[MUSIC]
- 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 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 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 best 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 twatting 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,
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 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
I have ever worked with and a very fine man.
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 copy
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. 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 [ch-ch]
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 onboard.
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 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 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 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 A to B
continued throughout the production.
Meetings would happen without me,
no one 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 null 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 talking Val
into switching roles with the James Woods' character,
to no longer being the lead man,
but playing the part of the Moreau's apprentice
or his sidekick instead,
which automatically gave him 40 percent fewer shooting days.
It meant that 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 on taking the summer off,
and I kind of got a sudden call
from my agent at the time, Arnold Rifkin,
and there were this there movie they were doing --
I was familiar with the H.G. Wells 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 of it,
as a half-joke I said,
"Well, we better put in a contingency
of a million and a half for another director,
because I don't think this is going to 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 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.
There was just absolute pristine beauty.
- I thought Richard's script was fantastic.
And here was this guy with long, black hair,
a white Panama hat, a white linen suit,
and I believe sand shoes, carrying a carpet bag,
and 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,
it was felt that Richard was feeling quite isolated
and that within the storyboard process,
he'd actually have somebody he knew quite well
who he could work with
and sort of act or sort of solve
the stresses he may have been under.
- We then started going after the beast-people.
- Hands down, the worst audition that I had ever done,
had ever been involved in,
had to walk around making stupid animal noises --
pigs, all that kind of stuff,
um, I said these stupid lines.
There was just 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 sent me for anything like that again.
That was shit.
This is not acting, blah, blah, blah, blah."
Then I got a phone call a couple of...about two weeks later
from the actual makeup, Stan Winston's makeup 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 short people playing animals that were short.
There was fat people, thin people.
The prosthetics then enhanced their particular physicality's.
The pig-women had their real breasts out
and then a sows three other pairs of breasts
prosthetically underneath their own,
and there was some very bizarre looking creature around.
- We had the shortest man on earth,
Nelson de la Rosa,
who we came across in the daytime TV show
in Santo Domingo, Dancing in the Mahow Mahow.
- 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.
We saw him, and we were like, wow,
he would be great to do monster makeup on.
So called up his agent, and me and a friend of mine
got to go to the Dominican Republic
to life cast him, to body cast him.
Come to find out like he was 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, 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 animals,
on all fours,
like pigs being real pigs
and the fact that they're rooting
and the sounds they make
and getting to know as much as possible
about the real animal,
and we'd have stuff like...
The most immediately visual one, I guess,
is the guy playing the hyena.
If you look at their backbone and everything,
they've got that sort of primeval 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 Trobriand 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,
it was a guy called David Hudson,
as the main go-between with the aboriginal community.
- He was very interested in who I was
and aboriginal language, and the didgeridoo,
and just culture in general.
You've got to understand where this bloke's coming from.
He comes from London.
He's in now rain forest country.
He's on the Great Barrier Reef,
but we all got on very well Richard and I,
he was very, very easy to work with.
His direction was precise.
- He was definitely very passionate about the picture.
- He showed me all the props, I mean, "Look at this.
You know, this is my movie. Isn't it cool?"
When people say he's crazy,
I actually experienced Richard as really a nice,
warmhearted guy,
like a kid that was so happy that his dream came true.
He was like a kid in a candy store.
- He was great.
He was affable, and he was clearly enthusiastic.
He was young. He was green.
- He was so happy, you know,
just was grinning ear to ear and just like
"Oh, I can't wait to get started."
It was really...that was the best part
of that film, definitely.
- I could see that he liked what I was doing
during the rehearsal and um, 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 the suburbs of Cairns
in north Queensland,
a fabulous house, like a tree house.
It was all wood with branches sprouting out
and walkways going here and a fantastic place,
but he would hardly ever come out of it.
- He wouldn't really interact with us in the normal way
he would do in pre-production.
