August 16, 2022 • 50 mins
Richard Stanley is a South African filmmaker, known for his boundary-pushing work in the horror and science fiction genres. Stanley grew up in apartheid-era South Africa, studying anthropology and filming tribal dance and initiation rituals. In the 90s, he directed the horror features Hardware and Dust Devil. He was then famously fired from an adaptation of The Island of Dr. Moreau starring Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer after only three days on set, an event which later became the subject of the documentary, Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau. Stanley went on to direct several documentaries and returned to narrative film in 2019 with Color Out of Space starring Nicolas Cage. Richard Stanley and Alec discuss Stanley’s upbringing in South Africa, what it’s like directing Marlon Brando and his biggest regrets from the failed Moreau production.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from My Heart Radio. South African filmmaker Richard Stanley
is hard to define, part anthropologist, part journalist, and part
Hollywood outsider, making boundary pushing films. Stanley grew up in
apartheid South Africa, shooting tribal dances and rituals, and later
(00:26):
filming in war torn Afghanistan, choices that have greatly informed
his perspective. In the nineties, he wrote and directed the
film's Hardware and Dust Devil, blending the science fiction and
horror genres. His next film was the third adaptation of H. G.
Wells novel The Island of Dr Moreau, a terrifying morality
(00:49):
play on scientific ethics, starring Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer.
The troubled production went quickly downhill, and Stanley was removed
from the project only three days in. The chaos was
captured in the documentary Lost Soul, The Doomed Journey of
Richard Stanley's The Island of Dr Moreau. Following the fallout,
(01:12):
Stanley produced several documentary films and covered events in Rwanda
and Uganda. He returned to mainstream movie making with the
two thousand nineteen film Color Out of Space and Escalating
Extraterrestrial Spiral, based on the HP Lovecraft short story and
starring Nicholas Cage. Richard Stanley is one of the most
(01:35):
intelligent and articulate filmmakers I've ever met, and articulate about
the actual work itself. So I wanted to know how
with such an interesting background, Stanley first found his way
to film. I started messing around with some super eight
cameras from early childhood. I think it wanted into my life.
(01:58):
When I was about four years old, Dad brought home
a sixteen millimeter Prince of King kong um Um kind
of fancied himself as a filmmaker and there was sixteen
million meter equipment lying around and I remember playing on
I say, as a toddler, and cong caught my attention
very early, and I kind of it was a gateway
(02:19):
drug to the Ray Harry Housing movies. And by the
time I was ten, I was messing around with claymation
dinosaurs like a lot of other kids. Have you know
that I ordered a copy of the film Fearlessly Scrapbook.
That's why Harry completely important. Yeah, I ordered a copy
from online today, We're inspired by you. The Ray Harry
(02:42):
House and the film Fantasy scrap Book was really the
first time I saw raised artwork, as well as the
drawings by Willis O'Brien and Mario Laranaga and some of
the other folks. And it's just such incredible work that
even in black and white reproductions, I was mesmerized at
an early age. I see my own children. So we
have quite a few kids running around, and my son
(03:05):
a couple of them have four boys and two girls,
and the oldest son who's about six. When I think
about it, and I get honest about it, I shouldn't
be surprised by his fascination with all things horror. He
wants to watch Alien, and he wants to watch the
monster come shooting out of John Hurts Thorax in the
(03:25):
middle of Alien, and he and and he loves and
when I think about when you mentioned Harry Housing in
this book. When I was a child, I had a friend,
my best friend, and his brother, Kevin and Keith Cornelius
lived behind me, and they would subscribe to Famous Monsters
of Filmland magazine. Famous Monsters was hugely significant, absolutely massive.
(03:49):
I saw my first copy when I was four years old.
Famous Monsters and the other warrant titles Creepy and Erie
and Vampirella that came at the same time in the
late sixties early seventies, just had covers that was so
bright and so i popping that they completely jumped off
the stands into your life and my family. We didn't
have the money, we didn't have the resources to buy,
(04:12):
but they would buy, like the Latex, like the rubber claws,
the hands of the creature of the Black Lagoon. They'd
buy Frankenstein's sutured hands. They'd get the headpiece with the
bolts for Frankenstein. They get and we would make movies.
He had a Brownie, he had a little Super eight,
and we go in the background. We would take two
picnic benches and we laid them on their side so
(04:34):
that the legs of the bench were there, and for
a child, you could lay down in between, and we'd
put some sheets or towels down and that was the
casket of Dracula. We made a casket for Dracula, and
we'd see the hand come up and gripped the side
of the coffin. Slowly. We'd film We're obsessed and we
were very young, we were six and seven, with the
(04:55):
maccabb and all that other stuff. And I'm wondering, why
do you think, I mean a lot of kids just
love that. Is it just the drama? I guess so.
