Original subtitles

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Most of the projects I initially worked on were very, very

strange movies, and they couldn't really hang on any kind of peg.

But then I discovered that certain things in my work scared them.

If I talked about the supernatural or something, or there

was a murder or something in the story, this would scare people.

Well, they might not be relevant to it, or they might

be misinterpreting it, and I was able to pick up on that.

♪

I first heard of Richard Stanley in the early 90s when hardware was

coming out at the time We were used to horror film directors having

beards and looking like your dad And then here was this sort of young

hot guy He had the long hair and very mysterious Look and the and the

wide-brimmed hat that became associated with him over the years

making this brand new film That was unlike a lot of the films that

had been leading up to it in the 80s And I was very struck by Richard

Stanley's vision It was kind of different from anything else that had

been going on His use of color and light and music and really

creating this unique dystopian vision for his story I still think

it's one of the most important genre films of the 90s, but woven

throughout it was this sort of esoteric Witchiness which is sort of a

trademark of Richard Stanley's works and his life in general Richard

Stanley was casting this spell on you when you watched his film I was

brought up by a strong mother who was involved in witchcraft and

anthropology and stuff I stayed on the road the whole time But she

was a very good mother in that she was very unstable And gave me a

kind of disastrous upbringing that was largely responsible for what I

am today It was a huge hit I mean in genre terms it was definitely a

huge hit and it was definitely something where this guy was the next

big thing You know, this is somebody you wanted to see what he was

gonna do next And it was largely because of the success of hardware

that Miramax worked with him on Dust Devil Miramax's view of Richard?

Good, good, good question.

I think they They like Richard in a

way that They like what he

is with hardware After Dust Devil Richard gets the opportunity

to direct The Island of Dr. Moreau We just thought that Richard

Stanley doing Island of Dr. Moreau was one of the most exciting

projects we'd heard of in a while Well, here was someone who had

worked on the independent side, but now he was getting the

backing of a studio This is gonna be a huge project and this is

gonna propel Richard Stanley into the

superstardom that he deserves as an auteur

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Okay, well here we have a mound of rather tatty

surviving artworks from Dr. Moreau that give some

brief glimpse into the workhouse of filthy creation.

A lot of the beast people are going to be

wearing human masks, just the same as human

beings in, I guess, pagan tribes and faiths wear animal masks.

We wanted the beast people to be wearing human masks.

The sloth people, although they weren't very bright, I

originally wanted them to be stop motion or something like that.

I wanted a couple of stop motion creatures in there.

I think it happens in a rather different way in the Frankenheimer movie.

One of those shots you just would never

have gotten in the finished New Light version.

Mutant baby sucks a mutant nipple.

Happily.

I'd first come across the book, in fact the same copy I've

got here, which is a first edition in my father's bookshelf.

When I was very small, four or five, I remember being drawn

to it, probably because it was bright red and it's got some

interesting plates in it, and being warned off by my parents

who consistently told me that it was too scary, which of

course drew me to it very strongly and I read it as fast as I could.

It's a book about humanity, about man and nature, man and

God, civilisation, and essentially what it means to be human.

It's a vast, complex book, written right at the

height of the British Empire, and I think

spurred by Darwin's theory on the origin of the species.

In the book, Moreau has been hounded out of

conventional society in London by

anti-vivisectionists who have been obviously appalled by what he's doing.

A flayed dog escapes from his laboratory in

London, which causes a controversy in the newspapers.

The Moreau horrors, he's forced to try and find a

place in the world where he's able to work in

isolation without conventional society looking over his shoulder.

To a large extent, he's a metaphor for God, he's the creator being.

He created the beast people, they're not

experiments, they're things which have never existed before.

In a curious footnote, Wells was a close friend at that

point in time of Joseph Conrad, and about one year later,

Conrad turned in a book called Heart of Darkness, which

caused Wells and Conrad to fall out bitterly, as Wells

claimed that Conrad was essentially ripping off Island of

Dr. Moreau, and that the character of

Kurtz in Heart of Darkness was based on Moreau.

Certainly, structurally, there's similarities between the two books.

The narrator spends the entire story journeying towards the

island in Island of Dr. Moreau, and eventually getting up to

finally addressing Moreau, and asking what it's all about, in

the same way that the narrator, Marlow, journeys upriver to find Kurtz.

Certainly with Heart of Darkness, the Kurtz character has

retreated from mankind, per se, and certainly civilization.

Conrad defended the accusations of plagiarism by claiming that,

in fact, he had based the character of Kurtz, not on Dr. Moreau,

but on the celebrated African traveller, Sir Henry Morton Stanley.

It's interesting, as far as Richard's concerned, that his

great-grandfather, Henry Morton Stanley, was considered to be

one of the main bases of Kurtz's character, and it seems certain

reports of Stanley did kind of give him this megalomaniac

texture, and it seemed that he was less

than gentle with the locals, shall we say.

♪

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The book was first adapted to the screen in 1932 by Earl C.

Kenton under the title Island of Lost Souls.

Wells was still alive at the time and was

bitterly disappointed by the film adaption.

He felt it was a terrible bastardisation

of his work and to some extent he's right.

Although Island of Lost Souls is probably the most effective screen adaptation.

Charles Lawton chooses to play Moreau as a

gloating sadist who spends much of the movie

twirling his moustachios and reclining on his chaise log.

It's a very memorable portrayal although very far

from the humane godlike figure envisaged by Wells.

It also compresses the narrative in a way

which I think every subsequent adaptation copied.

In that they're always only interested in the beast people

overthrowing Moreau and that's usually the end of the movie.

Whereas in the Wells book the beast people liberate

themselves just after the halfway mark of the book.

And things really become problematic once the

beast people try to run the island for themselves.

Wells knew that simply by giving control of the island

to the beast folk things could not possibly get any better.

Things would only backslide into anarchy and chaos.

After Island of Lost Souls there were a slew of illegitimate

adaptions such as Eddie Romero's Twilight People from the Philippines.

Test Tube Terror's half man half beast all

monster and Terror is a Man by Francis Lederer.

The next official adaption happened in 1977 and was directed

by Don Taylor and featured Burt Lancaster in the Moreau part.

But Lancaster actually did a pretty good job.

Unfortunately the movie's pretty ham-fisted.

I saw the Don Taylor version at my local cinema when I was a kid.

It has the distinction of being probably the first movie I

ever saw which angered me so much that I wanted my money back.

I was a big fan of the original and I was deeply disappointed.

Amongst other things I was confused by the fact

that there was a woman turning into a panther on

the poster of the movie which never happened in the film.

And I guess from that moment onwards the germ of the idea started

to gestate in my mind and I was determined to try and do it justice.

To try and adapt the story in a way that could actually work for screen.

♪

Shortly after Dust Devil, my second film, I

found myself washed up in London without a bean.

I'd never been paid the second half of my fee.

The film's rights were a complete mess.

To get it back and finish it, I had to basically

borrow resources and leverage pretty much

everything, so I was probably about 40 grand in the red.

Even then, I knew on the back of Dust Devil that I didn't

have the political clout to be able to really get Dr Moreau made.

I mean, after Dust Devil, I was finding it very hard just to get gigs.

He'd written a script, and we had a quick conversation on the

phone, and he, at that point, said, can we actually put together

some sort of basic image with a script cover to try and drum up the interest?

And we then thought, perhaps actually extending that further,

we'd recreate a couple of scenes from the imagined finished product.

I sincerely believed that if Wells was

alive now, he would write it differently.

There was no way that Wells now would set the story in 1895.

Plainly, the story would be set in the present.

It's not a story about the past, but it's about the near future.

The images, the first one we produced was

actually an image of Dr Moreau with a newborn creature.

One of the lamps actually looked like a sort of

halo around his head, so the whole point was to

almost play on the whole virgin and baby Jesus kind of image.

The dogmen are not entirely obeying his orders, because

we can see behind Moreau's back some of the dogmen are

actually licking the blood off the surgical instruments.

And way in the background of the tank, we see a big

three-eyed, intelligent, Cthulhuoid-type octopus thing.

There are going to be sea creatures as well.

From that, we decided that actually we'd produce a series of 12

images echoing the stations of the cross, which would begin with

this basic birth, birth of the baby Jesus, and then with a sort

of crucifixion scene at the end, which is actually Moreau's own death.

Moreau is originally conceived, actually, was nothing like Marlon Brando.

I think I originally talked to Jürgen Prochner about playing the part.

I wanted Moreau to be a little bit more of a new-ager.

In some of the early pictures, we see he's still got the long hair and beard.

I was making him into something of a composite of

Timothy Leary and John Lilly, the dolphin communication expert.

As important as the character of Dr Moreau were the beast people.

They were going to be civilized, at least more

so than we've seen in the previous Moreau versions.

They've decorated themselves, they've got piercings,

they've got some degree of beast person civilization.

There is no Cat Lady in the book.

The Panther Woman was added in the L.C.

Kenton movie in the process of making it

more Hollywood, and we in turn retained her.

In reality, Ayesa, our Cat Lady, is drawn from another novel.

We stole it from Outcast of the Islands, the Joseph Conrad novel.

