence that endures more than forty years on, even those who’ve nev­er seen the movie in some sense already know it.

What makes Taxi Dri­ver so pow­er­ful? Lewis Bond, video essay­ist and cre­ator of Chan­nel Criswell, sets out to answer that ques­tion in the two-part, fea­ture-length analy­sis above. Mar­tin Scors­ese’s fifth film, and the sec­ond of his col­lab­o­ra­tions with Robert de Niro, Taxi Dri­ver came out in 1976.

Adapt­ing the film noir tra­di­tion for an even more cyn­i­cal post-Viet­nam era, it osten­si­bly mount­ed a grim cri­tique of Amer­i­ca. Audi­ences of the 1970s, espe­cial­ly audi­ences of New York­ers, might have read­i­ly iden­ti­fied with the judg­ments of moral, social and urban decay bit­ter­ly aired by de Niro as Travis Bick­le.

But before long, those first view­ers sure­ly real­ized that they were watch­ing a work of art both more com­plex and more uni­ver­sal than that. Bond’s read­ing of the film gets right to the study at its heart of iso­la­tion, hypocrisy, puri­ty, cor­rup­tion, desire, and vengeance, char­ac­ter­is­tics found in but hard­ly unique to the human expe­ri­ence in 70s New York City. “Mar­tin Scors­ese’s 1976 film is a film that does not grow dat­ed, or over-famil­iar,” writes Roger Ebert in a 2004 appre­ci­a­tion. “I have seen it dozens of times. Every time I see it, it works; I am drawn into Travis’ under­world of alien­ation, lone­li­ness, hap­less­ness and anger.”

Ebert under­stands, as Bond does, that “utter alone­ness is at the cen­ter of Taxi Dri­ver, one of the best and most pow­er­ful of all films, and per­haps it is why so many peo­ple con­nect with it even though Travis Bick­le would seem to be the most alien­at­ing of movie heroes. We have all felt as alone as Travis. Most of us are bet­ter at deal­ing with it.” Yet over the past four decades, even as New York has emerged from near-bank­rupt­cy to become one of the most expen­sive and glam­orous of all cities, real-life Travis Bick­les have vis­it­ed their vio­lent, mis­be­got­ten vengeance all over Amer­i­ca. Mak­ing Taxi Dri­ver, Scors­ese and his col­lab­o­ra­tors thought they were cap­tur­ing the dying gasp of a city. Instead, they cap­tured an aspect of the human con­di­tion that haunts us more than ever today.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Revis­it Mar­tin Scorsese’s Hand-Drawn Sto­ry­boards for Taxi Dri­ver

Robert De Niro’s Taxi Cab License Used to Pre­pare for Taxi Dri­ver (1976)

What Is Apoc­a­lypse Now Real­ly About? An Hour-Long Video Analy­sis of Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Viet­nam Mas­ter­piece

Mar­tin Scors­ese Teach­es His First Online Course on Film­mak­ing: Fea­tures 30 Video Lessons

The Essen­tial Ele­ments of Film Noir Explained in One Grand Info­graph­ic

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Yes­ter­day we fea­tured the Direc­tors Series, the ever-expand­ing col­lec­tion of video essays that seeks out the essence of the auteurs of our time by close­ly exam­in­ing their entire fil­mo­gra­phies. So far, the series’ cre­ator Cameron Beyl has taken on the work of Stan­ley Kubrick, the Coen Broth­ers, David Finch­er, Paul Thomas Ander­son, and Christo­pher Nolan — all titans of cin­e­ma, and with the excep­tion of the last, all Amer­i­can. Giv­en that appar­ent cul­tur­al incli­na­tion, Beyl’s choice of a sub­ject for the just-begun cur­rent chap­ter of the Direc­tors Series fol­lows nat­u­ral­ly: that uncom­pro­mis­ing Amer­i­can tran­scen­den­tal­ist of the sil­ver screen, Ter­rence Mal­ick.

It also makes good sense to focus on Mal­ick now, giv­en that he’s spent the past few years in a peri­od of sur­pris­ing late-career pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. After estab­lish­ing the film­mak­er’s iden­ti­ty and main themes as well as giv­ing a sketch of his col­or­ful (and often only sparse­ly doc­u­ment­ed) life, Beyl uses his first episode on Mal­ick to get into his “crimes of pas­sion” movies, his 1973 debut Bad­lands and its 1978 fol­low-up Days of Heav­en.

The lat­ter seems to have solid­i­fied in the cin­e­mat­ic con­scious­ness many of the basic ele­ments of Mal­ick­’s style, includ­ing hushed yet often grand­ly philo­soph­i­cal nar­ra­tion; a wor­ship­ful, even reli­gious view of the nat­ur­al world; and a relent­less expan­sion of his own visu­al lan­guage. But though the film won Mal­ick a Best Direc­tor award at Cannes, he did­n’t make anoth­er movie for twen­ty years.

