In a 2019 interview with Ricky Camilleri, Terry Gilliam reflects on his directorial challenges in bringing The Man Who Killed Don Quixote to the screen: “I hate that song ‘The Impossible Dream’ from Man of La Mancha, but there is that—the improbable is interesting to involve yourself in. The impossible is even more interesting.” Until the international release of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote in 2019, the film’s impossibility seemed assured, chronicled famously in Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s documentary Lost in La Mancha (2002).1 Gilliam’s equivocation on Man of La Mancha reveals both a rejection of the 1965 musical’s sentimental register and a flirtation with its idealism.2 Such flirtation does not, however, lead to Gilliam’s complete embrace of what Robert Stam calls “the doxa of conventional post-Romantic interpretation: Don Quixote the noble defender of lost causes, Don Quixote the hero of the imagination, Don Quixote the deluded knight, foiled always by Sancho Panza the earthbound realist”—in part because The Man Who Killed Don Quixote distributes qualities of the knight and his squire across multiple characters (38).

Gilliam’s film complicates the “post-Romantic interpretation” of Don Quixote in its exploration of the “doxa” outside the Quixote/Sancho dyad with respect to Don Quixote’s unrequited love object, Dulcinea (38). In The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, Dulcinea is transformed from object into subject endowed with narrative agency and creative power by the film’s end. In this essay, I argue that Dale Wasserman’s changes to Cervantes’ representation of Dulcinea in Man of La Mancha furnish Gilliam with the metaphor of artistic prostitution against which the film defines its own values of artistic authenticity and integrity. Treating Don Quixote as “universal cultural currency,” to use Thomas Leitch’s term, rather than a sacred text, enables Gilliam to shape the Cervantean mythos through playfully inauthentic means (123).

Fulton and Pepe’s He Dreams of Giants (2019), which records Gilliam’s completion of his Quixote film after nearly three decades of attempts, reveals Gilliam’s unacknowledged indebtedness to Wasserman as well as his irreverent treatment of Cervantes. Early in the documentary, the camera finds Gilliam in his home office perusing his nineteenth-century copy of Don Quixote with illustrations by Gustav Doré, caressing the pages with engravings and marveling at the French illustrator’s artistry. The novel, which describes the exploits of a country gentleman influenced by fantastical tales of romance and chivalry, speaks to Gilliam’s longtime interest in the tension between imagination and reality. At approximately seven minutes into the film, the camera cuts to Gilliam pointing to the beginning of Chapter XXIX, as it is labeled in that edition, as if he is using his index finger as a reading guide (see Figure 1). A voiceover from Gilliam begins as this page remains the focus of the shot, with a cut to a supposed digital close-up image of the page: “‘Too much sanity may be madness,’ said Don Quixote, ‘But the maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be!’” The moment establishes Gilliam’s kinship with Cervantes’ knight, a comparison that audiences would recall from Lost in La Mancha or numerous other accounts of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’s seemingly doomed fate.

The voiceover, however, bears no relation to the words on the book’s page as presented to the viewer. The digital image has been altered to insert a quotation adapted from Wasserman’s Man of La Mancha (61), read by Gilliam as if it appeared in the original English translation held in his hands (see Figure 2).3 This trick of editing expresses the ambivalence in Gilliam’s interview comment on Man of La Mancha’s “Impossible Dream.” We see the text of Don Quixote “as it should be” in Gilliam’s view, not “as it is,” elevating Wasserman’s words above Cervantes’. The pastiche of Wasserman and Cervantes in this scene confirms the pliability of the Quixote mythos—less a departure from the textual status quo than an extension of it, as the novel already is a work of interpretation as an English translation accumulating yet another layer of analysis via Doré’s illustrations. Taking a step back, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, according to Stam, “has, from the very beginning, been caught up in the irresistible logic of sequels and adaptations” and “itself thematizes the issue of adaptation . . . by bringing up story sources as relayed by different media” (36).