We thought, how's this, this connection between Conrad and Wells,

borrowing characters from another Conrad story was vaguely within our remit.

I was determined on some level that I would provide that moment

that we were going to see the girl turn into a cat and be an animal.

She would run on all fours, she would become furry.

Underneath her, Jalaba is furry all over and has a tail.

The dog people take the opportunity while the master is

awake to chase her up the wall, drag her down, kill her.

Being civilized, they then proceed to not just eat

her, but to cook her and then serve her to the castaway.

When he realizes that what's happened in his

absence, he immediately shoots a couple of the dogmen.

The dogmen really love him.

Not only that, they've got very short memories because they're dogs,

so they don't really remember that they've killed and cooked the Cat

Lady to begin with, and they don't really understand why he's killing them.

We also rationalized that Montgomery would undoubtedly be

sleeping with the beast people if he's been on the island for decades.

I know in one version, we had the thought of the pig lady biting

Montgomery's dick off during the final party, which later in the

story, the beast people get into Montgomery's stash, so suddenly

we're dealing with humanized edibles of drugs, which is a very

appealing thought, and one starts wondering

how they would behave and what they would see.

These were to prove to be controversial

elements later in the development process.

Here we see the muscular satire character

cranking the handle to lower the lift cage.

All the way down the shaft, there's other

creatures living in the different layers of the complex.

We see them through the cage of the elevator, and they're peeking

out, and we notice that there's babies and fires burning down there.

Kiril, the bear man, reaches for a conch shell, a sort of Lord

of the Flies touch, and then picks up the conch shell and blows it.

Yes, there was going to be animal vision in

this movie, just like toad vision or droid vision.

Of course, we're going to see-of-view shots from the beast people.

I remember making phone calls until I ran out

of change from a phone booth in South London.

I remember it was close to Christmas and it was snowing and it was

close to a bus station, but somehow, just on the remains of my

dwindling change, I managed to basically get Ed Pressman, the Edward R.

Pressman Film Corporation, interested in Dr. Moreau.

Ed had produced a lot of fine movies, notably Badlands for

Terrence Malick, Conan the Barbarian for John Milius,

Desperate for Wolfgang Peterson, and Bad Lieutenant for Abel

Ferrara, so Ed had pretty good taste and was the right man to be the producer.

Island of Dr. Moreau came about by the initiative of Richard Stanley.

It was a wonderful script and he was a good filmmaker.

His agent at the time, Jenny Casarato,

represented the estate of Wells, HG Wells.

Right from the beginning, there was always that problem that I was

working on something I didn't own and I needed a big company to

pick it up because somebody had to actually negotiate with the

Wells estate and try and get hold of the rights, which were pretty confused.

Mike DeLuca was at New Line at the time

and liked it and we thought of

it as a modest budget sci-fi film that

would be done for $5-8 million.

Ed immediately wanted to Americanize the

script, which was something I was quite opposed to.

I felt that all of Wells' work is inherently British.

One of the real problems with the Wells material is that

Britain has never showed any interest really in adapting it.

In the end, Ed convinced me to allow them to do this, provided they

hired a screenwriter to work on it who I thought would do the work justice.

And so we ended up with Michael Herr, the writer of

Dispatches, the classic book about the Vietnam War,

which is probably one of the best books about war

ever written, who also provided the voiceover to Apocalypse Now.

It was a perfect choice for Moreau and brought

an awful lot to the Montgomery character, giving

him some of that hard-boiled, acid-drenched schtick.

He's the single greatest screenwriter

I've ever worked with and a very fine man.

I can't say hates is a strong word, but he

probably does hate Hollywood and hates the movie industry.

Whether or not he hates the human race in toto is a harder question.

♪

♪

As the company started with virtually nothing and as we

made our way in the business, we began to have as part

of our wherewithal, obviously, production and

acquisition financing that allowed us to buy films and to make films.

Bob Shea had created something that was very edgy.

It was all house party, Nightmare on Elm Street, Ninja Turtles.

It was drive-in, grindhouse, Saturday matinee type fare.

As artists and executives in a studio, they were

often maligned by the big boys as being, you know,

niche and crap, you know, Pink Flamingos and Freddy.

I mean, these movies make money, but they don't gain respect.

Mike DeLuca, who was president of our production

company, he was charged with the idea of going out and

putting together projects and then presenting them to

myself to decide whether we wanted to go ahead with it or not.

In the mid-'90s, Mike started to bring in directors who were

unknown at the time, like David Fincher, Paul Thomas Anderson.

You know, Mike really gave these guys their start.

I think New Line started to go through an identity crisis

because, you know, with all due respect, when you're used to

having Robert Englund in the commissary, metaphorically, and now

you've got Robert DeNiro and Dustin Hoffman with Wag the Dog,

there was this sort of euphoria that

now the minors are playing with the majors.

So suddenly they're remaking The Island of Dr.

Moreau, but they want to turn it into, like, an art film.

You know, I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about the project, frankly.

Mike DeLuca was more interested in

sort of, like, classic horror.

It all left me pretty cold.

Pressman had me go in and meet the New Line people

and wanted to get me on the picture as the producer.

And so we had, I think, basically just one meeting in my office.

I did meet Richard Stanley at that point too.

I didn't really know what to make of him and he showed up

in a hat in a white linen suit and said that's what he

was going to wear for the whole picture and never take it off.

I had no doubt going into him that Richard would be fine.

I thought he was very smart.

He's an odd character but I've worked

with many odd characters as directors.

I thought that Stanley was a somewhat unusual guy.

He almost got away with not doing

anything goofy and then he did do one thing goofy.

When my assistant came in and offered everybody

refreshments he said yes I would like a cup of coffee.

How do you take it?

And he said either three or four sugars and when I

heard that and so there's something going on here that

I don't think I completely understand but nobody takes

four sugars in a cup of coffee and walks out as a solid citizen.

He was like me an absolute stranger to LA.

Nothing in common with anyone here.

I mean I think I think that's really why we became friends.

Just instantly we had a good rapport.

You know I think when you're an artist and you have worked

for years with no budget and when finally you get to do it

the way that you've always known you can, you know to the

detail what you're going to do and how you're going to do it.

And the very first thing really came down to who was going to be

Dr. Moreau and Ed figured out a way of getting to Marlon Brando.

Someone had the idea of Brando

playing Dr. Moreau which changed

the whole character of the movie and increased the budget enormously.

We had just made a film with him where he was

already totally impossible so I was pretty

incensed with De Luca for choosing Marlon Brando as another film.

There was no particular reason to have him

and he was an incredible pain in the neck.

The very next thing I heard was that yes Brando was prepared to be Dr. Moreau.

The money was an escrow and that the film was

greenlit and was going to be directed by Roman

Polanski which came completely out of the left of field.

I hadn't seen that coming.

I responded by firing on all guns and demanding

that I have the right to at least one meeting

of Marlon Brando that I'd written the damn script.

Apparently I was very unhappy about this.

I was told by Mike De Luca the chappie from New Line just before

the meeting that Brando was going to really rake me over the coals.

I remember feeling a bit confused as to why

what Brando and everyone had it in for me for.

Certainly New Line couldn't wait to get rid of me.

Knowing that the odds were stacked against me I resorted to witchcraft.

At that point in time I was friendly with this warlock chappie.

It's in England.

Dr. Edward James Featherstone, commonly known as Skip.

So Skip had been shown to demonstrate his ability to fix things, to

do invisible mending before so I said my god Skip you've got to help me.

You've got to save my movie.

At the exact same time I went into the meeting on the other

side of the world Skip convened his coven, cut his arm, drew a

sigil and did some kind of routine to fix it and make it all right.

Simultaneously I was driven with the

big old limo that was part of the contract.

Brando's house was at the top of Mulholland on the left.

Joe Nicholson's house is on the right.

Brando's house was surrounded by a very dense

bamboo enclosure which screened the house from the road.

The bamboos were full of CCTV cameras and eventually

the gates slid open and I was admitted to the compound.

He had these trained dog padding around which were trained to

attack anything he pointed his laser pencil at because I have

fond memories of Brando drug pointing at things with his laser

pencil and getting the attack dogs to attack the little red dart.

New Line sent a lady named Ruth Vitale with me.

I stayed pretty quiet during the first part of the meeting.

Ruth was sweating and found it very stuffy in there.

Brando turned on the air conditioning.

She remarked at one point that if you turn that up any higher

I'll fall asleep and he kept doing it and after about 15 minutes

or so Ruth was fast asleep and at which point we began the conversation.

I'd done enough research to be able to engage him on,

I guess, environmental and scientific grounds and

then there's the whole weird Sir Henry Morton Stanley

connection which feeds back into the the character of Kurtz.

To begin with he was still pretty interested in Kurtz

so we were able to slide backwards into the gestations

of the character, the initial argument between Conrad

and Wells and he was extremely nice to me during the meeting.

I was never really sure why he took a shine to me the way he did.

It was very confusing for New Line because it was

not the outcome they've been expecting and it was

confusing for Ruth Vitale because she'd slept through it.

There's a very strong possibility that it may have been

voodoo or some kind of magical interference on Skip's

behalf but the next thing I knew Ron Polanski was out

and Brando was only going to do the movie if I was on board.