He would come on surveys and talk to people,
but as a leader and as a director,
he really didn't get involved.
He stayed in his house.
- We'd have to drag him to look at locations
and even meetings.
He wouldn't come to meetings,
and Tim Zinneman, the producer,
used to send me around to try and drag him back,
because I had the closest rapport with him, I guess.
We were friends.
I really liked the guy a lot, but I kept saying to him,
"Hey, Richard, you've got to go to meetings
if you're going to make this movie," and he --
"Well, can't they come around here?"
and I'd say, "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 artist
do the drawings for the scene
and have them Xerox'd,
and then he'd give them to the crew
as a way of communicating,
as opposed to having production meetings.
- I think 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 thought they were exactly clear.
- What I was lead to believe was that they were pretty much
behind him, you know,
and 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 he was to come directly from that set to Dr. 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 make it for Day 1,
in fact, knowing he wouldn't make it for Day 1
and whether he'd 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
and to start with the boat scenes
and the stuff that happens before they get to the island
in the hope that by the time we island
and got to the lab scenes,
well, then a Dr. Moreau would be found.
- Up until the time I left, everything was still in place,
but Richard had already said
that he felt then that the project
was going to be taken away from him.
- I no longer had any real 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
and the more unavailable he made himself.
- It was clear quickly that he might have been
in over his head.
You know, not because of anything,
except a lot of forces that were not aligned for him.
- Things 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 lamp shade.
She reached in to switch the lamp shade on,
and it bit her hand, which caused her flesh to melt.
It was incurable.
Back in London, Skip, the soothy 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,
that he had accidentally become irradiated
during his experiments,
but what happened was that his bones started to crumble.
One morning his hip dislocated,
and his leg literally popped out of the socket.
In hospital when they operated,
he then caught necrotizing fasciitis,
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 been just been struck by lightning,
and three fire balls had rolled through the lounge.
One jumped in the telephone, one jumped in the Hi-Fi system,
and she says the other one went out the cat door.
Shortly before, her next-door neighbors claimed they saw
a hyena run across the road.
Again, a hyena in Ireland doesn't make any kind of sense.
I noticed for the first time that the accommodation
where we were staying had hyena print wallpaper.
That the wallpaper was kind of looking at me
with a hungry kind of look in its eye.
The relationship with Val also became tense.
This started with different attempts to read the script.
- We all met at Richard's house,
and we're trying it do this first scene.
So I start, you know, being all feared
and this like Tempest thing,
and Val is just there sitting there,
smoking a cigarette,
"Wait, is this it? No. Wait, wait.
We can always cut it down, but he's still talking.
Okay, okay.
Is this it? Is this it?
He's saying all that?
He's saying all -- and this the first scene in the movie,
and he's saying all that?
Okay. Okay."
So I already know that 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 M'Ling
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 don't buy it, and you know what,
I don't need an assistant."
And Richard stood his ground and 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 the set.
He was just kind of a bit rude and abrasive.
He...that was his character, though,
so ergo maybe that was the way he prepared to be an asshole,
to, you know act like one off camera.
- So we started having strange, petty disagreements.
- We were shooting on a pier dock,
and it was one of these scenes that had
endless been sketched and re-sketched.
- Richard says "Okay. So let's do this,"
and Kilmer said, "Okay. One second.
One second.
I would like to know how you're going to cut this together."
And Richard said, "Well, you know,
the Prendick's character, he's in the ship,
and he's going to get hit on the head.
We don't know who hit him, and we just cut to black.
Camera goes back, and you look at him,
and you're like "What are you doing on my ship?"
or something like that, you know.
And then Val, always with a cigarette,
always really super cool.
I'm not even being sarcastic.
He was always really cool, you know, just
"Yeah.
That's not going to work, man."
So Richard, you know, "It's like a classic thing.
Someone gets hit, and 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, listening to this,
and I could I'm like, "Oh my god."