Although Gilliam’s film engages its sources with Cervantean verve, its plot differs significantly from both Cervantes and Wasserman. Toby Grummett is a director of commercials on location in Spain filming a Don Quixote-themed ad for a wind power corporation. After stumbling on a copy of his student film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, he returns to the filming location, the village Los Sueños. There, he reunites with the village cobbler he cast as Don Quixote, Javier, who is still living in the role as a roadside attraction. Javier dubs Toby Sancho after Don Quixote’s humble squire, and they set off through a series of misadventures that only tangentially evoke episodes in the novel or musical. Their wanderings lead them to reunite with Angelica, the Los Sueños tavern-keeper’s daughter who played a small part in Toby’s film. A lavish party hosted by Angelica’s abusive boyfriend Alexei culminates in Toby’s accidental killing of Javier. The film ends with Toby embracing the Quixote role and naming Angelica Sancho as they head back to Los Sueños—the place of dreams—to live in their imaginations.

Angelica, despite being named Sancho at the film’s end, corresponds loosely to Wasserman’s reworking of the idealized object of Don Quixote’s courtly devotion. Wasserman turns the Dulcinea figure, who never physically appears in Cervantes’ novel, into a character, transforming a joke into a tragedy. In Cervantes, the real woman behind the concept of Dulcinea is introduced in straightforward terms: “Near the place where he [Don Quixote] lived, dwelt a good, likely country lass, for whom he had formerly had a sort of inclination, though, it is believed, she never heard of it, nor regarded it in the least. Her name was Aldonza Lorenzo . . .” (8). Aldonza is only discussed, primarily by Don Quixote and Sancho, rather than supplying dialogue or participating in any plot events. The physical absence of Dulcinea in the text is a running gag meant to illustrate the chasm between reality and Don Quixote’s vision of the world. The only proof of Dulcinea’s existence is Sancho’s testimony, when he realizes during his time in the Sierra Morena that Dulcinea is Aldonza Lorenzo. He explains to Don Quixote, “I know her full well; it is a strapping wench, i’faith, and pitches the bar with e’er a lusty young fellow in our parish. By the mass, it is a notable, strong-built, sizable, sturdy, manly lass, and one that will keep her chin out of the mire” (176). Sancho’s depiction of Aldonza’s strength adds a layer of comic irony to Don Quixote’s devotion to Dulcinea, who is described in contrast to the type of delicate, courtly damsel in need of chivalrous protection.

To forward a more serious, tragic interpretation of Don Quixote’s idealism in line with the post-Romantic interpretation, Wasserman conflates the character of Aldonza and the prostitutes at the inn in Man of La Mancha. Despite Aldonza’s robust physicality, Cervantes never refers to her as a prostitute, nor is her sexual virtue rendered suspect. Turning Aldonza into a prostitute in the musical increases the gravitas of Don Quixote’s devotion. Instead of Cervantes’ comic disparity between a brawny country girl and Don Quixote’s notions of ideal femininity, Wasserman’s poignant contrast ties personal worth to female purity, but not in a way that targets Aldonza for judgment. We are meant to understand Dulcinea as a downtrodden woman whose true worth is recognized by Don Quixote regardless of her profession. Recalling Gilliam’s misattributed quotation in He Dreams of Giants, Man of La Mancha suggests that Don Quixote’s idealization of Aldonza reveals her real value—life “as it should be” (Wasserman 61). Because the musical presents her as an embodied character, the audience can also sympathize with Aldonza’s trials and assess her relationship with Don Quixote. The unrequited love theme from Cervantes remains in the musical’s Don Quixote, but Aldonza grows and changes because of their connection.  

