Changing Concept, and Unfinished Work
Although principal photography ended after Reiguera’s passing, Welles never brought forth a completed version of the film. As the years passed, he insisted that he was keen to complete the film, but it is clear that the concept changed several times. Welles stressed that unlike some of his other films, he was under no deadlines and regarded the film as "My own personal project, to be completed in my own time, as one might with a novel", since he was not contracted to any studio and had privately financed the picture himself.
At one point in the 1960s, Welles planned to end his version by having Don Quixote and Sancho Panza surviving an atomic cataclysm, but the sequence was never shot. As Welles deemed that principal photography was complete by 1969, it is likely that by this stage he had changed his conception of the ending.
In 1972, Welles dispatched his cinematographer Gary Graver to Seville, to shoot the Holy Week procession and some inserts of windmills for the film - although this footage has since been lost.
By the early 1980s, he was looking to complete the picture as an "essay film" in the style of his F for Fake and Filming Othello, using the footage of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza to compare the values of Cervantes' Spain, Franco's Spain (when the film was set), and modern-day Spain post-Franco. Welles himself explained, "I keep changing my approach, the subject takes hold of me and I grow dissatisfied with the old footage. I once had a finished version where the Don and Sancho go to the Moon, but then went to the Moon, which ruined it, so I scrapped ten reels . Now I am going to make it a film essay about the pollution of old Spain. But it's personal to me." However, he never filmed any of the footage necessary for this later variation.
One possible explanation for the film's lack of completion was offered by Welles' comments to his friend and colleague Dominique Antoine - he told her that he could only complete Don Quixote if he one day decided not to return to Spain, since every fresh visit gave him a new perspective, with new concepts for the film. At the time of his death, he was still discussing doing more filming for Don Quixote, and had produced over 1,000 pages of script for the project.
The endless delay in completing the project spurred the filmmaker to consider calling the project When Are You Going to Finish Don Quixote?, referring to the question he was tired of hearing. (It is unclear whether or not Welles was joking about this.) Up until his death in 1985, Welles was still publicly talking about bringing the unfinished work to completion.
In May 1986, the first public exhibition of the Don Quixote footage was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. The footage consisted of 45 minutes of scenes and outtakes from the film, assembled by the archivists from the Cinémathèque Française and supervised by the director Costa-Gavras.
Read more about this topic: Don Quixote (unfinished Film)
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