Brando's a big name but he's not big box-office so then

it was necessary to bring a box-office draw so we

immediately went after Bruce Willis for the role of a castaway.

Bruce was looking for something different to do at that point

in time, it was immediately pre Sixth Sense and really liked

the script and liked everyone else wanted to work with Brando.

One of those serendipity things I ran into James Woods in the

restaurant, got on well with James Woods, gave him the script.

Next thing you know James Woods was in for Montgomery.

We had pretty much the dream cast which was

Marlon Brando, Bruce Willis and James Woods.

We then set out to find the island.

After a lot of globe-trotting I ended up in far north

Queensland and I chose Cape Tribulation because there was a

huge triangular mountain volcano thing in the middle of it all

which I figured I could use to anchor together the geography of the island.

I found a way of selecting the different locations so the volcano

mountain was always vaguely in the background and matched it to

another atoll so that we could create the illusion that it was all one place.

Simultaneously a colossal makeup effects effort was going on

where we had the attention of all the kids in the Stan Winston studios.

I was one of the few if not the only

person in the studio who knew who Richard was.

You know I'd seen Hardware, I'd seen Dust Devil and you know I

was interested in his quirky little movies he was making and

he came in with these very psychedelic drawings of you know

animal people running around with machine guns and hospital

scrubs and everything and and very colorful and very like out

there and we had a team of folks that set out to design the characters.

Crash McCreary does these amazingly detailed

pencils and he did the Sayer of the Law, he did

Lomai, I did designs for Buffalo Man

and and the Pig Ladies.

Everybody chipped in and just bashed ideas

around until we until we settled on things.

♪

He was, you know, right off the bat, was showing me

the storyboards and the character designs from Stan

Winston, and he was so, so

excited and so passionate,

and it had been so many years in the making at that point.

We talked about the character, and he said, you know,

it's actually, I want to, you know, the story's like,

he is the, he is Brando's favorite, he is the master

dog, basically he's the only one that actually understands art.

He knows Shakespeare, he knows how to recite poems,

and I got really excited because I thought, God, you

know, it's like, this is actually the best part of the movie.

In the meantime, New Line, you know, tried

in different ways to contain the material.

I remember being called into an emergency meeting of which they really

were going to draw the line and try to get me to humanize the cat lady.

When Prendick initially seduces her, she's got six nipples and

her pubes kind of grow all over her thighs and up her chest and

stuff, and there's the celebrated moment where he's working his

way down from one nipple to the next and realizes along the way

that she's not human, which really upset them, really upset Ruth Vitale.

She said that it would upset menopausal women all over America.

We went through a couple of successive drafts with Waylon

Green, the writer of The Wild Bunch, at which point I could

justifiably say that even leaving myself out of the equation,

that the finished product was from the combined talents who

brought the world The Wild Bunch, Apocalypse Now, and The Time Machine.

It was a script we were extremely confident in, that

we thought would be some sort of milestone in the genre.

We shot some background footage that was going to work on

monitors, and we spent a day in a hospital doing bits and pieces.

There was a scene with Barbara Still, which was

filmed in Los Angeles, Barbara Still and A Ring of Time.

Just a very low-key day with a very small crew, and I

could just tell by the way that he was shooting what he

was shooting, how he was relating to the crew, that

once he had actors and a big crew, it might have some problems.

We all sort of said oh-oh to each other silently,

because we were all supportive of him and wanted him to do well.

I think Richard was in a rather squished hotel initially,

but when it was suggested that I go over to Los Angeles

and work with him in a hotel, I think they then decided

that they'd actually have to move into a slightly cheaper hotel.

So they said, as a savings, Richard, we'd

like to put you into the Oakwood Apartments.

It's a lot cheaper and you'll be able to cook.

Do you mind?

And he said, that's fine.

A small but telling problem was that I don't actually drive.

I'd been living in London for 20 years and was suddenly plonked

down in the city where there was no such thing as public transport.

This issue of trying to get from A to B continued throughout the production.

Meetings would happen without anyone telling me they were going on.

And in point of fact, I became increasingly paranoid,

thinking that I was being deliberately kept out of the meetings.

About two in the morning of that same day, I

got a call from Richard saying it's an emergency.

I have to move.

I can't stay in that place one minute longer.

And I said, where are you?

And he said, I'm in Hollywood.

I've walked from Burbank to Hollywood

and I don't know where to go or what to do.

And I said, where are you in Hollywood?

And he says, I don't know.

So I think that was when I said to myself, oh.

A number of things went wrong in the pre-production period

really the the beginning of the end the death knell was when

Bruce divorced Danny Decided for various complicated personal

legal reasons that he could not leave America for the next six months.

I then made another strategic error I

met Val Kilmer Val Kilmer

was a big star then and so the film all of a sudden became a 35

million dollar movie which at that time was like 70 million dollars today.

So it was a big movie which was

far Greater and its demands and

its ambition all of which worked Okay, until I was urgently

summoned from the island to a meeting with Val in Tokyo where

Val was for the Batman forever premiere Val was then at the

height of his powers surrounded by adoring Japanese fans

Behaving I thought very arrogantly indeed towards them Val had

decided that his life was too busy to

devote as long as we needed him for to to dr.

Moreau Val demanded 40% fewer shooting days I was told in

no uncertain terms that after the Bruce Willis debacle if

Val left the ship New line would probably close the project

down and would probably go back to the turnaround at this

stage I was already building the big house on the island

and was determined to go ahead I knew that we had to somehow solve this.

I had a very bad dream that night in the hotel in Tokyo I remember

wake one of those nights waking up and feeling that there was

Something in the room sitting on my chest And that sense of being

unable to scream or breathe and something banging on the door The

door seemed to be trembling and shivering and at the same time was

really being crushed or suffocated in the bed It was a very

unpleasant nightmare what they call them the old hag or nocturnal

sleep paralysis Richard came back and he seemed a bit Flustered but

he wouldn't tell me what he was flustered about But so I think he

been getting a bit of a hard time from Val Val calls up Mike DeLuca

says I want to talk to you and he said some breakfast for DeLuca at

the Bel Air Hotel Val is sitting there Val

says I'm very busy and I don't have a lot of time.

So don't talk to me Just listen and he goes on to say I know I

took this role, but I don't like the role anymore I then came up

with the idea of Talking Val into

Switching roles with the James

Woods character to no longer being the lead man, but playing the

part of the morose Apprentice or his sidekick instead which

automatically gave him 40% fewer shooting days It meant we had to

say goodbye to James Woods, which was very unfortunate We then

needed a new leading man and we ended up with an individual named

Rob Morrow Who was then hot from quiz show and

from a television show called Northern Exposure?

I was planning to take the summer off and I got a kind of

sudden call from my agent at the time Arnold Rifkin and There

were this movie that they were doing I was familiar with the

HGL story, you know And so as soon as they said it I was

intrigued, you know Next thing I know I

was flying down to Cairns to shoot the movie.

I was doing the budget with some Production people from new line

and when we got to the director section

as a joke half joke, I said

well, you know, we better put in the contingency of a million and a

half for another director because I don't think this is gonna work out.

I guess I thought that I could always Run to Brando for

backup if I got into trouble what I suggested and what they

agreed with is that we go down to Australia way far in

advance and just basically live there and let him settle in

and get used to the place and Wander around and not have a lot of pressure

♪

There was no television or radio or phones or anything.

It was just absolute pristine beauty.

I thought Richard's script was fantastic.

And he was this guy with long black hair, a white Panama hat, a

white linen suit, and I believe sand shoes, carrying a carpet bag.

That was all his luggage.

This is a guy who's coming to direct our film for months and months and months.

We knew as soon as we met the guy, hello,

we've got something different coming on here.

I know that when I was originally asked to go over to Cairns, part

of the whole idea, I think, was that it was felt that Richard was

feeling quite isolated and that within a storyboard process he'd

actually have somebody he knew quite well he could work with, which

would probably act as a sort of soul for the stresses he may have been under.

We then started going after the best people.

Hands down the worst audition that I'd

ever had, ever done, ever been involved in.

Had to walk around making stupid animal noises,

pigs, all that kind of stuff.

Said these stupid lines.

There was no kind of process as an actor that you can get your teeth into.

I rang my agent straightaway afterwards and said

don't ever send me for anything like that again.

That was shit.

This is not acting.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Then I got a phone call a couple of, about two weeks later

from the actual make-up, Stan Winston's make-up crew saying

we need you in tomorrow for a plaster cast and da, da, da, da, da.

And I got the part.

♪

♪

♪

Everyone in the cast was a peculiar shape or size, you know.

There were very tall people playing animals that were tall.

There were very short people playing animals that were short.

There was fat people, thin people.

The prosthetics then enhanced their particular physicalities.

The pig women had their real breasts out and then a sow,

three other pairs of breasts, prosthetically underneath their own.

There were some very bizarre looking creatures around.

We had the shortest man on earth, Nelson De La Rosa, who we came

across in a daytime TV show in San Domingo, dancing the majao majao.

A friend of ours was watching some Spanish talent show

and saw him and he had this little act that he would do.

He'd go on stage and dance.