Wasserman’s granting Aldonza an embodied presence in the musical allows her to display at least a limited agency compared to Cervantes’ deliberately absent figure. In Man of La Mancha, during her song “Aldonza,” she sings to Don Quixote, “Of all the cruel bastards who’ve badgered and battered me, / You are the cruelest of all!” (Wasserman 67). She continues:

Can’t you see what your gentle insanities do to me?
Rob me of anger and give me despair!
Blows and abuse I can take and give back again,
Tenderness I cannot bear! (Wasserman 67)

In the musical, Don Quixote’s naming of Aldonza as Dulcinea humanizes a woman previously objectified. Whereas in Cervantes’ book, Dulcinea is an idealized abstraction, the musical renders an encounter of friendship and education—Aldonza says, for instance, “You have shown me the sky” (Wasserman 67). Don Quixote has opened Aldonza’s worldview enough to make her compare her wretched state with true love. Aldonza has taken so much abuse over the years that she cannot, at this moment, assimilate Don Quixote’s high ideals into her sense of self. When Aldonza reappears at Don Quixote’s deathbed scene, she has absorbed his message and regarded herself as the lady Dulcinea, even bringing Don Quixote back to his mission of knight errantry after his memory falters. Aldonza’s transformation into Dulcinea is, importantly, a choice, a reflection of her own realization of what her life can be. But the consequences of this transformation are left open at the end of the musical. Whether, within the world of the play, a seventeenth-century prostitute could realistically abandon her profession in favor of any other path seems unlikely. Though meant to be uplifting, Aldonza’s awakening evokes pathos, as the ending of Man of La Mancha leaves us with Cervantes and his fellow prisoners in the framing narrative still incarcerated without any assurance of release. We may read this ending back into the character of Aldonza herself, stuck in the prison of her socioeconomic status and abusive profession but hopeful.

Gilliam’s Dulcinea character resembles that of Man of La Mancha in its transformation of the woman’s identity but differs in its context and consequences. In one respect, Gilliam’s film replicates the absence of Cervantes’ Dulcinea because cobbler Javier’s Don Quixote mentions his devotion to her throughout the film with no proof of a physically present woman. We are meant, however, to understand Angelica’s character as the Dulcinea figure of the film. Toby’s senior project for film school, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, enters the main narrative through diegetic video as well as flashbacks.  Angelica, the teenage daughter of a local tavern owner, becomes involved in the shoot playing a character simply called “girl” as well as a statue of the Virgin Mary carried in what appears to be a Holy Week procession. In a conversation outside of the shoot, Toby tells Angelica that she could be a star, and she travels to Madrid and other European cities to pursue what ends up being a failed dream of an acting career.

Gilliam’s characterization of Angelica borrows the element of prostitution but traces it back to Cervantes, not Wasserman. In at least two interviews promoting The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, he claims that Cervantes’ Dulcinea is a prostitute, reflecting his understanding of Don Quixote as a broad cultural phenomenon encompassing Man of La Mancha as well as the original text. Gilliam encountered Man of La Mancha before having read Cervantes’ novel, and the musical imprinted on his memory so strongly that his supposed source text was still framed by the later adaptation.4 Speaking with Ricky Camilleri, Gilliam explains, “In Cervantes’ version, she’s basically a peasant whore is what she is.” In an interview with Bruce Fretts, Gilliam recounts the evolution of Angelica’s character. The small-town girl stars in Toby’s student film, decides to pursue her dreams as an actress, “and she heads off to the big city and ends up basically a whore, which is what the original Dulcinea was.” In Gilliam’s film, Angelica’s prostitution elicits some pathos, but its ultimate effect is to create a metaphor with artistic prostitute Toby as its vehicle. 

Toby’s status as a creator of Angelica’s identity differs from Don Quixote’s role in Man of La Mancha shaping Aldonza into Dulcinea, partially because he only becomes a full Quixote figure at the end of Gilliam’s film, but mostly because of the modern context of their relationship. Toby casts Angelica in his film out of her own free will, and she decides to leave her village without his knowledge or persuasion. Her narrative contains traces of the “fallen woman” trope, connecting her eventual turn to prostitution with Aldonza’s character. Although Wasserman’s Aldonza eventually accepts her identity as Dulcinea, even playing the role at Don Quixote’s deathbed, she initially has less agency in crafting the persona. In Man of La Mancha, Aldonza initially serves as a screen onto which Don Quixote projects his notion of an idealized woman and grows into a woman in control of her own identity. Toby’s suggestion of Angelica’s star potential is a projection, but the projection has less to do with Toby’s idealism than his giddiness at his power as a filmmaker—power that is reduced, even mocked, as he is detached from control of his commercial shoot. Unlike Aldonza, Angelica’s involvement in prostitution seems to be temporary, less of a definitive character element than one small portion of a narrative trajectory.

