Impossible dream? Film archives join forces to finish Don Quixote film started by Orson Welles

More than 70 years after he shot the first few frames, Orson Welles’s lifelong project to put Don Quixote on the big screen could finally be completed thanks to a consortium of European film archivists.

- Stephen Burgen

Oja Kodar, the American filmmaker’s partner and collaborator, has given her blessing to the project led by archives in France, Spain and Italy, along with the Munich film museum, to produce a coherent film out of 30 hours of footage scattered among them.

Welles’s reworking of the classic novel by Miguel de Cervantes began in 1957 as a film for television backed by Frank Sinatra, but the scheme fell through. After that, Welles worked on it almost to the day he died in 1985, shooting scenes in Mexico, Italy and Spain whenever he could find a backer.

The team tasked with assembling the film - led by Esteve Riambau, a Welles authority and former head of the Catalan film archive - have their work cut out. To begin with, the Cineteca Nazionale in Rome must digitise 50,000 metres (164,000ft) of negatives to add to the 50,000 metres of 16mm and 35mm film held by Spain and the 80 minutes of 35mm footage kept in France.

“We don’t have a complete script, but enough to reconstruct it,” Riambau said. “Half the material is in the form of a negative in Rome which has to be printed before we can see it.”