Terry Gilliam is preparing a second attempt at adapting Don Quixote after his first ended in one of cinema's epic fiascos.

The director has started work on a new script in the past few weeks and expects to begin filming later this year.

He will hope that lightning does not strike twice — or, more specifically, that the set is not washed away in a flash flood, that the dialogue is not continually drowned out by Nato jets and that his leading man is not struck down with a prostate infection and a double hernia, all of which happened last time round.

Gilliam has been trying to film Cervantes's 1605 novel about a threadbare and deluded knight since 1990.

The mess that his first attempt degenerated into was memorably captured on film in the acclaimed documentary Lost in La Mancha in 2002.

It included tantalising glimpses of The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, the film that Gilliam now believes he can revive, almost certainly with Johnny Depp once again playing a marketing executive who travels back in time and becomes Quixote's faithful sidekick Sancho Panza.

Jean Rochefort, the French actor originally cast as Quixote only to fall ill at the worst possible moment, is not expected to return.

After a gruelling legal battle and years of speculation that have seen everyone from Gérard Depardieu to Billy Conolly linked with the title role, the film is now a live concern again.

Speaking to Empire magazine this month Gilliam said: “Tony [Grisoni, his writing partner] and I have started rewriting Don Quixote just this last week. I re-read the greatest script ever written and realise we gotta get rewriting!”

He was vague on details, saying only that he had “some very different ideas” for the film but had not lost any of his enthusiasm for the project over the years. “I'm starting to think I was lucky, because maybe the film will be better. It will have matured a bit longer.”

He is not the first director to fall prey to the Quixote obsession. Orson Welles started work on his version in 1957 and persevered long after the actor playing his knight had died, taking on well-paid acting and directing projects with a view to financing the envisioned masterpiece.

It remained hopelessly incomplete when Welles died in 1985.

In Lost in La Mancha, Gilliam pondered this apparent jinx, saying: “All versions of Quixote have always been plagued by bad things. It's kind of like the Scottish play.”

Gilliam made his name as the animator for Monty Python, later co-directing Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Meaning of Life. In the 1980s and 1990s he established his director's reputation with Time Bandits, Brazil, The Fisher King and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

His latest film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, was disrupted by the death of Heath Ledger but he finished it with Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law. If that is a box-office success, the prospects for Quixote may look bright after all.

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