Around the halfway point of Gilliam’s film, Angelica channels Aldonza’s world-weary stance. After separating from Javier, Toby encounters her as an ethereal vision gracefully dancing under a waterfall in a cave. Toby’s recognition of Angelica is not instant as he runs through various actresses from his commercial history to identify her. She is the one to recognize him first as she calls him by name, punctuating the accusing tones of her speech with jabs from a knife she initially wields for self-protection: “You made me a promise. I could be someone, you said. I could be a star. I just needed to be me. That was all.” This moment recalls the anguish of Aldonza’s confrontation with Don Quixote in The Man of La Mancha. Aldonza’s refusal of the title Dulcinea ends in “a wail” as “[s]he collapses” in that scene after Don Quixote’s promise that “Now and forever thou art my lady Dulcinea!” (67).

Gilliam’s film takes the confrontation in a different direction. Instead of being overcome by a violent physical expression, Angelica breaks the tension by laughing and telling Toby that he stinks. When the scene moves to the area outside the cave where Angelica has a horse waiting for her, she takes control of her narrative. After she discloses that her career path has included “modeling, mostly escort work,” and moves on to a reverie on the beauty of the surrounding scenery as tender, non-diegetic string music plays, Toby interrupts her recounting of a childhood memory to blurt out “I fucked things up for you, didn’t I?”. Angelica responds, “Don’t flatter yourself. Do you think I wanted to do laundry all my life?” Toby follows with an explicit apology as well as a recognition of the patchwork of bruises on Angelica’s back. “It’s a living,” she says, flatly. Angelica, in this moment, is the jaded Aldonza speaking, who followed her dreams at her peril and whose quest led her to an abusive relationship. Toby’s apology shows some growth from his caricaturish egotism at the beginning of Gilliam’s film, but this encounter with Angelica shows how little power Toby has as a creator figure in this text—less a godlike or Pygmalion-like presence than a catalyst for Angelica’s self-creation. The scene of Angelica’s reunion with Toby verges on the sentimentality of Aldonza’s anguish, but Gilliam’s film refuses to let the audience linger in that space long enough for emotion to take hold. Instead, the scene cuts to slapstick with the arrival of Javier’s Don Quixote, who beats on Toby with his lance and flirts with Angelica. The music changes to a heroic and suspenseful horn melody that ironizes Javier’s madcap chivalrous gesture. Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha never endures this degree of comic targeting, nor does he show Toby’s remorse or introspection with the musical’s Aldonza. Her identity is sealed within Don Quixote’s vision of the world, of which he is supremely confident. Toby starts the film in his own Quixotic bubble of perception which is probed and popped once Javier as Don Quixote dubs him Sancho.

Gilliam’s choice to align his leading man with Sancho Panza for most of the film suggests the burdens and concrete realities of creativity. While Man of La Mancha guides Gilliam’s creation of his main female character, engagement with Cervantes’ text fashions the lanky Adam Driver into an unlikely Sancho figure. Man of La Mancha, which Dale Wasserman emphasizes is not an adaptation of Cervantes’ novel (vii), presents Sancho Panza as a character with the depth of a cardboard cutout, albeit a loveable one. Comparing Cervantes’ Sancho and Gilliam’s Toby reveals the many dimensions of Gilliam’s statement on art and its potential for corruption. Four main points of comparison with Toby will be discussed, including Sancho’s dominant characteristic of avarice, his social station, his association with realism, and his physicality. These comparisons develop an analysis of the transformation of the Dulcinea, Sancho, and Don Quixote characters at the ending of Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.

