Don Quixote is an unfinished film project produced, written and directed by Orson Welles. Principal photography was between 1957 and 1969; while test footage was filmed as early as 1955, second-unit photography was done as late as 1972, and Welles was working on the film on and off until his death in 1985.
Don Quixote was initially conceived in 1955 as a 30-minute film for CBS entitled Don Quixote Passes By. Rather than offer a literal adaptation of the Miguel de Cervantes novel, Welles opted to bring the characters of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza into the modern age as living anachronisms. Welles explained his idea in an interview, stating: "My Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are exactly and traditionally drawn from Cervantes, but are nonetheless contemporary." Welles later elaborated to Peter Bogdanovich, "What interests me is the idea of these dated old virtues. And why they still seem to speak to us when, by all logic, they're so hopelessly irrelevant. That's why I've been obsessed for so long with Don Quixote...[The character] can't ever be contemporary - that's really the idea. He never was. But he's alive somehow, and he's riding through Spain even now...The anachronism of Don
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