Original subtitles

Most of the projects I initially worked on

were very strange movies,

so you couldn't really hang them 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.

Although they might be not be relevant to it,

or they might be misunderstanding 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 directors

having beards and looking like your dad,

and then here was this sort of young, hot guy.

He had the long hair and a very mysterious look

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.

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 films.

I was brought up by a strong mother

who was involved in witchcraft, anthropology, and stuff,

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 was somebody you wanted to see

what he was going to do next,

and it was largely because of the success of hardware

that miramax worked with him on dust devil.

Miramax's view on Richard?

Uh...

Good question.

Um... I think that they like Richard

in a way that they like what he was 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.

He was someone who had worked on the independent side,

but now he was getting the backing of a studio.

This is going to be a huge project,

and this is going to propel Richard Stanley

into the super stardom that he deserves as an auteur.

Okay. Well, here we have a mound of

rather tatty surviving artworks from Dr. Moreau

that gives some brief glimpse

into the workhouse of filthy creation.

A lot of the beast people are going to be wearing 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.

And the sloth-people, they weren't very bright.

I originally wanted them to be stop-motion

or something like that.

I wanted a couple of stop-motion creates in there.

I think it happens in a rather different way

in the frankenheimer movie.

One of the shots used would have never gotten in

the finished new line 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 I'm being warned off by my parents,

who consistently told me 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,

civilization

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

and in the book Moreau's been hounded out

of conventional society in London by anti-vivisectionists

who have been obviously appalled by what he is 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 to 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 is a metaphor for god.

He is the creator-being.

He created the beast-people. They're not experiments.

They are things which had 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 what way that the narrator Marlow

journeys upriver to find Kurtz.

Certainly with heart of darkness,

Kurtz's 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 traveler

sir Henry Morton Stanley.

What's interesting,

as far as Richard's concerned, that his great-grandfather,

Henry Morton Stanley,

was considered to be one of...

The main basis of Kurtz's character.

It seems, of course, that Stanley did kind of give him

this megalomaniac texture,

and it seems like he was less than gentle

with the locals, shall we say.

The book was first adapted to the screen in 1932

by erle 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 bastardization of his work;

and to some extent he's right,

although island of lost souls

is probably the most effective screen adaptation.

Charles laughton chooses to play Moreau as a gloating sadist

who spends much the movie twirling his mustachios

and reclining chaise lounge.

It's a very memorable portrayal,

although very far from the humane,

god-like figure envisioned 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 in 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 terrors,

half man, half beast... All monster"

and terror is a man with Francis lederer.

The next official adaptation happened in 1977

and was directed by Don Taylor

and featured Burt Lancaster in the Moreau part,

Burt 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 probably being

the first movie I ever saw

which angered me so much. I wanted my money back.

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

Amongst other things, 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 do it justice,

to try and adapt the story in a way

that could actually work for the screen.

Shortly after dust devil, my second film,

I found myself washed up in London without a bean.

I had never been paid my second half of my fee.

The films 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 $40,000 in the red.

Even then, I knew on the back of dust devil,

I didn't have the political clout

to be really able to get Dr. Moreau made.

I mean, after dust devil, I was finding it hard

just to get gigs.

He had 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?

It would be of the script cover,

to try and drum up the interest."

And we then thought perhaps actually extending that further.

We recreated a couple of scenes

from the imagined finished product.

I sincerely believe that if Wells was alive now,

he would write it differently.

There's 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 is 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 lambs,

with what actually looked like a halo around his head.

So the whole point was to almost sort of play on the whole virgin

and baby Jesus image.

The dog-men are not entirely obeying his orders too,

because we can see behind Moreau's back,

some of the dog-men are actually

licking the blood off the surgical instruments,

and way in the back in the background in the tank,

we see a big, three-eyed, intelligent cthuloid octopus.

There were going to be sea creatures as well.