Throughout Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Sancho’s main motivation for serving the knight and remaining with him through the quest is his avarice, specifically in the promise of his own island to govern. Although Toby’s characteristic sin would seem to be pride, he does display greed over the gold coins he finds at the side of the road on a decaying mule carcass. The encounter with the mule is one of the most closely adapted scenes from Cervantes’ text but only in the initial image of the maggoty animal with coin-laden saddlebags. In He Dreams of Giants, during the same scene featuring the doctored quotation, Gilliam pauses on the Doré illustration of the dead mule and comments on its inclusion in the film. The direct translation of Cervantes’ text, for Gilliam, often lies more in images than in words. In his film, these coins are a visual index for tracing Toby’s growing detachment from his commercial motivations. In the book, the abandoned personal effects are clues to the presence and mental state of Cardenio, the pastoral lover whose interpolated tale comments on the theme of male rivalry and power. With Cardenio’s story never explicitly addressed in the film, the mule and money appear more as a dream sequence or projection of Toby’s imagination, especially in the manner of the coins’ transformation at Alexei’s castle. The story of Cardenio is only faintly present in the “ownership” of Angelica by Alexei and the possible romantic rivalry between him and Toby. In Cervantes’ text, Cardenio’s story echoes Don Quixote’s idealized love in his devotion to Dulcinea.5

In the film, these coins serve a narrative purpose, leading Toby to enter an abandoned mine and cave in which he reunites with Angelica. Unlike Sancho, Toby is a rich filmmaker rather than a peasant, so the coins gesture away from gaining wealth and toward bringing Toby back into the narrative of the quest after his solitary wandering. The second appearance of the coins occurs after Toby is separated from Javier following the confrontation with the knight of the mirrors, Raul. Toby wanders in harsh and dark corners of the landscape during a windstorm. Exasperated, he screams “Who the fuck wrote this ending!?” eventually lying down, taking out the coins, showering them on his chest, and placing them on his eyes in the manner of old burial customs. “At least I’ll have died rich,” he mutters, before falling asleep or blacking out. He is awakened by Javier’s loud performance of Don Quixote’s “penance,” which leads them to reunite and eventually travel to Alexei’s castle. In functioning as a narrative device instead of a means of exchange, the coins remain outside of any real economy. When Toby mentions dying “rich,” he could be referring to his actual bank account, but the film implies a different kind of richness. The scene of his awakening suggests a rebirth even as his cynicism remains in his interaction with the masochistically penitent Javier. Despite an exasperated Toby calling Javier insane to his face, Toby helps wash his wounds and tend to his healing. A scene of selfishness and greed ironically leads Toby to care for his creation, Javier’s Don Quixote—for it was Toby who enlisted the cobbler for his student film and sent him down the path of madness.

“[C]ontemplation of the dangers and responsibilities of filmmaking,” as Philip Concannon describes the film’s major focus, reaches a climax with Toby and Angelica’s rooftop argument at Alexei’s castle, the final time that Toby’s coins appear in the film (54). After Alexei forces Angelica to lick some food dropped on his boot, humiliating her for her supposed transgressions with Toby, she flees with Toby in pursuit. After stopping on the rooftop, she asks, “What do you want—to rescue me?” Toby answers in the affirmative, and Angelica responds, “He was reminding me who I belong to—that’s all. Do you have the cojones to steal Alexei’s property? Yeah, I didn’t think so.” He then needles her with questions: “How much? What’s your going rate? Is that enough?” Toby reaches into his pockets to throw his coins at her, but they have been transformed into rusted metal washers.