So we saw him and we were like, wow, he

would be great to do a monster makeup on.

So we called up his agent and me and a friend of mine got to

go to Dominican Republic to life cast him, to body cast him.

Come to find out, he was like a huge

celebrity over there, like Michael Jackson celebrity.

And yeah, we just spent the day in our hotel room body casting

him and head casting him and he was so excited to do this movie.

But I think he was expecting to be like a main monster.

♪

♪

Richard was focusing on the creatures, he

was a great student of anthropology.

We had a dehumanizing process that we were working on, something

that we came up with a guy called Peter Elliott, who was the

animal behaviorist of Gorillas in the Mist and various other gorilla movies.

And we started a training program to train our

extras and our beast people to act like proper animals.

This went on for actually months before the movie was due to shoot.

I'd start by getting them to look at

footage and rehearsing them as the real animal.

On all fours, like the pigs being real pigs, the fact

that they're rutting and the sounds they make, and

getting to know them as much as possible about the real animal.

We'd have stuff like...

The most immediately visual one, I guess, is the guy playing the hyena.

If you look at their backbone, they've got that sort of pride and

evil thing, which gave him that sort of lovely hunchback, which gave

him that shape, and it gave him a nice

arc to the way he used his head.

I think they were initially a little apprehensive, but once

we started rehearsals, they threw themselves into it completely.

Also, we were working with the local

Aboriginal community and with the Etrobrian Islanders.

I wanted to make certain the locals didn't come to hate

us, so I wanted to make certain that we gave a lot of work

to the local community and appointed the buffalo man, a

guy called David Hudson, as the main go-between with the Aboriginal

♪

♪

very interested in who I was and Aboriginal language and the didgeridoo and

♪

general. You've got to understand where this bloke's coming from.

You know, he comes from London.

He's in now rainforest country.

He's on the Great Barrier Reef.

But we all got on very well, Richard and I.

He was very easy to work with.

His direction was precise.

He was definitely very passionate about the picture.

He showed me all the props and was like,

look at this, you know, this is my movie.

Isn't it cool? When people say he's crazy, I actually

experienced Richard as a really nice, warm-hearted

guy, like a kid that was so happy that his dream came true.

Like he was like a kid in a candy store.

He was great.

He was affable and he was very, he was clearly enthusiastic.

-He was young. -He was green.

He was so happy.

You know, he was just grinning ear to ear

and just like, oh, I can't wait to get started.

You know, it was really, that was the best part of that film, definitely.

I could see that he liked what I was

doing in the, in the, through the rehearsal.

And he, to me actually, it seemed that

he knew exactly what he wanted.

Like what kind of look he wanted for the movie.

He rented a house out in, in the suburbs of Cairns in North Queensland.

Fabulous house, like a tree house.

It was all wood with branches sprouting out and walkways going here.

Fantastic place.

But he would hardly ever come out of it.

He really wouldn't interact with us in the normal way you do in pre-production.

He would come on surveys and talk to people.

But as a leader, as a director, he really

didn't get involved and stayed in his house.

We'd have to drag him to look at locations and even meetings.

He wouldn't, he wouldn't come to meetings.

And Tim Zimmerman, the producer, used to send me around to try and

drag him back because I had the closest rapport with him, I guess.

And we became, like, I was, we were friends.

I really liked the guy a lot, but I kept saying to him, hey,

Richard, you got to go to meetings if you're going to make this movie.

And he, well, can't they all come around here?

I said, no, it doesn't work that way.

You've got to come to the studio and talk.

He would take a scene and then he would have the sketch

artists do the drawings for the scene and have them Xeroxed.

And he'd give them to the crew as a way of

communicating as opposed to having production meetings.

I think that he did have visions, whether

they were clear, I'm not so sure.

He would probably say he did.

Perhaps I misinterpreted some of what he was

saying, but I never felt they were exactly clear.

What I was led to believe was that they were pretty much behind him.

And, you know, he knew that they were nervous about

his youth and the fact that this was such a big film.

I think we managed to live the dream for a surprising amount of time.

None of us had any idea what ended up, what was coming.

♪

I guess the beginning of the end was

Marlon's daughter, Cheyenne, committed suicide.

Brando was then on a project in Ireland called Divine Rapture,

which was meant to come directly from that set to Doctor Moreau.

Divine Rapture closed down, never to resume shooting, was never finished.

Brando was understandably extremely upset because

his entire family was self-destructing around him.

Not knowing whether he would be able to make it for day

one, in fact, knowing he wouldn't make it for day one,

and whether he would ever be able to show up as Moreau,

obviously it threw the entire future of the project into doubt.

We figured the only thing we could do was to maybe shoot the scenes

in the water or to start with the boat scenes and the stuff that

happens before they get to the island, the hope that by the time we

got to the island and got to the lab scenes, that Doctor Moreau would be found.

Up until I left, I mean, everything was still in

place, but Richard had already said that he felt

that the project was going to be taken away from him.

I no longer had any wealth or power.

I didn't have any money in the project, and if Brando

wasn't going to show up, I couldn't bring Brando to the project.

The closer we got to production, the more isolated

he made himself, the more unavailable he made himself.

It was clear quickly that he might have been in over his head, not

because of anything except just a lot of forces that were not aligned for

began to darken around the island, things started to go wrong.

My PA got bit by a poisonous spider that

was living in a web underneath a lampshade.

She reached in to switch the lampshade on and

it bit her hand which caused her flesh to melt.

It was incurable.

Back in London, Skip, the Sufi warlock who had

first fixed the whole thing for me during the

Brando meeting, he was a pretty brilliant biochemist.

Skip believed that the clay wall in his laboratory had been too thin

and that he'd accidentally become irradiated during his experiments.

But what happened was that his bones started to crumble.

One morning his hip dislocated, his leg literally popped out of the socket.

In hospital when they operated he then caught

necrotizing fascilitis, this flesh-eating parasite.

During that time every single one of Skip's fixes came undone.

Over in Ireland when I phoned my mother to tell her what

was going on, her house had just been struck by lightning.

Three fireballs had rolled through the lounge.

One jumped into the telephone, one jumped into the

hi-fi system and she says the other went out the cat door.

Shortly before the next door neighbours

claimed they saw a hyena run across the road.

Again, a hyena in Ireland doesn't make any kind of sense.

I noticed the first time that the accommodation

where we were staying had hyena print wallpaper.

The wallpaper was all kind of looking at

me with a hungry kind of look in its eye.

The relationship with Val also became tense.

This started the different attempts to read the script.

We all met at Richard's house and we're trying to do this first scene.

So I start, you know, being underfeared and this whole like

tempest thing and Val is just sitting there smoking a cigarette.

Wait, is this it?

No, no, no, wait a minute.

We can always cut it down but he's still talking.

Okay, okay, okay.

Is this it? Is this it?

He's saying all that?

He's saying all that? This is the first

scene in the movie and he's saying all that?

Okay, well, okay.

So I already know something, like he didn't like it.

He did not like that the movie would start with me doing the tempest.

And he's like, Richard, look, I don't understand why

this character Maling has to be in the first scenes anyhow.

I don't get it.

And Richard was like, well, he's your assistant.

But look at his, look at the makeup.

I mean, he looks like a monster.

I mean, I don't, I don't buy it.

I mean, like, and you know what?

I don't need an assistant.

And Richard stood his ground.

He said, like, no, it's in the script.

By the time Kilmer changed parts and took on this

other part of the drug-fucked assistant to Marlon

Brando's Dr. Moreau, he was playing up a bit on set.

He was just kind of being a bit rude and abrasive.

He, that was his character, though, so fair go.

Maybe that was the way he prepared to be an

arsehole, to, you know, act like one off camera.

So we started having strange petty disagreements.

We were shooting on a pier or dock, and it was one of

these scenes that had endlessly been sketched and re-sketched.

Richard is, OK, so let's do this.

Kilmer says, OK, one, one second, one second.

I would like to know how you're going to cut this together.

And Richard said, well, you know, the Pendrix character,

he's in the ship, and he's going to get hit on the head.

We don't know who hit him.

We just cut to black.

Camera goes back, and then you look at him,

and you're like, what are you doing on my ship?

Or, you know, something like that. And then they'll, you

know, always with a cigarette, you know, really super cool.

Not even, you know, it's not even sarcastic.

It was always really cool, you know, just, yeah.

That's not going to work, man.

So Richard, it's like a classic thing, you know.

Somebody gets hit on the head, we cut to

black, and then there's going to be a time jump.

Nah, that's not going to cut together.

Richard went to give him some direction, and Val

said, Richard, directors stand behind the cameras.

Actors are in front of the camera.

Now go stand behind the camera.

And I was sitting there listening to this, and I'm like, oh, my God.

I mean, I really felt for Richard, because I thought, this

is not really, I mean, this is not about the shoot anymore.

This is a power game.

And I think at that point, Richard just completely

lost it and forgot all about the sketches and

really couldn't, had a hard time getting through the day.

I think it was like late in the movie, the scene we

were shooting, it was like all these mutants were

coming around, and I was having to shoot them and fight my way out.

And I just remember being on the beach, and I'm coming through, and

I think I remembered no one was really telling me anything, you know.

