Terry Gilliam Pushes Paramount to Greenlight ‘The Defective Detective’ as His “Final Film”: “I Want to Direct It Before I Die”

Now that his “Carnival at the End of Days” has fallen apart, in rather epic fashion, with shady Italian financiers backing out of the project, Terry Gilliam is now setting his sights on another project which he plans to convince Paramount to greenlight.

Yes, the return of "The Defective Detective", a project Gilliam has been trying to make since the early '90s. The fantastical noir follows a detective who enters a surreal dream world through the imagination of a young girl — pure Gilliam territory.

The script has long been stuck at Paramount, but Gilliam, during a new interview at the Sitges festival, says that he's now trying to ressuscitate "The Defective Detective,” adding that he's now more interested in making this than ‘Carnival.’

I'm now more interested in a script I wrote thirty years ago for Paramount. There are new people at the studio now, and I have a new agent in Hollywood, and I'm trying to move the project forward […] I’d like to direct it before I die. It's called “The Defective Detective” and it should be my last film.

This shift may come as a relief, given Gilliam’s persistence, for almost seven years, to make ‘Carnival,’ but can he actually convince Paramount to make this thing?

“The Defective Detective” has had a storied development history, with names like Nick Nolte, Nicolas Cage, and Bruce Willis attached at various points. Gilliam even said post-’Zero Theorem’ that he’d like to try it out again with Matt Damon in the lead.

Script drafts from the mid-'90s, some of which have made the rounds among fans, reveal a rich, visually ambitious fantasy world. The catch? With the modest budgets Gilliam typically secures these days, pulling it off seems like a long shot.

The last film that Gilliam, 84, directed was 2018’s “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,” a film he had been trying to make for more than two decades. It came and went without much excitement, although I thought it was his best film since 1998’s “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

I really hate to say this, but given the current state of the film industry, where original, high-concept projects are increasingly rare, especially from aging auteurs who require sizable budgets, it’s becoming more and more likely that Gilliam has directed his final film with ‘Quixote.’ As much as he remains creatively restless, the system no longer seems built to support someone like him.

I don’t really think Gilliam has been particularly successful since “Fear and Loathing,” with minor works such as “Tideland,” “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus,” “The Brothers Grimm,” and “Zero Theorem” being major disappointments, but I still believe he has a great film left in him … if only he could get it greenlit.