A contrast with the fate of Sancho’s coins in Cervantes’ text sheds light on Toby’s use of them, as well as Angelica’s character. Near the beginning of the second book of Don Quixote and in a self-reflexive metafictional gesture, the characters debrief on the main questions surrounding the first book. After pointing out an error in Book One in the representation of Sancho’s donkey, Don Quixote’s friend Sanson Carrasco asks, “but what happened to the hundred escudos? Are they gone?” Sancho replies, “I spent them for myself, and my wife, and my children, and they are the reason my wife patiently puts up with my traveling highways and byways in the service of my master . . .” (481). “Escudos” refers to the gold coins found by the pair in Cardenio’s abandoned pack shortly after entering the Sierra Morena (175).6 Sancho also regards the coins as compensation for the physical violence done to him in Don Quixote’s service—hazard pay for his work as squire. Timothy Hampton argues that these coins ultimately allow Sancho and Don Quixote to add more episodes of adventures to their story:

What we thought were pratfalls and blows are now, we learn, at least in Sancho’s mind, a commodity. They have been (or should be) paid for. Even more remarkable, when the question of the truth of history—in the form of the body’s pain—is thematized, we learn that the peasant has made good use of the money he found. He has invested it. But he has not used it to buy asses, the traditional sign of wealth for the peasant. Rather, he has used it to calm his wife while he goes off in search of adventure. In the largest terms, this means that literature can continue. (1224)

Toby’s position differs from the literary Sancho’s in his lone artistic genius status, with no family to invest in or convince of his adventures. Sancho regards the coins as compensation for his work, whereas Toby is bankrolled by the ad agency and the coins signal narrative enchantments more than exchange. In both texts, however, the coins push the story forward.

Hampton’s reading of Sancho’s compensation applies more to Angelica in Gilliam’s film, her prostitution and physical abuse resembling the squire’s conception of his service. Sancho considers his appropriation of Cardenio’s coins, Hampton observes, as payment for the beatings he has endured as Don Quixote’s squire. This justification of theft as payment for his labor resembles Angelica’s rationalization of her own abuse at the hands of Alexei. In her argument with Toby, she gestures to the castle and affirms her material comfort and luxury, her compensation for the bruises on her back visible in the scene near the cave. Indeed, the connection with Cervantes’ Sancho explains not only the transformation of Toby’s coins during his argument with Angelica but also her unlikely labeling as Sancho at the end of the film. Toby’s gold turns to base metal because it cannot be truly spent—its enchantment brings about narrative connections and crossovers, not commodification. His tossing of coins to Angelica is an aggressive act meant to shut down communication and the co-creation of narrative with her. Her response is to throw a knife at him.  

This scene is a reckoning for Toby and the consequences of his art, but also an acknowledgment that the artist has become subservient to his own creation. Two characters from his student film determine his story in a way he would never have expected. Angelica refers to him as an “enchanter” in the earlier scene by the cave, arousing Javier’s suspicions of Toby’s status as the evil magician who supposedly torments Don Quixote. To some extent, the filmmaker as a conjuror suits the role of this mimetic art. Toby’s “mesmerizing” quality, Angelica suggests, has done more than create a film, altering the course of her real life as well. Being targeted by two cast members of his student film about his use of “enchantment” shows him in a vulnerable position that becomes even more imperiled as the narrative plants itself in Alexei’s castle. Toby is simply another guest at Alexei’s carnivalesque performance of wealth, which is symbolically reinforced by the devalued coinage in his argument with Angelica. The power of enchantment shifts from his artistry to the surrounding spectacle. It is his service to Javier and quest for Angelica that continue the educational process begun in the film school project.

Instead of an explicit return to the creation of film as art, Toby turns his life into art at the film’s end. Angelica escapes Alexei’s enchantments, having been discarded for another woman after Javier’s accidental death, and takes the responsibility for bringing Javier home for burial at Los Sueños. Toby accompanies her, and the film shows that Toby imagines three giants attacking him. After a harrowing sequence of Toby nearly being eaten by one of the giants, the film cuts back to the reality of what Angelica, as well as the audience, is seeing. Toby not only attacks windmills, in the replication of Javier and countless other Quixotes on stage and screen, but the very windmills in the commercial shoot that began the film. The prop windmill is shown to be in disrepair, and the pieces of the prop giants litter the surrounding space. Most importantly, there is no film equipment there, implying that the shoot is either on hiatus or has been scrapped. That Toby returns to what was initially a space of detachment and cynicism with such immediacy of experience is meant to be positive, but the film leaves us with an ambiguous message concerning the fate of the artist. Although Toby’s assumption of the mantle of Don Quixote breathes life into the literary creation, the price paid is his sanity.