They would just kind of be like, OK, well,

go out, you know, and work your way up there.

And, you know, and then I just would find myself, you know, kind

of making up stuff in the scene, you know, making up stuff to do.

He probably would have needed a very good first AD

that, you know, does all these things for him, you know.

And then so he can have his vision, and then so

he doesn't have to get into these fights, you know.

But then nobody helped him.

That was my instinct, was always to try to find the constituency

that would support him, and then ultimately I found there was no one.

Reports started coming back from the set,

which was near Brisbane or someplace like that,

that Val Kilmer was sitting down, or

somebody was sitting down and wouldn't get up.

The buzz is just, you know, you walk through the hall

and you say, did you hear about, oh, my God, the

Richard Stanley climbed into a tree today and wouldn't come down.

What?

-This was... -Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Back the gravy train up.

When did he supposedly climb this tree and not come down?

At the end of the shooting day.

He climbed a tree and wouldn't come down.

After shooting a long shoot day and needing to get up at 5 a.m.

to shoot the next day.

No, I'm going to stay in a tree.

That's insane.

I think basically they all said, look, he's the star, basically.

He's what we...

We hope that we're going to make back our money because Kilmer is in it.

Now it's part of the budget, basically.

And it doesn't matter who directs it.

It's not about the vision, it's about the name and the stars.

I remember looking at the...

overseeing the boat the day before the shoot was meant to happen and

Murray Boyd, the Australian location manager, reassuring me about the

weather, saying, don't worry, mate, it's going to be flat as a millpond.

Anyway, of course, on cue, we were hit by a hurricane.

It started to rain.

They called a wrap and let's get the gear off the beach

and move out of here and I noticed that the creek was

starting to rise and the rain got heavier and heavier and heavier.

And I thought, couldn't rise that much, could it?

Well, it did.

And four hours later, the set was completely out in the Pacific Ocean.

Being off camp tribulation in a tramp freighter full of

exotic animals in the middle of a hurricane was a bad place to be.

We were floundering around out on the sea with Richard not

really knowing what was going on, or maybe he was knowing what

was going on, but not able to convey his directing to the right people.

In the course of trying to get the animals off the ship again, we were

moving the puma in a cage from one ship to another and I was trying to

steady the cage, the puma was above me and the fucking puma pissed on me.

They had my suit which had been tailor made by Prince Charles's tailors.

Rob Morrow was in the captain's cabin of

the ship talking by a radio

phone to his agent in LA, screaming to get me off this laming picture.

In those four days I started sending SOSs to my

lawyer, saying this is looking weird, there's bad

stuff going on here, there's bad vibes between people.

He was calling me from Brisbane and he said, we don't know

each other and I'm very happy to be working with you, etc, etc.

Just kind of a little introduction.

And then all of a sudden he almost broke down.

He said, this is totally insane.

I cannot, cannot continue.

I don't know what to do.

I want to get back to my family in the United States.

I can't stand this.

It's complete insanity.

Would you please, please, please let me out of this.

I think there was a part of Mike DeLuca that was amused by all this.

I think there was a part of several people's attitude.

Let's just see how far this can go.

It became increasingly obvious that we couldn't really do

anything that the only weather cover sets we had that were

completed were Moreau's laboratory and The interiors of Moreau's

house, but we didn't have Moreau We

couldn't retreat into the weather cover set.

Richard was really bad on these days And he was

being hammered by the DP and everyone was down on

him, and he was extremely nervous he was yelling at me.

The day is just going by and nothing's really

happening and and And Finally I see Richard walking around.

I'm like, hey Richard. Well, you know what's going on.

He's he's frantically smoking his cigarette, right?

and it's just like You know, I I must be seen every day

to be attempting to film something and that was what he

said And he walked away and I was like What's happening here?

The order finally came back from new line to to down tools to wait

Basically, the production was put on hold which was the prelude to the end.

I happen to be at a restaurant where Val was at another table

and he sort of summoned me over

and started saying how this

wasn't working for him and you know something serious had to

happen and and I must say I did agree because it wasn't

working and So I then called Mike

DeLuca new line woke him up

at 4 in the morning or something and told him my sad story and

He was kind of screaming at me and and he said well, what do you want me to do?

And I said, well, I you better look at the footage and draw

your own conclusions But my view is you need to make a change

♪

I had to let Richard go.

It was the only time in my career I'd ever

had the responsibility of changing a director.

And it was very difficult.

It wasn't handled well at all.

Sort of a call went to his agent, and it was done that way.

Not the manly way, you might say.

They had to do it, I suppose.

But I kind of felt I was on his side, and

I could feel that they felt that as well.

And I thought, Oh, I'd better be careful, or they'll be firing me as well.

Perusa, realising what had happened, leapt up and gave an

amazing speech to Tim, the line producer, explaining to him

exactly why it would be a disaster beyond belief if they went down that route.

I remember thinking, No, this isn't real.

There's some misunderstanding.

They're going to work it out.

Don't panic, Richard.

In the course of it all, taking it a bit too far, she

threatened to cut her own heart out of a

sushi knife if New Line closed the project down.

And I said, Well, I'm walking.

I'm not staying. There's no reason for me to be here.

She ran out of the sushi restaurant, jumped in the limo

parked outside and told the driver to take her to Sydney.

She had insufficient grasp of the geography of Australia, I

think, to know that Sydney was on the opposite side of the continent.

I may have.

I may have.

I don't remember how I got there.

The driver then drove her clear across the country.

He was a guy named Lewis, who had previously been on the art

department, who had been fired after some kind of punch-up in

art department, and had gotten back onto the project as a driver.

I was out of a job by the time I had my second job.

I had three jobs.

The second one was the production running.

I got sacked from that because while I was all in

limbo, Farooza had contacted me and

said, What are you doing?

Do you want to come to Sydney?

I'm like, Sure, you know, let's go.

And when I got back, the production didn't want to know me

because I'd sort of committed some film faux pas, you know.

I just remember feeling absolutely

just bewildered and terrible.

I felt terrible for him, and I did.

I felt like this was the greatest injustice and we should

call the Hollywood Reporter and everyone should know that

this is what they're doing and, you know, because he was my friend.

I went and saw him at his house and he was in the middle of the

room just sitting there, paper spread out everywhere, and he was a mess.

He was very paranoid.

He was very freaked out.

I don't think he was sleeping.

I mean, beyond upset.

He'd become quite immersed in the whole project to that

point where he was living and breathing Moreau and then

he'd just have that mood of, Oh, I think he probably went a bit mad.

Who wouldn't have a complete mental breakdown at

that point if that happened to you, you know what I mean?

Because he was really, really manic.

I went back to my headquarters and started spreading documents.

I was a little vindictive.

I also wanted to make it particularly hard for them to make that film.

In my mind, I was going to leave with him and the lawyers were

going to be hired and all the actors would walk and we would

shut the production down because everyone would be loyal to him.

New Line eventually basically offered to pay me my full fee just

to shut up and go away, in return for which I had to agree if the

project was revived, not to come within,

I think, 40km of the location.

We were waiting for Richard for ages to come out

of his bungalow, but I'd been told from the

production office just to make sure he gets on this plane.

Yeah, I remember dropping him at the airport.

Like, I thought I'd been told to make sure

he gets on the plane, so he was there on time.

But the next morning I got a phone call

saying, Where the hell's Richard Stanley?

I think he had to take it home from them and he

didn't use it and they knew that Nobody was on the plane.

He was supposed to be on a plane out of there

and he wasn't Suddenly he was this missing person.

They were and so they're just assuming.

Okay, we've we've totally fucked this person over So that doesn't

know that there would be in some revenge motive to do something But

I think he made a few threats on his

way out I'm told that he and

some of aboriginal friends had placed rocks around the Location to

wish us bad luck a casual remark by Grace Walker during one of the

records Ah, well if new line try and throw us out if you ever close

blow the whole place up had found its way back to be to new line who

actively frightened that we might try and blow up the set or

Sabotage the production in some way and we

heard that Richard Stanley had Not worked out.

So for most of us and the hearsay that it was like, what does that mean for us?

What are they gonna get a new director?

What does that mean?

Production shut down for a couple of weeks.

They didn't send us home we just sat around and repaired things or

painted more pieces or whatever and Waited for production to resume.

We had millions of dollars invested and it wasn't like we

were a very big company So we had to continue with it and

that's generally my spirit Anyhow, no matter how hard

things are finish it up and then we'll see what happens

They had to have the same cast because of the makeup

effects that they really life cast

everyone They couldn't actually recast the leads.

So they had to try to hold the original actors to contract my

Representation said you'll never work again Not only will they sue

you and garnish your wages for the next 20 years but they will

ensure that you don't work ever again in

this industry and They'll tarnish your name.

They'll destroy your reputation, you know, because

you're not allowed to just walk on a multi-million

dollar picture You know, it wasn't just what happened to Richard.

That was the beginning of the nightmare

We had met John Frankenheimer on just a general meeting kind of thing.

He was an incredibly talented guy, but he

also had a few films that were not successful.

He was sort of in the discard pile and was looking for work again.

All the other actors turned it down.

They went to Philip Kaufman, he turned it down.

