Director Terry Gilliam has finally finished filming his long-gestating passion project The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. The director has tried to make the film a whopping eight times in the past nineteen years, leading to it becoming one of the most infamous projects trapped in development hell. But now The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, based on the 1605 novel Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, is seeing the light of day.

This latest attempt took years to get off the ground but finally started shooting earlier in 2017 with a star studded cast of Jonathan Pryce (Pirates of the Caribbean, The New World, GI Joe, Game of Thrones) as Don Quixote, Adam Driver (Girls, Star Wars) as Toby Grisoni and Olga Kurylenko, Stellan Skarsgard, Oscar Jaenada, Rossy de Palma and Jason Watkins in supporting roles.

In a recent Facebook update by Gilliam, the director confirmed that the project has completed filming, thanking everyone involved for helping it eventually happen. You can see the post below.

The fantasy-adventure-comedy film is set in modern day and follows director Toby Grisoni (Adam Driver) who is shooting a commercial and comes across a copy of his old student film, a re-telling of the famous Don Quixote story. This leads him back to the old Spanish village where he shot the film, causing Grisoni to undergo a series of catastrophic events and adventures.

They're unlikely to be as catastrophic as the behind-the-scenes story of the film, however, which has even been the subject of its own documentary, Lost in La Mancha, made back in 2002. Rather humorously, that was just after the earliest attempts at the film; Gilliam started on Don Quixote in 1998 with Jean Rochefort as Quixote and Johnny Depp as Grisonia, but film was cancelled due to the set and equipment destroyed by flooding, the departure of Rochefort due to illness and problems obtaining insurance for the production. He's reattempted multiple times since between 2005 and 2015 with actors Robert Duvall, Michael Palin, and John Hurt all eyed to play Quixote and Johnny Depp, Ewan McGregor, and Jack O'Connell considered for Grisoni. Due to a wide range of circumstances (mainly finance related), though, none ever got off the ground.

Thankfully, after all that, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is now set for a 2018 release and fans of Gilliam's work couldn't be more excited to see the film that has been nineteen years in the making.

Next: 15 Movies That Survived Development Hell

Source: Terry Gilliam