I really felt for Richard because I thought this is --
this is not really --
I mean, this is not about the shoot anymore.
This is a power game.
- I think at that point Richard just completely lost it
and forgot all about the sketches
and really couldn't --
He was having a hard time getting through the day.
- I think it was like, late in the movie,
the scene we were shooting.
I 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 remember, no one was really telling me anything.
They would just kind of be like "Okay. Go out.
Work your way up there," and, you know,
then I just would find myself just kind of
making up stuff to do.
- He probably would have needed a good first AD
that does all these things for him
so that he can have his vision
so that he doesn't have to get into these fights, you know.
But then nobody helped him.
- That as my instinct always to try to find the constituency
that would support him,
and ultimately, I found that there was no one.
- Reports started coming back from 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 halls and "Did you hear about" --
"Oh my god, did you hear that Richard Stanley climbed
into a tree today and wouldn't come down?"
- What? This was...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 5:00 a.m. and 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 what -- we hope that we're going to make back
our money because Kilmer is in
it and now that'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,
reassured 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 off the beach
and move out of here,
and I noticed that the creek was starting to rise
and that the rain got heavier and heavier and heavier.
And I thought, "It couldn't rise that much, could it?"
Well, it did,
and four hours later
the set was completely up to Pacific Ocean.
We were floundering around on the sea with Richard,
not really knowing what was going on
or maybe was knowing what was going on
but not able to convey his directing to the right people.
- It became increasingly obvious
that we couldn't really do anything;
that the only weather-cover sets that 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.
- Rob Morrow was in the captain's cabin of the ship,
talking by a radio phone to his agent in L.A.
screaming to "Get me off this laming picture."
- In those four days,
I started to sending SOS's to my lawyer saying
"This is looking weird.
I mean, 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,
et cetera, et cetera," 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.
You -- I don't know what to do.
I want to get 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 this.
I think there was a part of several people's attitude
"Let's just see how far this can go."
- Richard was really bad on these days.
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 was just going by and nothing's really happening
and finally I see Richard walking around
and I'm like "Hey, Richard, what's going on?"
And he's frantically smoking his cigarette, right,
and he's like "You know, 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?"
You know.
- The order finally come back from New Line
down to...down to us to wait.
Basically, the production was put on hold,
which was the prelude to the end.
- I happened 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 I must say I did agree because it wasn't working,
and so I then called Mike DeLuca at New Line
and woke him up at 4:00 in the morning or something
and told him my sad story.
And he was kind of screaming at me,
and he said, "Well, what do you want me to do?"
And I said, "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.
That was the only time in my career
that I ever had the responsibility
of changing a director,
and it was very difficult.
- It wasn't handled well at all.
Sort of the call went to his agent
and was done that way, sort of.
Not the manly way, you might say.
- They had to do it, I suppose.
I kind of felt like I was on his side,
and I could feel that they had as well and thought
"I'd better be careful, or they'll be firing me as well."
- Fairuza, realizing what happened,
leapt up and gave an amazing speech to Tim,
the line producer,
which explained 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 with 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
and 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...I don't remember how I got there.
- And the driver then drove her clear across the country.
And 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 the 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 was the project running.
I got sacked from that because while it was all in limbo,
Fairuza had contacted me and said,
you know, "What are you doing?
Do you want to come to Sidney?"
I'm like "Sure. Let's go."
And when I got back the production didn't know;
so I had committed some film faux pa.
- 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 it was a mess.
- He was very paranoid.
He was very freaked out.
I don't think he was sleeping, I mean, beyond upset.
- He had become quite immersed in the whole project,
to the point where he was living and breathing Moreau
and then literally just have that murdered.
I think he went a little 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 shredding documents.
I was a little vindictive.
I'd also wanted to make it particularly hard them
to make that film.
- In my mind, I was going to leave with him
and that lawyers were going to be hired
and that all the actors would walk,
and we would shut the production down,
because everyone would be loyal to him.
