Every Don Quixote Adaptation, Ranked for Faithfulness: Gilliam's Cursed Film, Man of La Mancha, Welles and the Rest

Terry Gilliam started trying to make a Don Quixote film in 1989 and released one in 2018. In between he lost a lead actor to a herniated disc, a location to a flash flood, a soundtrack to NATO fighter jets, and an insurance claim to a clause. The story of the failure became a documentary that is better known than the film it documents.

That is the famous adaptation. It is also, by the measure used below, one of the least faithful. Ranked on a single stated axis, how much of Cervantes’ own story a version sets out to carry, the winner is a television film almost nobody has seen. If you would rather be inside the scenes than watching someone else’s version of them, the playable Don Quixote opens on the night he talks an innkeeper into knighting him.

📐 The axis they are ranked on

Faithfulness is a useless word unless you say faithful to what. This piece ranks on one thing only: how much of Cervantes’ own story a version sets out to carry, judged by what its makers say it is rather than by a scene-by-scene audit. That axis is deliberately unkind to the best work on the list, and it should be read as one measurement rather than a verdict on quality.

The Knighting of Don Quixote at the Inn is a doorway in the playable Don Quixote: an innkeeper who can see exactly what is happening, and a guest who needs the ceremony to be real. You can play it kind or play it cruel. Role-play Don Quixote →

🎬 Twenty-nine years, and a film that is about that

Gilliam first conceived the project in 1989, according to both Wikipedia and the BFI’s Sight and Sound, which puts the whole gestation at close to three decades. Across those years the role of Don Quixote was held at various points by Jean Rochefort, Robert Duvall, John Hurt, Michael Palin and finally Jonathan Pryce, who plays him in the finished film opposite Adam Driver.

The film that came out in 2018 is not the novel. Driver plays Toby, a commercials director who stumbles back into the Spanish village where he shot a student film years earlier, and finds the old shoemaker he cast as Quixote still living inside the part. The book is the thing being remembered, not the thing being filmed.

🌊 The 2000 collapse, in the order it happened

The attempt that made the project notorious began shooting in Spain in 2000. Fighter jets from a nearby NATO range ruined the sound on the first day. A flash flood then wrecked the location and the equipment, and changed the colour of the landscape enough that the footage already shot no longer matched. Jean Rochefort, cast as Quixote, was diagnosed with a double herniated disc and could not ride. The BFI records that the shoot was over inside five days, and the insurers declined the flood claim.

Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe had been hired to make a promotional making-of. What they filmed instead was the collapse, released in 2002 as Lost in La Mancha. On the day this piece was written its Rotten Tomatoes score stood at 94% from 102 reviews, against 66% from 128 reviews for the version Gilliam finally released in 2018.

One detail gets misremembered almost every time this story is retold. Johnny Depp was in the 2000 cast, and he was never cast as Don Quixote or as Sancho. He was Toby, the modern advertising man, the part Adam Driver eventually played.

• ✅1989. Gilliam conceives the film.
• ✅2000. Shooting starts and stops within a week. Jets, flood, herniated disc, refused insurance claim.
• ✅2002. Lost in La Mancha releases the wreckage as a documentary.
• ✅2018.The film premieres on the closing night of Cannes on 19 May, over a producer’s legal objection, and takes about $2.4 million worldwide.

🎶 Man of La Mancha never claimed to be the novel

The 1965 stage musical is the version most people have actually encountered, and it is the reason so many readers arrive at Cervantes expecting a noble dreamer. Wikipedia’s account gives the credits as music by Mitch Leigh, lyrics by Joe Darion and a book by Dale Wasserman, opening on 22 November 1965 and taking five Tony Awards including Best Musical the following year.

Its central device is not in the novel at all. The musical frames the story as a play performed by Cervantes and his fellow prisoners while he waits on a hearing before the Inquisition, which lets the knight’s idealism be argued for directly in a way the novel never does. That frame is also why several of its most quoted lines get attributed to Cervantes by people who have never opened him. The lines, and who really wrote them, are a separate essay on this hub.

The 1972 film version, directed by Arthur Hiller with Peter O’Toole and Sophia Loren, did not carry the stage show’s success across. Roger Ebert’s review called its dancing “paralytic” and said the material “would sound incredibly dumb if it weren’t in a musical, and the musical it’s in ain’t worth it.” O’Toole’s singing was dubbed by Simon Gilbert.

🎞️ Welles never finished, and the ones that did

Orson Welles shot his Don Quixote intermittently from 1957 to 1969 and never released it. His financing fell away in the first year, his Dulcinea grew up during the shoot, and the original audio was lost. The footage ended up split between archives in Munich, Madrid and Paris. A 1992 assembly by the Spanish director Jesús Franco premiered at Cannes and satisfied almost nobody.

The versions that finished are quieter. Grigori Kozintsev’s 1957 Soviet film, with Nikolay Cherkasov as the knight, was the first in colour and widescreen and screened at Cannes that year. G. W. Pabst’s 1933 version, built around the bass Feodor Chaliapin, was the first with sound and lost money. Peter Yates’s television film for TNT, broadcast on 9 April 2000 with John Lithgow and Bob Hoskins, took three Emmy nominations according to the Television Academy’s own database, and of everything on this list it is the one that simply sets out to tell the story.

The ballet deserves its own line. Marius Petipa and Ludwig Minkus premiered Don Quixote at the Bolshoi on 26 December 1869, and it is still danced constantly, but it is built almost entirely on the wedding of Kitri and Basilio. Those two come out of the Camacho wedding, which runs three chapters of Part Two, 19 to 21, out of 126 in the book. The knight wanders through his own ballet as a guest.

📺 So which one should you watch

Watch Lost in La Manchafirst, because it is the best-reviewed of the two titles here that carry public scores, 94% against 66%. Watch the 2000 television version if what you want is the plot. Watch Gilliam’s 2018 film after you have read the novel, when its argument about what stories do to the people who tell them has something to land on. Man of La Mancha is a good musical and a bad guide, and the ballet is a good ballet and no guide at all.

None of them will give you the thing the book is actually made of, which is the running argument between two men on a road. For that you need the text, free and complete at Project Gutenberg, or a translation worth paying for.