They asked some other people, they're

like, how much time do we have to prepare this?

One week? And we're working with Kilmer

and Brando, we have one week for this script?

And we have no vision, it's like, no.

I worked with John for basically the last decade of

his life and he was, I don't know, he was an old

school guy who was a good filmmaker, very good director.

While we were together, everything he

did he got an award for, except for Moreau.

He had a reputation for being an enormously talented wrangler of

difficult actors and had worked with some of the most difficult actors around.

His background was he knew how to make a movie, that's all I cared about.

A movie about monsters wasn't exactly John's.

John would not have probably picked that one out if they said, here, take it.

Here's ten movies, which one do you want to direct?

This wouldn't have been on the list.

Later on, actually, I asked him why he actually did the

movie, because we all knew that he didn't like the script.

And so he told me that when they offered him

the movie, he said to his wife, what can we do?

And his wife said, well, you just ask him for something that

either they would not agree to or we're really happy people.

So he asked, as far as I know, he asked

for a three-picture deal and a lot of money.

We're going to fly to Australia and do this movie.

I'm like, get out a map, let me see, where is this?

And I got a rainfall map.

I'm thinking, rain, I'm an AD, I got to shoot.

And I'm looking, it's color-coded, and it gets bluer as it gets to be rain.

And then there's this one dot, the

size of an eraser head, purple, as dark as it could possibly be.

And I looked closely at the map, and that's where we were going.

I mean, and it was a lot of water.

So I thought, well, that's interesting.

We're going out to see the set, and we leave the hotel the first day.

We're driving out.

And I'm looking at my watch and thinking, well,

this is a half hour, 45 minutes, on these little roads.

And I mean, five minutes away from the hotel, we're in the jungle.

You're looking at jungle.

But 55 miles away, you're also looking at jungle.

Well, when you're in the jungle, what do you see?

Jungle.

I mean, it's like, why?

Oh, OK, well, we had to plant some of

this, too, because it's a banana plantation.

So they had actually gone to the jungle and then

planted some jungle, and then built this thing an

hour away from the hotel, every day an hour, driving.

So it's two hours out of my day to get there.

And they said, why did you do that?

Well, when it's clear, and you look up there, you can see this mountain.

It's the highest mountain in Australia.

Really?

Oh, OK.

That mountain was visible for about an

hour and a half, the whole time we were there.

And when it did come out, we had to dig a hole about this deep

to put the camera in, because it was so close to the mountain.

It was like all of it wrong, all of it wrong, useless.

I was always getting flak about how far I'd built the set from

town and how far everyone had to travel each day and blah, blah.

But I'd search for months to find this

particular location that we carved out of.

We just carved it out of the rainforest.

We had one week to prep, one week we had to get to

meet everybody, basically, and to see what was going on.

They said I had to come to dinner and

that our director, our new director, was here.

And this older gentleman in, you know, director

gear with this jungle hat on came into the restaurant.

And at one point during the dinner I actually

asked him, so what's your take on this story?

There's a certain vision, and he's like, ah, Marco, vision.

That's an overused word, I'm telling you.

It's not about a vision, it's I'm trying to tell a story here, okay?

Yeah, what is this?

Are you gonna tell this story?

Ah, we're gonna see. I bring on, I brought in my own writer,

so I'm like, okay, it's gonna be a different movie, I guess, now.

He brought in a new DP, William Fraker.

He brought me and a couple of other people.

And was going along with the cast.

They had to, they recast it at the last minute.

David Theulis came in.

I didn't want to be involved in something that just seemed so cynical.

He tried to get me to stay.

He couldn't believe that this young kid was

sitting there saying no to John Frankenheimer.

Initially he said, you know, listen, I'm just been brought in, I don't

know what's going on, I'm just a director, I'm here to try to do a job.

I need all the help I can get from you, you know,

just be on my side and we'll get through this type thing.

Within three or four days, that had changed to

name-calling, it had changed to being screamed at.

This man hated my guts.

But Frankenheimer was a freak, he was a real freak.

I was a producer and I had to drop some new script around his place one night.

You know, they'd give me the script, I knew where he lived.

Driven straight to his place, knocked on the door.

Frankenheimer came to the door and he's like, Oliver, you're late!

So I was like, alright, alright dude, here's your script, man.

The first week we went pretty slow, plus we were still sorting things out.

Script pages were coming in on the facts, you know, from the US.

And then we finally brought out a writer and then another writer.

There was a writer there all the time.

Oh, what about we, oh, that's a great idea, yeah, let's do that.

So I thought, oh, good, here we go again.

It was really John had to decide, had to figure out how

the story could be shaped into a story he wanted to tell.

And it was not what the previous director had planned.

It was always drifting away from what

Richard's ideas for the story were.

He came to the set and he said to everyone,

look, I did this a couple of times in my life.

I came in, you know, somebody else got fired and I rescued their movie.

And actually, it turned both times, it turned out well.

So let's see how this one goes.

No bullshit, let's not muck around, let's get it happening.

Little did he know.

I mean, nothing really changed in terms

of efficiency when he got there.

I was only meant to be there for three, four weeks.

I was there for like six months.

It was great.

♪

I knew that this was going to be totally insane and

that we were going to be hugely lucky if we just

finished a film with a beginning, a middle and an end.

Everyone knew it was a tough shoot and it was a tough shoot.

There was a lot of friction between the actors, some of the actors and John,

mainly because of John's behavior towards them.

John can be very strong and if he has a

disliking towards someone, he would just let him have it.

He was kind of a little bit of a tyrant that way.

He was that way in all the movies he did.

It wasn't just this one.

He's really, really one of the last old school screamers.

He would bark out his orders and he was just

this rough cut guy and you could imitate him.

Things are going to change, aren't they?

I need my commander on camera one and

camera two, you better be ready to catch it.

And you're going to throw the torch and the whole thing goes up into flames.

He wanted people to do their job and that extended from the guys doing

the lighting to the guys doing the special effects makeup to the actors.

And he was heavy handed with the Australian crew, which

he would loudly denounce at lunch and say that it's the

worst crew he'd ever seen and he wanted his American crew.

And the crew, which they do on a lot of

shoots and still do, is make up crew t-shirts.

The t-shirt had on it as a quote, which

was one of the lines of dialogue for the film.

You don't have to obey these bastards.

They're not gods.

He had no idea what a didgeridoo was, or what the instrument

at one stage he called me, he says, David, I want you to

get that dickeridoo, and I want you to smash him over the head.

I said, John, I'm not going to do that with a didgeridoo.

This didgeridoo is a sacred instrument to me, and to Aboriginal peoples.

He didn't seem like he particularly wanted to be there either.

I know he didn't.

But he was there because he wanted to work with Marlon Brando.

Like everybody did.

Basically, he was hired to work for two weeks.

And so I said, no, but you have to absolutely be here on this date.

Of course, not only did he not show up, he was nowhere to be found,

and none of his lawyer agents or anybody knew where he was, purportedly.

And then about a week after he was due to report, he did show up.

And John was uncharacteristically very nervous.

And everybody's, oh, Marlon's coming to the set.

He's coming to the set.

An hour goes by.

He's coming, get ready, have everything ready.

And Frankenheimer was like, have the cameras ready.

And then I don't hear from him until about 3 in the afternoon.

He just said, well, I'm ready to shoot, so I'm fine.

And I look.

And out of the jungle, this, this, this,

I couldn't really tell what was going on.

But this person emerges out of, because we were in the

middle of this banana plantation, a really thick jungle.

And the scene was in a palanquin that he was supposed to be being brought in.

I thought maybe it was one of the creatures or

something that I hadn't seen that was like a different design.

And it was Marlon.

Release him.

Release him.

And he was in a.

Looked like cheesecloth like a very very thin

linen that he'd wrapped around himself Like a diaper.

He'd covered himself in white paint.

Don't you feel the heat?

As I do I Tolerate it.

It was explained that the white face was kind of a makeup

that he wore only has in the Sun so I talked to

Frankenheimer and asked if the dialect to use was also

something that he would change Interior

and exterior and Brando was a ham operator.

He was listening to our phone call and he said If you

want to direct the film when I showed up on the set, isn't it?

You know you direct the film he he banned me from

the set for questioning this the whole white faced

thing was Was that gene it was that mad or was that genius?

Because the whole white face wearing sunglasses Meant that

Marlon Brando's stand-in could do quite a lot of the picture

for him Brando's in the Palico and then He says, you know John.

I Think we need some peacock feathers behind my head It wouldn't look

better if we had some peacock feathers and out of the corner of my eye.

I see the Art director was this wonderful guy could do

anything Running like hell to his car And so everybody then

sat around again while we're waiting for peacock feathers in

the middle of nowhere and then about 20 minutes later the

Gracie, I think it was his name came roaring back in and

Holding up the peacock feathers and I said where the hell did

you get those from and he had found a

peacock That was on the road by a farm somewhere.

Remember it's saying and he Leaped on the peacock and pulled

the feathers out He was just delighted by everyone and

expressed all kinds of glee at seeing all these wonderful

Faces and the heads and the monsters and he wanted to meet everybody.