- New Line eventually 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, 40 kilometers of the location.
- We waited for ages for Richard to come out of his bungalow.
I had been told from the production office
just to make sure that he gets on this plane.
Yeah, I remember that, dropping him at the airport
like I thought I'd been told was 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 is Richard Stanley?"
- I think he had a ticket home from them,
and he didn't use it,
and they knew nobody was on the plane.
He was supposed to be on the plane out of there,
and he wasn't.
- Suddenly, he was this missing person.
So they're just assuming...we totally fucked this person over
so that must mean there must be some revenge motive
to do something.
- I think he made a few threats on his way out.
- I think he had, yeah.
- I had been told that some of his aboriginal friends
had placed rocks around the location to wish us bad luck.
- A casual remark by Grace Walker
during one of the reckies
about how if New Line tries to throw us out of here,
we could always blow the whole place up,
had found its way back to New Line
who were actually 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 here, what does that mean for us?
Are we going to 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 really 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 see what happens.
- They had to have the same cast because of the makeup effects.
They did 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 ever work 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 met John Frankenheimer
at 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 again.
- All the other directors turned it down.
They went to Philip Hoffman. 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 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...
He was a good filmmaker, a 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.
I mean, his background was he knew how to make a movie.
That's all he cared about.
- A movie about monsters wasn't exactly John's...
John would probably not have picked that one out
if they said, "Here. ten movies,
which one do you want to direct?"
This one would not 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, "So what can we do?"
and his wife said, "Well, you just ask them 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.
Well, get out a map. Where is this?
And I got a rainfall map, and I'm thinking rain?
I'm an AD. I've got to shoot,
and I'm looking, and it's color-coded,
and it gets bluer as it gets to be rain,
and then there's this one dot,
little pencil, the size of an eraser head,
purple, as dark as it possibly could be,
and I looked closely at the map, and that's where we were going.
And I mean, 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, 40, 55 minutes
on these little roads.
I mean, five minutes away from the hotel,
and we're in jungle.
You're looking at jungle.
But 55 miles away, you're also looking at jungle.
When you're in the jungle, what do you see? Jungle.
And it's like...okay.
Well, we had to plant some of this too,
because it's a banana plantation, oh god.
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? Okay."
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 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 flack 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 searched for months to find this particular location
that we carved out.
We had carved it out of the rain forest.
- We had one week to prep.
One we week 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 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 this story?
Is there a certain vision?"
and he's like "Marco, vision, that's an overused word.
I'm telling you, it's not about a vision.
It's about, I'm trying to tell a story here, okay."
"I mean, yeah, how are you going to tell this story?"
"Oh, we're going to see. I brought in my own writer."
So I'm like, okay, it's going to be a different movie,
I guess, now.
- Initially, he's like "Listen, I've just been brought in.
I don't 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,
and it changed to being screamed at.
This man hated my guts.
- But Frankenheimer was a freak.
He was a real freak.
I was on a production run and had to drop some new script
around his place one night and, you know,
they gave me the script, and 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 all right. "All right, dude.
Here's your script, man."
- The first week we went pretty slow
because we were still sorting things out.
Script pages were coming in on the fax from the U.S.,
and then we finally brought out a writer
and then another writer.
- There was a writer there all the time being like,
"Why don't we --"
"Oh, that's a great idea. Yeah, let's do that."
"Oh god, 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 times in my life.
I came in, you know, somebody else got fired,
and I rescued their movie.
And it turned -- both times it turned out well.
So let's see how this one goes."
- No bull shit. Let's not muck around.
Let's get it happening.
Little did he know...he... Things...
Nothing really changed in terms of efficiency
when he got there.
I was only meant to be there three, four weeks.
I was there for like six months.
It was great.
- If I knew 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, middle, and an end.
- Everyone knew it was a total 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 is...can be very strong,
and if he has a disliking towards someone,
he would just let 'em 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.
