John Hurt says he’ll star in Terry Gilliam’s Don Quixote movie, if it ever happens

Barring any more setbacks, Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote really will be shooting soon, and John Hurt will play Don Quixote. “I am doing the Don Quixote film with Terry Gilliam next year,” Hurt told Supajam of his upcoming plans, sounding pretty confident about a film that’s been in the works longer than this fall’s incoming high school freshmen have been alive. But apparently, it’s really happening: As we wrote back in August, Gilliam says the financing has come together to get his chronically stymied project going once again in 2015, this time with the film taking on the meta twist of being about a guy who’s made his own disastrous Don Quixote movie.

Of course, even since that report, there’s already been another “hiccup,” as Gilliam told Rolling Stone, describing the film as “the Sisyphean rock that keeps rolling back.” Most of that “hiccup” was apparently due to casting, with Gilliam telling Twitch, “The choice is whether we stay with a particular actor or start looking for another. I’m not sure what’s happening at the moment. We’ll see where it goes.”

If it doesn’t go well, this may, really and truly, be Gilliam’s final attempt to make the film. Gilliam told Rolling Stone: “I’m beginning to actually think, ‘If it doesn’t work this time, I’m gonna dump it.’ I’ve wasted far too much of my life doing it. If you’re going to do Quixote, you have to become as mad as Quixote. I’ve wasted how many years? Fifteen? Yeah, there’s a certain point. It’s kind of the determination to be crazy and unreasonable. Every intelligent person around me says, ‘Walk away from it.’ But those are reasonable people.”

[via The Playlist]