By Richard Horgan, FilmStew.com

How does a 74-year-old directing an 86-year-old in a big screen version of a literary classic that is over 400 years old sound? It hasn’t happened yet, but if Spanish actor-director Paul Naschy (a.k.a. Jacinto Molina) and British star Christopher Lee have their way, a feature film version of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote will roll before one or both of them rides off to the big windmill in the sky.

The project has been rumored, discussed and debated by Lee fans for a number of years now, stoked by the occasional tantalizing sound byte from an actor who wrote in his great 2004 autobiography that he regretted not having played the part and that it was now too late. But lo and behold, yesterday at the Burda Live media event in Offenburg, Germany, Lee mentioned that though he has yet to see a script for the Naschy project, he would welcome the opportunity to play the man of La Mancha.

Lee would certainly be the oldest actor to ever portray Quixote on film or TV, as compared to the likes of John Lithgow, Rex Harrison, Peter O’Toole, Lee J. Cobb and Boris Karloff. Back in 2000, Terry Gilliam had 70-year-old French character actor Jean Rochefort playing the part in The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, before that film was undone by a series of freakish circumstances and never completed. (For those who have not seen Lost in La Mancha, a 2002 documentary about the Gilliam debacle narrated by Jeff Bridges, I recommend you add it to your Netflix queue now.)

The tentative title of Naschy’s Cervantes flavored opus is Mi Perro Aquiles and regardless of whether it ever gets made and-or whether Naschy directs or simply co-stars, you have to tip your hat to both the Spaniard and the Brit. The former just completed work as an actor on the H.P. Lovecraft mystery La Herencia Valdemar and begins work this month on a stop-motion animated feature titled The Apostle, while the latter has four films coming out in 2009 including the co-lead alongside Colin Farrell in Triage. Not bad for a couple of cinematic geezers.

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