You know, he would bark out his orders,
and he was just this rough, tough guy,
and you could imitate him.
- Things are going to change around here.
- "Man, you're on Camera 1,
and Camera 2, you better be ready to catch it the second..."
- "And then you're got to throw the torch,
and the whole thing goes up into flames."
- He wanted people to do their jobs,
you know, and that...from the guys doing to the lighting
to 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
it was the worst crew he had ever seen
and he wanted his American crew.
- And the crew,
which they do a lot in a lot of shoots
and still do is make up crew t-shirts.
The t-shirt had on it, as a quote
which was a quote from the movie one of the dialogs of 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 meant,
because at one stage he called me, and 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...a didgeridoo is a sacred instrument to me
and to aboriginal peoples.
- He didn't seem like he particularly
wanted to be 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, "But, you know, 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 then about a week after he was due to report,
he did show up,
and then John was uncharacteristically
very nervous.
- And everybody's all "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
3:00 in the afternoon.
He said, "Well, I'm ready. Ready to shoot," so "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.
This really thick jungle.
- In the scene he was in a palanquin.
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 cheese cloth,
like a very, very thin linen
that he'd wrapped around himself like a diaper.
He covered himself in white paint.
- Don't you feel the heat?
Because I do.
I can't...I can't tolerate the sun.
- It was explained that
the white face was kind of a makeup
that he only wore out in the sun.
So I talked to Frankenheimer and asked
if the dialect he used 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. If you want to direct the film,"
he banned me from the set for questioning this.
- The whole white-faced thing was...
Was that mad or was that genius?
Because the whole whiteface, wearing sun glasses
meant that Marlon Brando's stand-in
could do quite a lot of the picture for him.
- Brando is in the palanquin
and he says, "You know, John,
I think we need some peacock feathers behind my head.
Wouldn't it look better if we had some peacock feathers?"
And out of the corner of my eye, I see the art director,
who's a wonderful guy who could do anything,
running like hell to his car.
And so everybody then sat around again,
and we're waiting for peacock feathers
in the middle of nowhere,
and then about 20 minutes later, the...
Gracie, I think, was his name -- came roaring back in,
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,
out by a farm somewhere, he'd remembered seeing it,
and he leapt on the peacock and pulled all the feathers out.
- He was just delighted by everyone,
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 a bison.
Someone else was dressed as a monkey.
So we although we feel we met Marlon Brando,
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.
- A typical day with Marlon.
Marlon would arrive...he would arrive at 9:00 o'clock,
and he would go into the trailer
and then John would go in there and start talking to him,
and the executives would stand around in a circle
and scour and scowl
and look down and not know what to do.
Hours went by, maybe an hour, half an hour before lunch,
they would come out, and they would tour the set,
and talked about the scene we're about to shoot,
and Marlon would amend 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 that animal-people
should get together,
and there should be a grand celebration,
like a Bar Mitzvah,"
and I thought he's fucking with them.
- He was always playing with the idea of being hot,
and overheated.
He wanted an ice bucket on top of his head.
- Frankenheimer says,
"What? An ice bucket on your head?"
He said, "Yes.
Something to keep my head warm,
because it is so hot, you know."
So Johnny, the prop guy, found a --
it was a sauce pan or something,
and we cut the bottom out of it,
and it fitted on his head perfectly.
And then Fairuza Balk's character tips the ice in.
No one ever knew that he wanted ice
or an ice bucket on his head so we had to make it quickly.
- You had to just keep taking away problems
that he created in order to put the work off
and then finally you got the work.
- This one day I said, "Can we talk?"
And he said, "What is it, dear?"
And I said, "I don't know.
Just in terms of our characters and how they relate.
I'd like 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 sense; so why worry?
You know, just relax. Just do what you're doing.
You're beautiful, don't worry about it.
And I said, "But I mean, how the characters relate.
Isn't there?"
