DON QUIXOTE & THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM

It is the mission of each true knight...
His duty... nay, his privilege!
To dream the impossible dream,
To fight the unbeatable foe,
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go;
To right the unrightable wrong.

It is always a gamble to collaborate with a friend on a creative project, for it can often run the risk of the friendship being sacrificed as a consequence of the often heated process of artistic endeavour that invariably ensues.

However, in one circumstance I distinctly recall, I had the happy experience of working with one of my oldest and most cherished friends yielding quite spectacular results (at least to our young minds), in regard to the adventure part of the undertaking, if perhaps not with quite the conclusive victory we had planned for when first embarking upon the unique quest together.

And just like the subject of our shared project, Don Quixote, we too tilted at windmills, only to eventually find our own lances stuck in rotating sails. Nevertheless, the dream we pursued only further strengthened the bond between us for a lifetime ahead, just as it did for the world famous knight errant and his loyal squire Sancho Panza.

It was 1999 and I had just returned from a holiday in New York with my Irish friend, Niall, to my home town of Stroud, Gloucestershire after my university career had ended miserably with a whimper and not the expected bang that had been hoped for, by myself and my family.

Having little shame regarding the ruination of my academic failings, I reverted to what I often do when avoiding reality: reading books, watching films and listening to music. In this sense I found a great affinity with Miguel Cervantes' fictional creation, the retired country gentleman, Alonso Quixano, who pickled his own brain by reading endless tomes on the knight errants of old and the chilvaric code they dutifully followed before convincing himself he too could become one.  

Around this same time of personal introspection, I found myself re-acquainted with a dear childhood friend whose path had diverged from mine many years before. On the brief occasion when I had seen him prior to my homecoming, I found we were now more like strangers to each other, as if our shared childhood of fierce solidarity had been snatched from us in the transition to early adulthood, robbing us of all our previous affinities and soul connection.

But something had changed in the short time since we'd last seen each other; I instantly noticed some semblance of the spark I remembered of this precious friend had returned. I soon further discovered that he had, in many ways, become far more learned than me in our unintentional sabbatical from each other, reading books on esoteric philosophy and religion as well as the immortal classics from the vast canon of Western literature while I had been watching mostly mediocre films under the tutelege of my film studies teacher in the film lecture hall at my university in Surrey. Incidentally, I'll never forgive all those afternoons wasted watching old British transport films when we could have been watching the masterpieces of Wilder, Hitchcock, Lean or Kubrick instead.

But not everything I had consumed at that time was informed by the world weary tutors who appeared to have carried over their resentments from their own personal lack of success in the industry to us students.

Who knows? Perhaps they'd fallen short of their own planned quests somewhere along the way.

The discovery of a vast array of old documentaries and films in the college library  had enabled me to run in tandem with the underwhelming choices of my tutors, far  more inspiring references to feed my learning and fuel my future ambition.

In retrospect, the three greatest teachers I learnt from on my film course were Billy Wilder, Leonard Bernstein and Orson Welles.

Having most recently watched an old BBC Arena interview with film director Orson Welles discussing his career and expounding on his most notable and glorious creative failure, that being his cinematic attempt at adapting Don Quixote, I became drawn like a moth to a flame to finding out what it was about this famous book I'd often heard of but never actually read. I wanted to understand what exactly it was that so compelled this master of filmmaking to spend thirty years of his life trying to tell his own version of the tale.

After discussing my curiosity about Quixote with my childhood friend, Roly, we both decided to read the book at the exact same time so we could share our thoughts on the subject.

Then, much like Orson, we soon became enamored with this Spanish classic of madness and delusional heroism, and found ourselves under the enchanted spell of the Quixote universe, embarking on our very own script adaptation of the novel.

And thus, so began our first (and only) writing adventure together in the following summer of 2000.

We were still wet behind the ears back then, as neither Roly or myself had ever properly written a full length screenplay before, but this minor disadvantage did nothing to quell our shared ambition as we whiled away the long, hot summer of 2000 investing as much time, research and writing as we could on the subject of Cervantes, Don Quixote and Orson Welles in our own bid to secure immortality.

Writing the screenplay in linear fashion, we embarked (at least in our own minds) like our characters did on the page, on a journey that began in Castile-La Mancha, through El Toboso and onwards toward Toledo and then the many others regions of Eastern Spain that Quixote and Sancho travelled in the book.

The deeper we immersed ourselves in the process, the more we became like Quixote and Sancho ourselves, our writer/editor roles switching between one another as we'd jest in mock argument who was the knight in our own story and who was the squire.

The truth is, I like to think, we were both, though I have since come to reflect that while Roly exorcised the ghost of Quixote for himself once we'd put him to rest in the final scene of our script, I continued to carry the mad man along with me on my crazy path into the future. Perhaps I should have buried Alonso at the time, especially after we had our script rejected by several companies, finding ourselves up against numerous other Don Quixote adaptations that were in development by far more established figures than us, most famously Terry Gilliam who coincidentally also found himself undone by the now universally accepted curse of Quixote adaptations for film.

Nevertheless, I believe myself and Roly, much like Quixote and Orson, succeeded in honoring the impossible dream of attempting something magnificent, and the experience of writing in the footsteps of the deluded knight and his squire felt as if we had reverse incarnated into 17th century Spain and had lived our own adventure of a lifetime in the writing of it.

This is my quest
To follow that star
No matter how hopeless
No matter how far
To fight for the right
Without question or pause
To be willing to march, march into hell
For that heavenly cause

Happy Birthday Roly!

13/01/2022