After return­ing to film­mak­ing in 1998 with the James Jones-adapt­ing World War II pic­ture The Thin Red Line, Mal­ick appeared to pick up right where he left off: The New World, his inter­pre­ta­tion of John Smith’s encounter with Poc­a­hon­tas, came in 2005, fol­lowed by 2011’s Palme d’Or-win­ning The Tree of Life. That film, deeply per­son­al in its depic­tion of an Amer­i­can child­hood in the 1940s and even more deeply per­son­al in its zoom out to the cos­mic scale, reveals as much about Mal­ick­’s obses­sions as any­thing he’s done. Yet the star­tling­ly many pic­tures he has direct­ed since — the impro­vised roman­tic dra­ma To the Wonder, the Los Ange­les odyssey Knight of Cups, the his­to­ry-of-the-uni­verse doc­u­men­tary Voy­age of Time, the exper­i­men­tal musi­cal Song to Song, and his upcom­ing return to WWII Rade­gund — tell us, as Beyl will show, that his cin­e­mat­ic explo­rations have many more awe-inspir­ing places still to take us.

Watch Part 1 of the Mal­ick study above. Find future parts on the Direc­tors Series Vimeo page.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Direc­tors Series” Presents Free Immer­sive Stud­ies of Stan­ley Kubrick, the Coen Broth­ers, David Finch­er, Paul Thomas Ander­son & Christo­pher Nolan

Video Essay­ist Kog­o­na­da Makes His Own Acclaimed Fea­ture Film: Watch His Trib­utes to Its Inspi­ra­tions Like Ozu, Lin­klater & Mal­ick

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Humorist and movie crit­ic Joe Queenan once stood out­side a the­ater after a screen­ing of Juras­sic Park and asked each exit­ing view­er if they knew who direct­ed the film they’d just seen. Only five out of the ten who talked to him, he report­ed, could name Steven Spiel­berg. (Not just one but two of those who could­n’t said, inex­plic­a­bly, that the Michael Crich­ton adap­ta­tion had been direct­ed by Stephen King.)

Queenan pulled this stunt as an infor­mal test of “auteur the­o­ry,” which holds that the direc­tor, despite the inher­ent­ly col­lab­o­ra­tive nature of the medi­um, is ulti­mate­ly the “author” of a motion pic­ture. But what does it say about auteur the­o­ry that half of his sam­ple of view­ers could­n’t come up with the name of quite pos­si­bly the most famous film­mak­er alive? Does the iden­ti­ty of a film’s direc­tor mat­ter as much as those of us who sub­scribe to auteur the­o­ry believe it does?

As for the case for the auteur, if you’ve got fif­teen hours or so to spare, you can watch it made in depth by the Direc­tors Series. These mul­ti-part video essays by writer-direc­tor Cameron Beyl exam­ine what makes an auteur an auteur not just one fil­mog­ra­phy, but one film at a time.

Beyl launched the series with the ide­al selec­tion of Stan­ley Kubrick, an almost Pla­ton­ic ide­al of the mod­ern auteur, whose career-long jump­ing from sub­ject to sub­ject and even genre to genre reveals all the more clear­ly the ele­ments of his bold cin­e­mat­ic sig­na­ture.

Then came series-with­in-the-series on direc­tors from the gen­er­a­tion after Kubrick: David Finch­er, Paul Thomas Ander­son, the Coen Broth­ers, and Christo­pher Nolan. Though all alive and vey much still active, they’ve all forged the kind of strong styles that inspire wor­ship­ful ret­ro­spec­tives at cin­e­math­e­ques the world over. Even the kind of movie­go­er who thinks Stephen King direct­ed Juras­sic Park sure­ly sens­es, on some lev­el, the com­mon sen­si­bil­i­ty shared by films as out­ward­ly dif­fer­ent as Fight Club and Gone Girl, Boo­gie Nights and There Will Be Blood, Rais­ing Ari­zona and Far­go, Memen­to and Inter­stel­lar.

In the Direc­tors Series, Beyl reveals the tech­niques these film­mak­ers use to make their body of work a uni­fied cin­e­mat­ic project, and so rise to the sta­tus of true auteurs. Try to repli­cate Queenan’s exper­i­ment today, and you may well find that many, if not most, of the view­ers who’ve just seen one of their movies won’t know the direc­tor’s name. That, of course, does­n’t mean that they did­n’t enjoy or appre­ci­ate the direc­tor’s art — but it also does­n’t mean that, equipped with the kind of insight pro­vid­ed by the Direc­tors Series, you won’t enjoy and appre­ci­ate it even more.

Fol­low these links for more on each series: Stan­ley Kubrick (3 hours), David Finch­er (3.5 hours), Paul Thomas Ander­son (2.5 hours), the Coen Broth­ers (4 hours), and Christo­pher Nolan (3.5 hours).

The first video from each series appears on the page above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Com­plete Col­lec­tion of Wes Ander­son Video Essays

“Auteur in Space”: A Video Essay on How Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Tran­scends Sci­ence Fic­tion

Four Video Essays Explain the Mas­tery of Film­mak­er Abbas Kiarosta­mi (RIP)

An Intro­duc­tion to Jean-Luc Godard’s Inno­v­a­tive Film­mak­ing Through Five Video Essays

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.