Masters of disaster: creative and life partners Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton talk about Lost in La Mancha, their fab documentary about a film gone horribly wrong. (film).

If your significant other is also your filmmaking partner, how do you separate labor and love? It's tricky, say Louis Pepe and Keith Fulton, whose feature-length documentary Lost in La Mancha--about director Terry Gilliam's unraveling attempt to make his film The Man Who Killed Don Quixote--opens January 31 in Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco.

"You can't go home and complain about the jerk you work with when the jerk you work with is waiting at home," laughs Pepe, 36, who met Fulton, 37, when they were graduate students at Temple University in Philadelphia. "On this project we moved our editing room out of the house and hired an editor, so it made a clearer separation between work and home."

"That way, we could be a united front complaining about what the editor was doing," Fulton smiles.

Residents of Los Angeles's Silver Lake neighborhood, the two often finish each other's sentences and have worked together almost from the moment they met in 1990, when Temple's film department organized students into collaborative groups. Fulton was openly gay; Pepe wasn't. "I pretty much chased Lou from day one," admits Fulton. Within a year and a half he caught him, and last March they celebrated 10 years together.

Their first career break came when Gilliam, renowned for his Monty Python animations and for directing such iconoclastic films as Brazil and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, came to Philadelphia in 1995 to shoot the Bruce Willis-Brad Pitt-Madeleine Stowe starrer, Twelve Monkeys. Gilliam wanted a local filmmaker to produce a "making of" documentary, and the pair from Temple won the plum opportunity. The resulting doc, The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys--a name inspired by the cold day when Willis waited naked and shivering while the perfectionistic Gilliam obsessed about a hamster in a scene--was well-received at festivals and distributed on the Twelve Monkeys DVD. Thus established, Pepe and Fulton relocated to Los Angeles and began shooting offbeat behind-the-scenes footage for such films as Three Kings, Ghost World, and Insomnia.

Gilliam offered them a second chance to follow him around in 2000, this time while he was in preproduction for his decade-spanning Quixote project, starring French actor Jean Rochefort as the impossible dreamer and Johnny Depp as a time-travelling ad exec whom Quixote mistakes for his sidekick, Sancho Panza. Pepe and Fulton captured Gilliam deciding on everything from costumes to casting while in preproduction for two months in Madrid. But when shooting began, calamity quickly intervened: Rochefort took ill, a flash flood damaged sets and equipment (and nearly swept away Pepe and Fulton's car), and the production shut down after only six days. Like Quixote, Gilliam suddenly seemed a man tilting at windmills.

Even in his misery, Gilliam encouraged Pepe and Fulton to finish their project. "Someone has to get a film out of it, and it doesn't look like it's going to be me," he said. Lost in La Mancha has thus become a reliquary in addition to being a well-received film at festivals, holding the shards of Gilliam's vision along with the documentarians' cleverly added animations and observations.

Unless you count the hunk value of a Pitt or a Depp or stretch to find a homoerotic subtext between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Fulton and Pepe's films haven't yet dealt with gay subjects. In the future, however, they hope to produce narrative films with either gay characters or gay themes. While this interview marks their formal coming-out in the media, they haven't hidden their partnership in the past--and perhaps it's a mark of gay progress that no one has cared one way or the other. Lou particularly recalls an interview about The Hamster Factor in which Philadelphia journalist Carrie Rickey asked him, "So, are you in love with Madeleine Stowe or what?"

"Carrie, we're gay," Pepe answered.

Without missing a beat, Rickey responded, "So, are you in love with Brad Pitt, or what?"

Kort is the author of Soul Picnic: The Music and Passion of Laura Nyro.