So I mean everybody I was dressed as a feral pig someone else was

dressed as a goat someone else was dressed as a bison someone else was

dressed as a Monkey, so although we may feel we met Marlon Brando and

he I'm sure just met a Number of grotesque animals that he wouldn't

recognize again and shook trotters and paws and claws with us the

typical day with Marlon Marlon would arrive he would arrive at nine o

'clock And he would go into the trailer and then John would go in there

and start talking to them and the executives would stand around in a

circle and scour and scowl and Look down

not know what to do hours

went by maybe an hour half an hour before lunch He would come out and

they would tour the set and talk about the scene We're about to shoot

and Marlon would invent a bunch of things I remember Frankenheimer

trying to talk to him about the scene and Marlon saying no, no, no,

no, no Instead of it being about violence and all this pain and

suffering I think that all of that animal people should get together

and there should be a grand Celebration like a bar mitzvah, and I

thought he's He he was always playing with the idea of being

hot and overheated he wanted an ice bucket on top of his head Oh

So Johnny the prop guy found out as a saucepan or something that we

cut the bottom out of it It fitted on his head perfectly and then

and for is a ball character Tips the ice in no one ever knew that he

wanted ice or an ice pack on his head So we had to make it quickly

you you had to just keep taking away Problems that he had created in

order to put the work off and then finally you got the work just one

day I said, can we talk and he said what and what is it dear and I

said, I don't know just In terms of our characters and how they

relate I'd love to have some time to do

that and he said No This is

all Insane, I'm getting paid You're

getting paid None of the scripts make any sense.

So why worry?

You know just relax do what you're doing.

You're beautiful. Don't worry about it And

I said, but I mean how the characters relate.

Oh, isn't there?

He never would learn his lines and

he had Carolyn as assistant.

Mm-hmm read lines from the trailer into his little earpiece

and One I remember one time

Take was going rather smoothly

and then he stopped in the middle of it and he said

goddammit Carolyn I told you not to act Frankenheimer

actually called me at one point Again, it was one of those I

you don't know me, but I have to talk to the head of the company So what is it?

He said this is complete insanity here And I have to tell you I

dealt with some very very difficult actors in my life But I have

never ever dealt with somebody like Marlon Brando he said we're

driving and he stops the car and says

let's fuck Bob Shea and I

said this is John's saying to me and I

said well why he seems like a pretty nice guy.

Why should we do that?

so well, he doesn't know what he's doing and I think what we should do

is just close the down in the production and You and I are gonna

rewrite the script and we'll spend six or eight weeks Rewriting it

because I have some ideas about how Dr.

Moreau should be wearing a hat all the time.

And at the end of the movie takes off his hat and he's actually

a dolphin So then I knew we

were in serious serious bad shape

John Referred to Brando as a genius

After the movie he didn't Brenda.

Look at me sick. Okay, so So you know the German actor, right?

Uh, yes, I'm the German actor I don't talk so just well,

♪

buzzer cuts

No idea.

Not German, right?

So I said, Mr. Rendell, I'm sorry, I didn't understand that.

So you're German, right?

Yes, I'm German.

Ah.

Katze is cat.

Dach is roof.

So I'm like, ah, you're talking about the cat on the hot tin roof, right?

No.

Okay, I got no idea what he was talking about then and

then and then Zinnemann said I think what he's talking

about is You know, it's better to kill two birds with a stone.

Whatever. He did he made something up, you know, and Brenda's

exactly He talks better German than you Mr. Brando, we need you on the set.

I gotta go now last time I talked to him never talked to him again, right?

And then the next thing I heard actually is that that he actually did

something very similar to Nelson de la Rosa You're the Spanish actor.

Si, senor Mmm, so you I do speak some Spanish

Si, senor, I love this guy I want this guy in every

scene every scene with me every scene Zinnemann Sorry, mr.

Brennan that no we can't do that because he's not an actor.

I teach him how to act Okay, but you know, he doesn't

speak English I just dub him Yeah, but we you know, I

mean Marco Hofschneider is is in every scene with you.

Well, I guess we just have to change the script And that was it.

He took my part away I mean Brenda gave him the part but man,

you know, I was I thought I'd a problem with Kilmer No, I had

a problem with the smallest man in the world and I lost to him.

That's something So Nelson was about 17 inches or something.

I think he stood this high anyway And he

would he talked like this as well

and And he would draw you pictures and the pictures were

kind of really childlike he would say these things to us

and his sister would interpret and Sometimes his sister

would just shake her head and say I'm not I and I said you

cannot you're not here to censor what he says because he

was 27 years old or something and I said you you just you need to interpret.

So he's part of what whatever's happening and she

said, oh Nelson wants to know what you're doing later.

Can you do you want to come around to his room?

It was like Okay, we might just you can censor that's fine.

Very popular with the ladies.

They loved having him up on their laps It was great fun going out

with him to cans in the nightclubs you know, you'd be queuing up

and they'd be looking for ID for people and then they'd see him and

When he'd go and you know with you'd have to kind of Dance in a

circle around him so that he didn't get trodden on we would go out

and we'd go dancing and stuff he'd get down and but yeah, he was a

Very sexual but even Nelson started acting up once Marlon decided he loved him.

We were standing in the In the elevator at one

point and I said Hannah's now, how was your day?

Shut up And he he actually hit me

in the nuts And I can't do

anything I mean like no it's it's like if somebody would see you

like kicking of the smallest man in the World around you're in

trouble He started getting lines written for him and he started

getting the same costume as Marlon was Wearing that was all

Marlon and it did I wanted him as my

sidekick the guy who I had making all the props.

He was a genius He built this beautiful little grand piano that we sat

up on top of the the grand piano

that Brando was playing and They played

I think it's one of the greatest scenes ever.

And I think that's how the whole mini-me thing developed, which, you

know, has gone on to South Path of Marlin, adopting this little guy.

I said, you know, you really get along with him, and he

said, well, I'm telling you, this movie, nobody's gonna

care about anything except this young

man, because he's fascinating.

He is just human artwork.

You know, I will say that in Richard's defence any day.

It's like Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer were

there to mess with the film as much as possible.

Marlon was there with his legendary contempt for

what he does for a living, but he was a little more

fun about it, and he was also respectful to all of us.

Val was best described by someone as a prep school bully.

In the makeup room, he came to me, and

he's like, you know, I saw Europa Europa.

You're a very good actor.

I like what you did there.

I'm like, oh, nice, thank you.

Yeah, just to make one thing clear here, you know, if

it's ever gonna be between you and me, it's gonna be me.

And then he walked away.

Val was next to the camera here, and he was sitting in a chair,

and then he sort of started to squat down, and he was off camera,

and he was doing his lines, and the focus puller was right next

to him, and this guy had, I mean, we were in the jungle for whatever.

Eight weeks, and his hair, his sideburns had grown, you know, he

hadn't been trimming, so they were, you know, scraggly, and the

guy's sitting there, and Val was smoking a cigarette, and he

goes, and he starts to burn the end of this guy's hair during the take.

It became a kind of, one of the triggers that started

the crew to really not put up with any shit, so to speak.

Marlon, I guess, didn't like Kilmer, and was not a fan, anyway.

There was one scene where Marlon and Kilmer were gonna be together.

Val sits down, tries to talk to him.

He says, so, have you been out on the reef?

And Brando just looks at him and says, the reef?

I own a reef.

I got reefs coming out of my ass.

And that was it, that was their whole conversation.

Kilmer didn't like Brando, Brando didn't like Kilmer.

They all didn't like Frankenheimer.

Frankenheimer didn't like them.

When Frankenheimer was on set one day, I remember him saying to a

few of us that were standing around, you know, if I was directing a

film called The Life of Val Kilmer, I wouldn't have that prick in it.

Well, Frankenheimer was equally powerless to wrangle these massive egos.

Yeah, I think he started to get a bit depressed at some

points, and I would go and cheer him up, you know, on night

shoots, I would go and find him, and we would chat a little bit.

We had a late call, it was a night shoot.

We got everybody, all of these people in their makeups.

We go trucking out to set.

We're out sitting around, and we're sitting

around, and we're sitting around, nothing's happening.

Finally, we corral the AD, and we're

just like, what's happening, what's going on?

And he's like, well,

Marlon won't come out of his trailer till Val comes out of his trailer.

And Val won't come out of his trailer till Marlon comes out of his trailer.

And we're like, oh, you gotta be kidding me, you know?

The actors were really disheartened.

Yeah, three and a half hour makeups.

You didn't know if they were gonna be shot, but

you still had to do your best work because you

couldn't leave any edges up or anything like that.

You still had to put in major effort, and then the

actors go out and sit in the sun, and they don't get shot.

Most of the time, they didn't get shot.

For days and days when you're sitting around in a tent

waiting for Brando or Kilmer to decide whether they're

gonna shoot anything that day, night shoots would finish

with huge alcohol orders of bottles of spirits at seven

in the morning and retiring back to someone's room for the morning.

We were being paid above equity minimum to work on a major feature film.

We were being paid very healthy per diems to stay in a very nice hotel.

I know with my per diems one week, I bought a huge Scalextrics racetrack.

Other people were buying equally ridiculous things, and

every person's room towards the end became like a

different place to go and visit and a different place to go and play.