From that we decided actually..We produced

a series of 12 images echoing the stations of the cross

which began with this basic birth,

birth of the baby Jesus,

and then with the sort of crucifixion scene the end,

which was actually Moreau's own death.

Moreau was originally conceived

was actually nothing like Marlon Brando.

I think I had originally talked to Jurgen prochnow

about playing the part.

I wanted Moreau to be something, a little bit of a new ager.

In some of the earlier pictures,

we see he's still got the long hair and beard.

I was making him into some type 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 book.

The panther woman was added

in the in the erle c. Kenton movie

in the process of making it more Hollywood,

and we, in return, retained her.

In reality, aissa, our cat-lady is drawn from another novel.

We stole it from outcast of the islands,

the Joseph Conrad novel.

We thought since there's this connection between

Conrad and Wells,

borrowing characters from another Conrad story

was vaguely in our agreement.

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 and underneath her chilaba

is furry all over and has a tail.

The dog-people take the opportunity,

while the master is away, to chase her up the wall,

drag her down, and kill her.

Being civilized, they then proceed to not just to eat her

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

When he realizes what's happened in his absence,

he immediately shoots a couple of the dog-men.

The dog-men 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.

They don't really understand why he's killing them.

We also rationalize 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 animals on drugs,

which is a very appealing thought,

and then one starts wondering how they would behave

and what they would see.

And 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.

Here the bear-man reaches for the conch shell

with a lord of the flies touch

and then picks up the conch shell and blows it.

Yes, there was going animal vision in this movie,

just like toad vision or droid vision.

Of course, we're going to see point-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,

and I remember it was close to Christmas,

and it was snowing, it was close to a bus station,

but somehow I just on the remains of my

dwindling change,

I managed to basically get ed pressman

of the Edward r. Pressman film corporation

interested in Dr. Moreau.

Ed had produced a lot of fine movies,

notably badlands with Terrence malick,

conan the barbarian for John milius,

das boot 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 out about

by the initiative of Richard Stanley.

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

His agent at the time, jenne casarotto,

represented the estate of Wells, h.G. Wells.

Right from the beginning there was always that problem

that I was working on something I didn't own.

I needed a big company to pick it up,

because somebody actually had to 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 all of Wells' work is inherently British,

and one of the problems with the Wells' material

was that britain has never really shown any interest really

in adapting it.

In the end, ed convinced me to allow them to do this,

provided that 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

and was a perfect choice for Moreau

and brought an awful lot to the Montgomery character,

giving him some of that hard-boiled,

acid-drenched shtick.

He is the single greatest screenwriter

he hates... I can't say "hates." It's a strong word,

but he probably does hate Hollywood

and hates the movie industry.

Whether or not he hates the human race in total

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, acquisition, and financing

that allowed us to buy films and to make films.

Bob shaye 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 and 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 De Niro

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 an art film.

I wasn't particularly enthusiastic

about the project, frankly.

Mike DeLuca had in it,

was interested in it and sort of liked classic horror.

It all left me pretty cold.

Pressman had me going and meet the new line people

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

So we had, I think,

basically just one meeting in my office.

I did meet Richard Stanley at that point in time.

I didn't really know what to make of him,

and he showed up in a hat and white linen suit,

said that's what he's going to wear for the whole picture,

never take it off.

I had no doubt going into it 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, I said,

"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 L.A.,

nothing in common with anyone here.

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

just instantly we had a good rapport.

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

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 really first thing came down to who

was going to be Dr. Moreau,

and ed figured a way of getting to Marlon Brando.

Someone had the idea of Brando playing the role of 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 DeLuca for choosing

Marlon Brando in 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 in escrow, and that the film was green lit.

It was going to be directed by Roman polanksi,

which came completely out of the left field.

I hadn't seen that coming.

I responded by firing all guns

and demanding that I have the right

to at least one meeting with Marlon Brando,

that I had written the damn script.

Apparently, he was very unhappy about this.

