The 1996 remake of The Island of Dr. Moreau is largely forgotten, its greatest impact being a “South Park” character modeled after Brando’s Moreau who creates monkeys with multiple asses. 18 years later, the true story of what went wrong with that movie is being told. The documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau screened at Fantastic Fest, with Stanley himself in attendance. Later, the Austin comedy troupe Master Pancake presented The Island of Dr. Moreau with their mocking commentary.
Lost Soul chronicles how Stanley’s original ideas got warped when the likes of Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer got involved, and Stanley was ultimately replaced with John Frankenheimer. Further shenanigans ensued. Stanley would sneak back onto the set as an extra in full animal mutant mask, a PA got bit by a poisonous spider and Brando demanded dialogue, wardrobe and casting changes. We got an interview with Stanley to expand upon his experience on Dr. Moreau, which should only whet your appetite for Lost Soul.
CraveOnline: You might like this. Back in 1996, I would call the movie The Island of Dr. Moron. I thought I was pretty clever back then.
Richard Stanley: That’s kind of appropriate to the Frankenheimer film.
Would you compare the story of your attempt to make The Island of Dr. Moreau to Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse?
Only tangentially. Obviously on Apocalypse Now, they ended up with a film which is a solid gold masterpiece whereas the Frankenheimer movie is kind of a risible footnote to genre history.
In a way, do you feel like you dodged a bullet considering how much worse the production got after you left?
I guess to some extent I did. My cardinal mistake was probably not to have quit earlier. Plainly the point to have gotten out of the game was probably right at the beginning when they were thinking about replacing me with Roman Polanski, at which stage there was still a chance the movie might have been good. I could have stayed on as the screenwriter, so I guess my desire to hang onto the writer/director hyphenate job at all costs was really what brought me down.
Would there be a whole movie’s worth of Val Kilmer stories?
There’s probably a bunch more. There’s at least a whole movie again of other terrible things that happened in the movie which [director] David [Gregory] didn’t get around to or nobody mentioned in different interviews. It’s certainly still only the tip of the iceberg in terms of some of the actual insanity that happened on the set.
So it won’t ruin the film for any of our readers. What are some other stories that could give them a taste of what the movie is about?
Frankenheimer had no interest in the beast people, which he just saw as monsters or extras. He was really just concerned with trying to get Val and Marlon out of the trailer and dealing with the human actors. For me, the beast people were potentially the most interesting characters in the movie, but Frankenheimer delegated all of them to another director.
He decided he didn’t have time to direct the beast people, so he put Peter Elliott, the animal behaviorist, in charge of directing all the creatures, the beast folks. Peter Elliott was the guy from Gorillas in the Mist and Congo who had been brought on as an animal movement expert. They basically gave him a bigger role as being the creature director, the problem being that Peter was already cast as the monkey man. New Line thought the monkey man was potentially racist. Planet of the Apes was not around at that point in time and [they] didn’t like the idea of him being a chimpanzee or gorilla. So the monkey man was redesigned as a baboon man. Baboons have snouts, so then Peter Elliott was wearing an animatronic snout which is a kind of metal muzzle with teeth and the whole thing strapped to his face, which was a huge application.
Then of course, once the thing was in place and fastened to his face, there was almost no way that anyone could hear anything that he said. So every single day he would attempt to try and direct the beast people. We’d come on set and this little baboon with a megaphone would be there trying to tell us what to do, like, “Mmmphhhh rhhhh.” You literally could not understand a word that came out of his mouth and the more he tried to direct us, the more incoherent he became and the more angry he got. He’d kick around screaming incoherently almost every day and we basically just laughed at him.
These kind of disasters of planning where all the direction is coming down to this capering ape that just wasn’t making sense was typical of the whole production. After about a week, Peter’s entire face swelled up and he got two black eyes just from trying to scream into that muzzle every day.
You had Brando on your side in the beginning. Did he turn out not to be much of an ally?
At that point in time, it just didn’t make any kind of sense from the point of view that Brando’s problems were so much bigger than my own. Not mentioned in the documentary is also Christian Brando shooting Cheyenne’s boyfriend, the murder at Mulholland Drive and Christian going to jail. With one son being convicted of murder and the daughter committing suicide, his problems were so extreme that my issues with the movie seemed relatively trivial. I didn’t even call him when the problems broke out because it felt kind of churlish of me to trouble him under the circumstances.
Did the PA with the spider bite get better?