We quite often would make up little

films or sing songs or a lot of chess playing.

There was a lot of sex going on between

people that shouldn't have been having sex.

There was a lot of drugs around.

Yeah, I smoked a lot of pot.

It was a party most of the time, you know, interrupted to go

out, put costumes on and do some madness that wasn't scripted.

And as it went on, it descended into more and more kind of madness.

I think we forgot that we actually had normal lives elsewhere.

This became our normality.

♪

At one time, I had 10 extras.

Um, as soon as John arrived, his comment, I think,

was, um, I can't make this picture with 10 extras.

I want 100.

This was suddenly like, oh, my God.

They advertised for ferals and hippies and

people with amputations and anything they could

work with to make a sort of, like, bunch of monsters.

-Yeah. -They were the hippies.

They had dropped out.

They were living on the dole.

They were living in the woods, just sleeping in the woods.

They were all sleeping with each other.

Dreadlocks unwashed.

Tattoos, piercings everywhere.

They were the island of Dr. Moreau.

So there'd be lots of, um, guitars.

There were fire eaters and people on stilts and

people, you know, spinning discs, and they were all on acid.

It was the wildest thing I'd ever seen.

It was like we had our own little freak show circus at base camp all the time.

It was great.

I got back in and I was working as an extra now so I was working

with this friend of mine, Danu, who was part of the household we

were living in and basically Danu, he would just come and go from

Cairns and sort of spend his time sort of roaming about and making didgeridoos.

He's back from this fruit farm, this

organic fruit farm that was out in the Tablelands.

He just sort of said off the cuff, oh yeah, there's this guy out

there, this crazy guy that's just raving about how Val Kilmer's

ruined his life and he's out there just

smoking wads of pot and I was going, what?

And you know, suddenly I was actually listening to what

he was saying, I was going, just say that again, and I

was going, oh fuck, you know, he's talking about Richard.

During that time I ended up staying out on a huge chunk of

rainforest owned by this farmer who had lost the use of his

legs, a place called the Mary River, which was a very nice spot,

no crocodiles, healthy weather, coconuts, cassava, yam and fish in the river.

So yeah, I got left in isolation and then, you know, one

night I saw a light in the forest further down river and

realised that there were other people down there, camping

down there, and the next morning I walked down the river

and discovered that there were extras from the island of Doctor Moreau.

I was like, dude, we've got to go and

get him because everyone's looking for him.

We walk up this river, there's a big cast iron bathtub sort of by

the side of the river with a fire underneath it, so someone's

like, you know, heating up some water to have a bath and it's Richard.

Dana and I just kind of walked up and

said, dude, what are you doing and come with us.

I explained that if I did that I'd be breaking contract.

That would mean that New Line could technically refuse to pay

me a dime and that I was currently still in negotiation with them.

It could be a bad idea but I did want to see what was going on, I was curious.

So he basically jumped in the car and came back to Cairns.

No one from the house let the secret out that he was there, that, you

know, that was all pretty tight so, because we knew that we were

sitting on something sort of like, we knew something was going to

happen with Richard, just being who he is and the situation he was in,

it was just like, okay, let's just sit

back and watch what this maniac's going to do.

I'd come home with the script with all the new coloured pages

in it, all the amendments and, you know, Richard would be

there waiting for me with a massive joint, you know, sort of

waiting to rip into the damage they've done to his script, you know.

And then he throws a wobbly to me, he says to me,

Dave, he says, he said, I want to get onto the set

and I was going, and how do you envisage that, Richard?

He says to me, well, I want you to teach me how to

walk in a fashion so that I'm just one of the extras.

I ended up borrowing Lewis's Dogman outfit, which is

a some kind of Stan Winston original now, 20 years

on, fallen prey to the leprosy that afflicts foam latex.

But, you know, it was a full head Dogman

mask and it came with a jalaba and claws.

He got changed in the van so no one saw him and we all got our

sort of like costumes on, these latex beast masks and everything.

And then we sort of like, I remember we sat there and he's like,

you know, he smoked one big fat joint for like, you know, good luck.

And the way he went and then sort of like emerged into the, into the people.

It got so hot when we were working.

So I was trying to give them breaks as often as I could.

And they would pull the head back and drink some water.

And there was this guy, one of them that was never doing, I kept watching him.

And he would never take his head off.

And I thought, well, that guy's nuts.

You know, I started to think, well, he's going to just die.

Out of 300 extras in this tent, like

Richard's the only one who hasn't taken his mask off.

He was the bulldog man.

And he was, did this great job of jumping around and doing this weird stuff.

And I, and I went to him and I said, no, it was really great.

I thank you. It was, I really enjoyed watching you.

It was a nice job. And he goes, he said, Oh, thank you.

And he had a completely different accent than anybody else.

And then I started to wonder.

And I think once that rumor started, that the Richard Stanley

was in the background that I think that just grew into sort of

stories about Richard Stanley then wanting to sabotage the shoot.

I did hear about it.

Look, maybe, I don't know, it was the tropics and he went a bit troppo.

They've been shitting themselves leading up

to that thinking Richard's out there somewhere.

And they all they all they imagine doing some

sort of like, you know, sabotage sort of thing.

But when it came to it, there was no, you

know, we just drove onto set with him in the car.

Like there was no security really.

There are a whole lot of extras on set this night.

And it was where we were meant to be lighting Dr. Moro's character on the pyre.

Richard was on set.

He was standing at the back of the set

next to a load of cans that said gasoline.

So he was in effect standing behind this huge arsenal of petrol.

With a monster mask.

The first thing somebody does, prop one of the prop guys.

Okay, hey, you over there.

Here's a torch.

You go over there.

As a beast person on set, I was constantly

there and being directed to take a hatchet and

smash the furniture or to douse the place in gasoline.

Much of what I was doing as a beast person was capering up

and down being destructive and vindictive in the background.

But as it was part of the movie was okay.

See, if he really was troppo, he would have just,

he could have burnt the whole set down there in there.

That would have been crazy cool.

I had the privileged position of being able to see what was going

on but at the same time the rather nightmarish position of

Discovering that I was now one of the beast people on the island

of Dr. Moreau that I had completed a full arc from create a figure to dog

♪

Fortunately, John Frankenheimer was an

unbelievably professional, real trooper kind of guy.

He really understood what the issues were and

did wrangle Marlon and all these other maniacs

pretty well.

And at least we came out with a film.

We lost money on the film.

I don't recall how much, but not as much as we

would have lost if we didn't have the film at all.

My hopes were really high.

You know, major picture, great role.

I really thought this is cool.

It's gonna be great and I was very

disappointed by all the things that happened.

I mean basically, you know, they They they gave me a great part.

I had a director that liked me and that respected me to You

know to have basically to have the three or four scenes in the movie

What people choose to do in the name of politics which

is basically in the name of money There are no morals.

There are no There's no integrity at all.

They'd sell their child down the river for money I I'm damn

curious to I Wish we could go back in time and have an or have

an alternate universe where Richard gets to direct his movie I

think if Richard had made the film for eight million dollars

with good actors and people that

were under his Direction And

he's a good director, I don't think he's a very bright guy and a

lot of good ideas I don't Think that he

could handle a big at that point a big crew.

I'm sure there is a place for Richard Stanley with with a

terrific independent company Backed by people

who really believed in him.

I mean basically after Murrow he vanished into the

wilderness, you know And I didn't know what had become of him.

I Never heard from him again.

I've often wondered what happened to Richard Stanley

♪

The perception of me in Hollywood at that

point in time was that I no longer existed.

My agent never returned any of my phone calls from the time

that the main decision was made to remove me from the project.

You know, when you get really, really hurt like that, you're so

gun-shy about ever putting yourself in that kind of a position again.

I saw him in London a couple years later, and I remember

him saying, I don't know if I'll ever make another movie again.

I don't think I will.

I can't even bear the idea of being behind

a camera I just, it makes me want to scream.

Marlon Brando told me that everyone in the

industry were hyenas, that I should try and take

care of them and try and make a better life for myself.

♪

Like the lead character in Dr. Moreau, I found myself

increasingly unable to fit in with the so-called real world.

And I found myself much happier away from

people and up the mountain where I am now.

I eventually moved to Montségur in the French Pyrenees, the scene

of the last stand of the Cathars in 1244, who are a bunch of

pagans and heretics who are basically slaughtered by the outside world.

The various nation-states basically formed up and

decided to crush the weird ones that didn't really fit in.

To a large extent, we're still able to

perform our strange experiments of reality.

We're still able to shoot.

I'd like to continue and maybe make something a little bit longer.

Maybe next time around I won't feature dogmen.

Maybe I won't have a whole lost civilization or try to

completely monkey-wrench 21st century culture and

technology in the same way, but something a little bit

more modest, but still red in tooth and claw would seem in order.

♪

You know, it's a part of my youth, that's how I see it.

That it was like a crazy chapter that became some

lunatic movie that's known as one of the worst films ever made.

Yeah, that's not a source of pride for me.

I'm proud to be involved in one of the worst movies ever.

It's just awesome to see how much effort it goes into.

It's a little stinker, like, you know, rock and roll.

♪

♪