I was told that by Mike DeLuca,

the chappy from new line just before the meeting

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

And I remember feeling a bit confused as to why...

What Brando and everyone had it in with 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 chappy 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 sort of routine

to fix it and make it all, 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; Jack 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 into the compound.

He had these trained dobermans padding around

and which were trained to attack

anything he pointed his laser pencil at,

because I have fond memories of Brando drunk pointing at things

with his laser pencil and getting the attack dogs

to attack the little red dot.

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,

and 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,

at which point we began the conversation.

So 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 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'd been expecting,

and it was confusing for Ruth vitale

because she had slept through it.

There's a very strong possibility

that it was may have been voodoo

or some kind of magical interference

on skip's behalf,

but the next thing I knew Roman 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 for us to bring a box office draw.

So we immediately went after Bruce Willis

for the role of the 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 like everyone else, wanted to work with Brando.

One of the serendipity things is I ran into James woods

at a restaurant,

got on well with James woods

and 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 globetrotting,

I ended up in far-north queensland,

and I chose cape tribulation,

because there's 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 into 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

at 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 had seen hardware.

I had seen dust deuvil, 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 very colorful and very, like, out there,

and we had a team of folks

that set out to design the characters.

Crash mccreery does these amazing detailed pencils,

and he did the sayer of the law.

He did lo-mai.

I did designs for buffalo man and the pig-ladies.

Everybody chipped in and just bashed ideas around

until we settled on things.

He was, you know, right off the bat,

he 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 is that he is Brando's favorite.

He is the master dog.

Basically, he's the only one that understands art.

He knows Shakespeare.

He knows how to recite poems,"

and I got really excited,

because I thought "god, you know,

this is like actually the best part in the movie."

In the meantime,

new line tried in different ways to contain the material.

I remember being called into an emergency meeting

of which they were really 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 this 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 walon green, writer of the wild bunch,

at which point I could justifiably say that,

even leaving myself out of the equation,

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'd 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 Steele,

which was filmed in Los Angeles.

Barbara Steele and an orangutan.

Just a very low-key day with a 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,

and we all sort of said "uh-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 swish hotel initially,

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

and work with him in hotel,

I think they then decided they'd actually have to move

him to a slightly cheaper hotel.

So they said, "you know, as a savings, Richard,

you know, we'd like to put you in the oakwood apartments.

You know, it's a lot cheaper, and you'll be able to cook,

and 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 plumped down in the city

were there was no such thing as public transport.

This issue of trying to get from ato b

continued throughout the production.

Meetings would happen without me,

anyone telling me they were going on,

and point in fact, I became increasingly paranoid,

thinking that I was being

deliberately kept out of the meetings.

About 2:00 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?" He said, "I'm in Hollywood.

I've walked from Burbank to Hollywood,

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

And I said, "where are you in Hollywood?"

He says, "I don't know."

So I think that is when I said to myself "uh-oh".

A number of things went wrong in the preproduction period.

Really, the beginning of the end,

the death knell was um...

When Bruce divorced Demi,

and 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.

So the film, all of a sudden, became a $35 million movie,

which at that time was like $70 million today.

So it was a big movie which was far greater in 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 premier.

Val was then at the height of his powers,

surrounded by adoring Japanese fans

and behaving, I thought,

very arrogantly indeed towards them.

And val had decided that his life was too busy to devote

as long we needed him for to do Dr. Moreau.

Val demanded 40 percent fewer shooting days.

I was told in no uncertain terms

that after the Bruce Willis debacle

that if val left the ship,

new line would probably close the project down,

and we'd go back and turn around.

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 remembered 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 breath

and something banging on the door...

Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam...

The door seemed to be trembling and shivering,

and yet at the same time, I was really being crushed

or suffocated, in the bed.

It was a very unpleasant nightmare,

what they call 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.

So I think he'd been getting a bit of a hard time from val.

Val calls up Mike DeLuca and says,

"I want to talk to you,"

and he sets a 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 talkina val