"Nah, I didn't read the script."
- He never would learn his lines,
and he had Caroline, his assistant,
read lines from the trailer into this little ear piece.
And I remember one time a take was going rather smoothly,
and then he stopped in the middle of it said,
"God damn it, Caroline, I told you not to act."
- Frankenheimer actually called me at one point.
Again, it was one of those "You don't know me,
but I have to talk to the head of the company."
I said, "What is it?"
He said, "This is complete insanity here,
and I have to tell you I've dealt with some very,
very difficult actors in my life,
but I have never ever dealt with somebody
like Marlon Brando.
We're driving and he stops the car and says,
"Let's fuck Bob Shaye."
And I said...this is John saying to me
"Well, why?
He seems like a pretty nice guy,
why should we do that?"
He said, "Well, he doesn't know what he's doing,
and what I think we should do is just close down the production,
and you and I are going to 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, he takes off his hat,
and he's actually 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.
- Brando looked at me and was like, "Oh, okay.
So you are the German actor; right?"
"Yes, I'm the German actor."
"I do talk some German.
[UNINTELLIGIBLE]."
I had no idea -- Not German; right?
So I said, "Mr. Brando, I'm sorry.
I did not understand that."
He said, "You are German; right?"
"Yes, I'm German,"
"[UNINTELLIGIBLE]"
"Ah, 'katze' is cat and 'dach' is roof;
so you are talking about
the cat on the hot tin roof; right?"
"No.
[UNINTELLIGIBLE]."
"Ah, okay. I got it."
And I have no idea what he was talking about.
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 made something up.
I don't think know, and Brando's like "Exactly.
He talks better German than you."
"Mr. Brando, we need you on the set."
"I've got to go now."
Last time I talked to him.
Never talked to him again; right?
And the next thing I heard actually is that he actually
did something very similar to Nelson de la Rosa.
"Oh, you're the Spanish actor?"
"Si, Señor."
"So I do speak some Spanish
[UNINTELLIGIBLE]."
"Si, Señor."
I love this guy.
I want this guy in every scene, every scene with me,
every scene."
Zinnemann, "Sorry, Mr. Brando.
No, we can't do that because he is not an actor."
"I teach him how to act."
"Okay, you know, but he doesn't speak English."
"Ah, just dub him."
"I mean, but you know,
Marco Hofschneider 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, Brando gave him the part, but man,
you know, I was I thought I had 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, [UNINTELLIGIBLE] he talked like this as well
[UNINTELLIGIBLE]
and he would draw you pictures.
and the pictures were really kind of 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," 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 just need to interpret
so that he's part of whatever's happening,"
and she said,
"Nelson wants to know what you're doing later.
Do want to come around to his room?"
"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 Cairns in the nightclubs.
They'd be out queueing up and looking for ID for people,
and then they'd see him, and on he'd go,
but 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,
and he'd get down but yeah, he was very sexual.
- But even Nelson started acting up,
once Marlon decided he loved him.
- We were standing in the elevator at one point,
and I said, "Hey, Nelson. How was your day?"
"Shut up,"
and he actually hit me in the nuts.
And I'm like "Oh, fuck," and I can't do anything.
It's like if somebody would see you like kicking 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,
saying, "I want to get 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 on top
of 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 when the whole Mini-Me thing developed,
which has gone into South Park,
with Marlon 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 going to 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 defense
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."
And I was like, "Oh, nice. Thank you."
"Yeah, just to make one thing clear, yeah.
If it's ever going to be between you and me,
it's going to be me,"
and then he walked away.
- Val was next to the camera, 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 side burns
had grown, you know, he hadn't been trimming;
so they were scraggly, and the guy's sitting there,
and Val was smoking a cigarette,
and he starts to burn the ends of this guy's hair,
during the take.
- I think that one of the triggers
that sort of started the crew to really not put up with any shit,
so to speak.
