Craziest project in years: Johnny Depp will play Satan with one of the best director of films of his career

Craziest project in years: Johnny Depp will play Satan with one of the best director of films of his career – Terry Gilliam and Johnny Depp would reunite after their failed project adapting Don Quixote.

By Megan Sauer

Every time Terry Gilliam wants to start a project, problems accumulate. Starting with financing. It’s not something that happens only to him, of course, but bad luck seems to have struck especially the former member of Monty Python. We all remember the odyssey suffered to film ‘The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’, and to make matters worse it was a failure at the box office. Faced with the adversities that prevent his work, Gilliam has flirted with retiring, but before that he is trying to put together what could be his last cinematic chapter: A biblical film with Johnny Depp playing Satan.

Gilliam has shared the synopsis of ‘Carnival at the End of Days’, which is how the project is titled, as follows: “ God annihilates humanity, and the only character who wants to save them is Satan. And Johnny Depp plays Satan.”

The film is co-written by an unknown 33-year-old screenwriter, “because as you get older, the world becomes stranger to you,” Gilliam explains. The story is as crazy as you would expect from the creator of ’12 Monkeys’ and ‘Brazil’.

“This is a plain story as God is annihilating the humanity which is ruining a beautiful garden on Earth.” Gilliam said.
“There is only one character who is trying to save humanity and that is Satan, because without humanity he would lose his job, and he is an eternal character and living without a job is terrible. He then finds some young people and tries to convince God that these young people are the new Adam and Eve. It’s a comedy”.

Although the film is still in an early stage, Gilliam is confident. Which doesn’t mean he joked about asking for Elon Musk’s phone number at the Lumière Film Festival in October, in case he crashed. In a recent interview in France, Gilliam revealed that the budget for ‘The Carnival at the End of Days’ would be around $30 million.

The film would be the second collaboration between Depp and Gilliam after ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’ , since the participation of the actor from the ‘ Pirates of the Caribbean ‘ saga as Don Quixote of La Mancha in Gilliam’s cursed project about the ‘ingenious hidalgo’ was twisted by a series of misfortunes that can be remembered in the magnificent documentary ‘Lost in La Mancha’, available on Filmin. Gilliam’s first attempt to adapt Don Quixote in 2000, with Depp as Sancho Panza and Jean Rochefort as Don Quixote, was a disaster that ended up being canceled amid production chaos, weather conditions and lack of financing.