Yeah, eventually she did, quite by accident. There was no cure for it. It kept semi-healing up and then more bubbles and blister would appear on her skin and her skin would start to rot itself off again. She was, at that point, in a state of complete panic. It wasn’t helped by the fact that day one, in a state of panic, she also crashed the only hire vehicle we had access to. She was pretty much useless to the production from that point onwards, but about three or four months later, she ended up in a hot spring in far north Queensland with a very high sulfur content in the water. Incredibly enough, after all the different doctors and people had jabbed her and different things, the water in the hot spring managed to do the trick and magically reversed the Galloping Gangrene.
When you were bought out of the film, did they make you sign an NDA?
Yeah, I basically at the time had to agree not to talk to any of the cast members, not to come on set, not to talk anymore to Fairuza [Balk] who was my then girlfriend. Also not to ever speak to the press.
Did that have an expiration date, or is this documentary in violation?
I’d imagine to some extent it’s in violation of that agreement, but at the same time New Line themselves have violated the agreement a couple of times. Notably, Mike De Luca gave an interview to Fangoria magazine that completely blew the gaff in advance.
I’d imagine at this point they don’t care anymore. It becomes interesting history.
It looks like Bob Shaye is kind of on the side of the documentary on some weird level.
You said at the screening that this documentary is 2/3’s of the story. What is the other 1/3?
That’d be too much to go into, like the aforementioned story of Peter Elliott, the animal behaviorist, thus being directed by a gibbering baboon with a megaphone. There were just so many crazy things that happened along the way that there’s not quite time or room to fit into the movie. Many of the darker moments, certainly from my perspective the game plan of what we were actually trying to do remains very obscure in David’s film. We hear from different producers saying they don’t know what I was doing, what I was doing in the house or whether I knew what was going on, or whether my directions were getting through to the rest of the crew. So for me, there’s not much of a sense of what I was actually attempting to do during that time period.
Well, we see your concept art which gives us a sense of a classier direction you might have been going in.
Yeah, for instance, on the last days when I was in charge on the island, we were shooting on board the freighter. The last scenes are all at sea. We had to shoot the freighter scenes because basically A, the sets weren’t ready and B, we didn’t have Brando. Then once we started on the freighter scene we ran into two problems.
The very first thing that happens in the freighter scene is the castaway rescued from the dingy wakes up hearing the slurred voice reading from a reading readiness primer off screen. He tries to get a handle on where he is, gets out of the cabin and goes down the companionway towards the sound of the voice and we see that the boat is full of wild animals which are all in cages. The ship’s shipping animals to the island. At the far end of the aisle of cages, there’s a puma in the cage and there’s this misshapen figure who is reading his Shakespeare primer to the puma. The castaway comes up to try and ask the guy what’s going on. The figure turns around and we see that he’s not really human, at which point Montgomery and the other humans appear behind him.
Just this business of going down the companionway past all the wild animals with the character reading from the reading readiness primer was already a huge problem. This is why Val was going, “How come this other guy’s got all this dialogue in the scene that’s not me? I should be the one reading Shakespeare” or “What do we need these other animals or this other person for?” So just trying to do this very simple business of waking up in the cabin and moving down the aisle for the puma cage was the cause of the initial spat with Val immediately on day one. Val had been busted down to playing the support part, the Montgomery role, because he wanted 40% fewer shooting days. But the moment he had the support role, he immediately wanted to try and make it back into the lead role by taking the dialogue and the scenes from all the other actors, which was a huge problem.
In the course of that, that’s when the hurricane started blowing up. By about midday it was pretty much horizontal rain. The freighter was lurching up and down the waves. We were also in an incredibly dangerous part of the world which was off Cape Tribulation in far north Queensland off Endeavour Reef where Captain Cook’s ship ran aground. It’s called the Endeavour Reef because the Endeavour was Captain Cook’s ship. In the course of discovering Australia he was wrecked in Cape Tribulation. So it’s not a great place to be stuck on a freighter in a hurricane with a puma, an orangutan, a hyena and all those other things.
In your version, does Dr. Moreau become a more significant character than he is in the Frankenheimer movie?
I would certainly hope so. I don’t think he has much dialogue left in the Frankenheimer movie as far as I can tell. I’ve never seen the whole Frankenheimer movie. Admittedly last night, I put my head around the door at the beginning and the end. That was really the first time I’ve ever even seen those sequences.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Best Episode Ever and The Shelf Space Awards. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