Similarly, in Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil, Sam Lowry escapes into his imagination in the face of an unchanging, cruel world.7 The Man Who Killed Don Quixote departs from Brazil’s dystopian vision, but its solution to maintaining artistic integrity or individualism is escape—literally riding off into the sunset. Toby’s naming of Angelica as Sancho repeats Javier’s earlier configuration of Toby in that role. Just as Don Quixote is projected onto various characters, so is his squire. This ending also suggests, ironically, that turning away from the business of filmmaking unleashes true creativity, not a surprising message from a maverick filmmaker who finally brought his Quixote to the screen in spite of the movie-making machine.8 The ending of the film asks us to consider whether Angelica holds the true power of artistic creation. Geographically, she comes from the village of “dreams,” Los Sueños, but instead of serving as mere muse or bit player, Angelica drives the narrative back homeward as Toby’s squire, possibly a future Quixote figure herself given Toby’s own progression, where the words of Wasserman’s Man of La Mancha—“to dream the impossible dream”—could very well ring from her mouth.

The proliferation of Quixotes within the film mimics the many different quixotic texts that fed into Gilliam’s film throughout its production history. The power and plasticity of the Quixote mythos—Leitch’s “universal cultural currency” (123)—as well as Gilliam’s flexible definition of translation, was readily apparent in Edinburgh in 2016, when Gilliam chose a quotation he attributed to Don Quixote as the basis of a public art project: “I shall tear up trees with my bare teeth! I shall crush mountains with my fists! I shall go crazy - for love!” appeared in neon lights in the Scottish city. According to Alice Carr, Communications and Administration Officer, Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust, “This quotation comes from a translation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote by Gilliam and Tony Grisoni, who co-wrote the screenplay for the unfinished film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote based on Cervantes’ original story. Terry Gilliam said: ‘I chose that quote because it represents the heart of my 25-year cinematic quest, which I am still on, to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.’”9 Significantly, this quotation is a translation only in the loosest sense. Gilliam’s earlier quotation of Man of La Mancha in He Dreams of Giants, inserted into the text of Cervantes, complements this public incorporation of his screenplay into Cervantes’ canon. The experience of those encountering the Edinburgh sign as Cervantes’ words resembles the experience of knowing Don Quixote through Man of La Mancha. The Edinburgh quotation occurs in the film during a scene parallel to that of Don Quixote in Book One, Chapter Twenty-Five, in which the knight plans to imitate the penance of his chivalric models.

In Cervantes’ text, the closest language to Gilliam’s adapted quotation appears when Don Quixote explains the necessity of having Sancho as a witness to his penance: “Now I have to tear my clothes, toss aside my armor, and hit my head against these rocks, along with other things of that nature, all of which will astonish you” (197). In the context of the screenplay, Javier shouts the “I shall go crazy - for love!” quotation as he scourges himself violently, drawing copious amounts of blood. This scene links his injury with Angelica’s back bruises, though his wounds differ in their self-inflicted nature and level of gore. In Cervantes’ book, Don Quixote’s self-harming penance is only talked about—never implemented.  Even when Sancho leaves Don Quixote to deliver the knight’s letter to Dulcinea, the text does not imply a level of self-inflicted violence that would result in a blood-soaked shirt. The humor of this episode derives from his misguided imitation of the knights of romance—even indecision about whom to imitate—as well as the ease with which the narrative thread pulls him from the work of penance. In the novel, this scene also reveals the identity of Dulcinea to Sancho. Gilliam’s revision and addition shifts the focus of Don Quixote’s claims as well, describing the strength and size of giants who can destroy trees and rocks, not just hit their head against them. As a reflection of Gilliam’s directorial practice and approach to adaptation, his screenplay quotation epitomizes his larger-than-life, comically exaggerated scale, a man who molds myths and creates new ones.