And there's also a sense of taboo about it. Um.
The harder that people try to sense of things or
take things away from you, the more it bestows value,
and the more you feel that you actually need them.
I mean, to some extent, horror movies were never any
(05:16):
fun anymore after I was old enough to watch them.
Do you understand what they were trying to do to you? Yeah?
At the moment you hit eighteen, you've got other concerns.
There's a woman in your life, and you have to
make money, and life goes out. But and somehow it's
not important. But up to that point there a kind
of a forbidden fruit in a way. They also speak
(05:38):
some kind of truth that you can't get from the
adults or the school teachers. I think that my kids,
if they were like me, it was forbidden And it
was also just the chance to completely occupy someone that
was not you. You know, you really could play a character.
But to get back to um, your you go to
the South African College of Music. Correct well, I got
(06:01):
I got a job there basically shooting for their archival
section when I was a teenager who had got me
posted to some of them what they used to call
the homeland states in Apartheite era South Africa. I should
make a note that growing up in Apartheite era South Africa,
which was essentially a police state, the horror movies, in
(06:24):
the genre movies and particularly the horror comics of that
period of the nineties seventies were really the place that
I acquired my social conscience from. It definitely didn't come
from my school teachers, or from the government, or from
my parents, God bless their souls. All of that was
coming from the comic book writers and California in places
(06:45):
who are doing a lot of LSD at that point
in time, and who were writing yeah, super challenging material
or very politicized at that point in time, and all
of it came through UM, through the genre. So I
was super glad for that. Basically ended up was a
cameraman in UM in the Truant sky shooting tribal dance
(07:06):
and initiation rituals, which was another area that's always drawn me.
If it hadn't been for the regrettable geopolitical circumstances, I
think I might have stayed in South Africa and become
an anthropologist. When we know in your childhood, when you're
growing up your mother was an English anthropologist and you
moved to South Africa. Was it Cape Town? Is at
(07:28):
the city you grew up in? Yeah, I grew up
in Cape Town. When my mom initially quit England and
went to Africa, she went first to m Zimbabwe. She
went to Bulawayo first because it had the word away
in it. It was a sufficiently long way from hub. Yeah,
post war England. She just wanted to get the hell out,
more or less pected a random but because she trailed
(07:51):
with her an interest in witchcraft and in the fairy culture,
the fairy folklore of the West Country, I think she
um I saw a side of Africa that the other
um colonial um European settlers were oblivious to. She pursued
that doggedly and ended up writing a cornerstone book on
(08:13):
African mythology. But accordingly, in the first few years of
my life, for the first three or four years she
was dashing around to one bunch of tribal people after another,
and always trying to find the sangoma or the the
traditional healer. Um I guess instilled a set of values
in me where I came to see these people as
(08:35):
figures of extraordinary value and power. What about your dad?
What did he do? He was basically a travel writer.
UH had a gig for UM mobile oil that ready
worked for him where he was writing UM kind of
little travel brochure things for mobile and return for free
(08:56):
gasoline and doing star rating guides for hotels and campsites.
So that kept him on the move and kept the
gas tankful. That's pretty much yeah, what he did the
whole of his life. Now, um, when you go and
shoot the tribal dances and initiation which was which was
did you accompany your mother? Were you working with your mother? Then?
(09:17):
Now I was out of my own by the time
I actually got to start shooting material in the tran
sky and the other Homeland places. This was when I
was in my early teens, and my mom's interest in
tribal witchcraft and tribal magic um I guess um influenced
me hugely, mostly because it was something that none of
the other kids had any real interest, and when I
(09:40):
went to when I was old enough to go to
school and mix with um other European kids, I was
shocked to find that they didn't believe in any of
the stuff or had only the the most horrifying kind
of prejudiced notions about it. Now, when you're there, described
briefly if you can, about these tribal dances in initiation rituals.
(10:02):
And how did what I'm assuming was the richness on
any level style, wardrobe, music, the choreography itself. How did
this What effect did this have on you in terms
of your own film career? Did you bring some of
the things you observed to your other films? Almost certainly,
and in a way it actually pushed me into filmmaking.