- Marlon, I guess, did not like Kilmer,
was not a fan anyway.
There was one scene where Marlon and Kilmer
were going to 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've got reefs coming out of 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 the set one day,
I remember him saying to a few of us standing around,
"If I was to direct 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.
- I think he started getting depressed at some points.
I would go and cheer him up.
On night shoots, I would go find him,
and we would chat a little bit.
- We had a late call. It was a night shoot.
We got everybody, all the beast-people,
in their makeups.
We're all truckin' out to set.
We're out, sitting around, and we're sitting around,
and nothing's happening.
Finally, we corral the AP, and we're just like,
"What's happening? What's going?"
He's like "Well, Marlon won't come out of his trailer
until Val comes out of his trailer,
and Val won't come out of his trailer
until Marlon comes out of his trailer,
and we're like "Oh, you've got to be kidding me?"
- The actors were disheartened.
We had three-and-a-half hour makeups.
You didn't know if they were going to be shot,
but you still had to do your best work,
because we couldn't leave any edges up or anything like that.
You still had to put in a major effort,
and then the actors go out in the sun and get shot.
- Sometimes they didn't get shot at all. Did they?
Most of the time they didn't get shot.
- For days and days when you're sitting around in a tent
waiting for Brando and Kilmer to decide whether they're
going to shoot anything that day.
Night shoots would finish with huge alcohols,
and bottles of spirits.
At 7:00 in the morning,
we were retiring back to someone's room for the morning.
We were being paid above minimum to work on a major feature film.
We were paid very healthy per diems
to stay in a very nice hotel.
And I remember with my per diems.
One week, I bought a huge Scalextric racetrack,
and other people were buying equally ridiculous things,
and every person's room towards the end
became like a different place to go visit
and a different place to go and play.
- We'd quite often would make up films
or sing songs or a lot of chess playing.
- There was lot of sex going on
between people who shouldn't be 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 that we actually forgot
that we had normal lives elsewhere.
This became our normality.
- At one time I had ten extras.
As soon as John arrived, and his comment,
I think, was "I can't make this picture with ten extras.
I want a hundred."
And suddenly it was like "Oh my god."
- They advertised for feral's and hippies
and people with amputations
and anything they could work with to make like,
a bunch of monsters.
- 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 guitars.
- There'd be fire eaters and people on stilts
and people 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. I was working as an extra now
so I was working with this friend of mine, Dano.
He was part of the household we were living in,
and basically, Dano, he would just come and go from Cairns
and sort of spend his times about and making didgeridoos.
He was back from this fruit farm,
this organic fruit farm, out in the tablelands.
He just sort of said, "Oh, yeah.
This guy out there, this crazy guy
that's just raving about how Val Kilmer's ruined his life,
and he's just out there smoking loads of pot",
and I was going, "what", and all of a sudden,
I was listening to what he was saying and going,
"just say that again", and I saying,
"Oh, fuck, he's talking about Richard."
- During that time, I ended up staying
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, Halcyon weather,
coconuts, cassava, yam, and fish in the river.
So, yeah, I got left in isolation.
And then one night saw a light in the forest further down river
and realized that there were other people down there,
camping down there.
And the next morning I walked down the river,
and discovered that they were extras from
The Island of Dr. Moreau.
- I was like, "Dude, we've got to go and get him,
because everyone is looking for him."
We walk up this river.
There is a big cast-iron bathtub
sort of by the side of the river with a fire underneath it;
so someone was heating up some water to have a bath,
and it's Richard.
Dano and I just kind of walked up said,
"Dude, what are you doing?" and "Come with us."
- I explained that if I did that,
I would be breaking contract
and that would mean that New Line could technically
refuse to pay me a dime,
and I was currently in negotiation with them,
and 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 back to Cairns.
No one from the house let the secret out that he was there,
that was all pretty tight,
because we knew 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 like, "Okay, let's just sit back and watch
what this maniac is going to do."
