Terry Gilliam's long-awaited The Man Who Killed Don Quixote gets a first-look image featuring Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce. Later this year, Gilliam will finally release the Don Quixote film he's spent the last two decades struggling to bring to life. The film stars Driver as an ad exec hurtled backward in time to 17th Century Spain, where he meets delusional would-be giant-slayer Don Quixote (Pryce).

Gilliam's previous effort to shoot Cervantes' immortal Don Quixote with Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort resulted in one of movie history's most memorable tales of on-location disaster. Budgets shrank in pre-production. Fly-overs by NATO jets made filming difficult. Storms ravaged sets. Star Rochefort suffered a herniated disc that forced him to leave the film. The movie itself never saw completion, but the on-set madness did result in a memorable documentary, Lost in La Mancha. Gilliam himself never lost hope though, and later resurrected his take on Quixote. Despite more legal hassles and financial woes, Gilliam finally started filming last March, finishing the movie in June.

Related: Disney Developing Don Quixote Movie by Hunger Games Screenwriter

With The Man Who Killed Don Quixote at last nearing release, a first image has surfaced showing stars Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce in the film. The shot has circulated at the European Film Market, and filmmaker Andrea Corsini shared it on Twitter. See it below:

The image indeed is everything you would expect from Terry Gilliam's Don Quixote. There's Jonathan Pryce in full armor as Quixote, the man so crazy he thinks he's a knight. And there's Adam Driver in a big old hat, the hapless ad exec Quixote thinks is Sancho Panza. After viewing an early cut, Terry Gilliam himself declared the movie "surprisingly wonderful." The real surprise though is that the movie exists at all, given all the adversity visited upon the project over the years. A lot of filmmakers would have just given up, but not Gilliam. Like Quixote himself, he kept picking himself back up and soldiering on.

When it comes out, Don Quixote will be the first Terry Gilliam film released since 2013's The Zero Theorem. Once a prolific filmmaker and occasional Oscar contender, Gilliam in recent years has had difficulty just getting projects going. Sadly, studios simply aren't willing to finance big movies by risk-taking directors like Gilliam. So Gilliam has shot less, and spent more time scraping money together in order to continue. Though Gilliam hates compromising, he had no choice but to scale back his vision on The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Otherwise the movie would simply never have come to fruition.

More: 15 Great Directors With The Most Flops

In 2015, Amazon Studios picked up The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, but thus far no American release date has been announced. The movie will debut in France in May.

Source: Andrea Corsini