- I'd come home with a script with the new color pages in it
and amendments, and Richard was there waiting for me
with a massive joint
and sort of ripped into the damage
they'd done to his script, you know.
- And then he throws a wobbly to me.
He says to me "Dave," he says,
"I want to get onto the set."
And I was going
"And how do you envision 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 dog-man outfit,
which is a some kind of Stan Winston original
now 20 years on fallen prey to
the leprosy that afflicts foam latex.
But yeah, it was a full head, dog man-mask,
and it came with a chilaba and claws.
- He got changed in the van so that no one saw him,
and we all sort of got out with our costumes on,
these latex beast masks and everything.
And then we sort of like -- maybe we just sat there and
smoked like a big fat joint for good luck
and away he went and sort of merged 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 would never do it.
I kept watching him, and he would never take his head off,
and I thought "That guy's nuts."
I started to think, "Well, he's going to just die."
- There were 300 extras in this tent,
but Richard was the only one that wasn't taking his mask off.
- He was the bull dog-man,
and he did this great job of jumping around
and doing this weird stuff, and I looked to him and said,
"That was really great," and he goes "Oh, thank you."
"I really enjoyed watching you, it was a nice job."
and he said, "Oh, thank you."
and he had a completely different accent
than anybody else.
And then I started to wonder.
- And I think that once that rumor started,
that Richard Stanley was in the background that,
I think, that just sort of grew into stories
about Richard Stanley and how he wanted
to sabotage the shoot.
- I did hear about it.
Look, maybe, I don't know.
It was the tropics, and maybe he went a bit tropo.
- They'd been shitting themselves leading up to that
thinking Richard's out there somewhere,
and they imagined him doing some sort of sabotage sort of thing.
But when it came to it, there was no...
You know, we just drove into set with him in the car.
There was no security really.
- There were a whole lot of extras on set this night,
and it was where we were meant to be lighting
Dr. Moreau'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,
probably 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 up 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 and being destructive
and vindictive in the background,
but as it was part of the movie, it was okay.
- See, if he really was tropo,
he could have burned the whole set down,
then and there.
That would have been crazy cool.
- And I had the privileged position of being able to see
what was going on but at the same time
the very 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 creative figure to dog.
- Fortunately, John Frankenheimer was
unbelievably professional, a real trooper kind of guy.
He really understood what the issues were
and did wrangle Marlo
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 a film at all.
- My hopes were really high, you know,
major picture, great role.
I really thought this is cool. It's going to be great.
And I was very disappointed by all the things that happened.
I mean, basically, they gave me a great part.
I had a director that liked me and that respected me to,
you know, to basically 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'm damn curious to...
I wish we could go back in time or have an alternate universe
where Richard gets to direct his movie.
- I think if Richard had made the film for $8 million
with good actors and people that were under his direction,
he's a good director.
- I think he's a very bright guy.
He had 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 a terrific independent company,
backed by people who really believed in him.
- Basically, after Moreau, he vanished in the wilderness,
and I didn't know what became of him.
- I never heard from him again.
I often wondered what happened to Richard Stanley.
- The perception of me in Hollywood at that point in time
was I no longer existed.
My agent never returned any of my phone calls
from the time 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 of 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 the camera.
I just...it makes me want to scream."
- Marlon Brando told me
that everyone in the industry were hyenas.
That I should try to steer clear of them
and try to make a better life for myself.
Like the lead character in Dr. Moreau,
I've found myself increasingly unable to fit in
with the so-called real world,
and I find 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 were a bunch of pagans and heretics
who were 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.
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 dog-men.
Maybe I won't have a whole lost civilization
or try to completely monkey wrench
21st century culture and technology in the same way,
maybe something a little bit more modest
but still red and tooth and claw would seem in order.
- You know, it's 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 awesome to see how much effort goes into making
an absolute stinker, you know.
Rock n' roll.