(10:24):
At the at the top, I wasn't sure I wanted
to be a filmmaker. But the more time I hung
out in the on the wrong side of the tracks
in South Africa with long hair and a camera, the
more trouble I got into was the arm authorities, and
the more I was construed as basically having a political
context because that's the only way they saw things back there,
(10:46):
and eventually did to me basically fleeing the country, Um
when I ended up finding asylum in London and in England. Um,
the only thing I had to show for myself was
a bunch of deeply weirdly dressed people, um dancing and
doing strange things a number of yeah, spectacular locations, which
(11:08):
I was eventually able to translate into a job making
music videos for the Yeah, the music business. It gave
me an end, you know what I was going to say.
Then at some point you go and make music videos
for Public Image limited s Express Noir Desire. These are
all African. Ban's South African. These are British bad Son.
(11:32):
If you went back to this when you went to London, Yeah,
public Image, it's John Lyden's bound. Yeah. The first It
was the first proper union shooter I ever did. When
I graduated from a Super eight coverare to a full
Union Crew and honey Wagon and you know the makeup fans,
the full Monty. It was a terrifying day, but it
(11:52):
was the potential for getting drafted into the the angle
in war that propelled you don't want to leave and
go to London? Correct? Yeah. I was in the cadet
school for two years and I was supposed to go
straight into the South African Defense Force and become an officer,
and I'm going to the Golden Bush War. The family
had a long military tradition that was just like what
(12:14):
you did at a certain age as you were supposed
to go in the army. By then, I developed a
huge antithesis for the Apartheit regime. The notion of having
to pick up a gun and defend them kind of
stuck in my craw And I didn't really believe the
propaganda anyway, which was telling us that the Russian Army
and the Cubans were across the border in Angola. Unless
(12:36):
we confronted them, they would be Russian t sixties. Who's
on the streets and Pretoria in twenty four hours or
whatever the bullshit was at the time. I chose not
to believe it and upstakes and left. Now, when you're
in you go to the UK and you're there, and
then you make your way to Afghanistan to film the
(13:00):
Soviet Afghan War. What was the impetus for that? Why
did you want to go do that? And I'm assuming
put yourself a tremendous risk. Correct, Yeah, it was a
crazy time. I don't regret it. Unfortunately, the cameraman was
very badly injured. UM he did make a full recovery.
So I regret the cameraman's injuries, but I'm glad that
(13:21):
we took that decision. It was an insane thing to do. Basically,
it came out of three years of doing music video
work in London and it had gotten to the point
that in order to pay everyone's rent and keep everything moving,
we had to do pretty much one music video a month,
which meant the quality started sliding. We weren't able to
(13:41):
pick the bands and the songs as well as I
would have liked. UM I was on a particularly lousy
music video shoot. I've got a generally in my career,
I've taken a first on, last off policy. I'd like
to get their first thing in the morning before the
crew arrives, and UM I like to stay until after
all the cable is washed and all the lenses have
gone safely back into their boxes and everything's wrapped. So
(14:05):
UM I was coming out of the shoot and the
last van to UM to leave the location. UM the
driver was grumbling about the stick shift on the van
and said, this thing is as hard to drive as
a BTR sixty, which I recognized as a lightweight Soviet
troop transporter used in the invasion of Afghanistan. And I
(14:25):
asked him what the funk you'd been doing driving a
BTR sixty to begin with, and he told me that
he was a g hardy uh, that he was down
his luck and M London was trying to doing odd
jobs essentially to try and save up enough money to
go back to Afghanistan and fight the g Hard And
I was in such a vile mood after the promo
(14:48):
shoot that day, I said, look, if I give you
the Boddy to go back to the g Hard, will
you take me with you and allow us to bring cameras? So, um,
that's pretty much. Yeah, how it happened. It was the
spur of the moment. I've been obsessed with Afghanistan for
a long time ever since, so I guess reading about
it as a kid and the works of Robert E.
(15:09):
Howard or U. Rudget Kipling's um Man, it would be king.
So when you arrive in Afghanistan, when you first give
him this is eighty nine? Correct? Yeah, what do you mean?
Is there a lot of is it very furtive? Are
you sneaking around and you're having to kind of here
with this guy. You're accompanying him, are you? You're still
(15:30):
with him when you get there. You we're following him.
But you had yeah, and we had to. We had
to trick our way over the over the border and
UM coming well. First we tried doing it legitimately the
first way. The first trip we made in we did
with the Red Cross was the United Nations and UM
we drove in trucks of flower to UM a bunch
(15:54):
of locations in Ningraha Province. So we came in first
ULL saying legit un food delivery. That was the first
time that I was in country. UM had my first
um yeah vision of Afghanistan, saw the light and the
space of the place and got the smell of it.
But UM, on the first trip out with the u N,
(16:16):
we deviated from the path. When you're around doing those
kind of runs for around the u N, you have
to really stick to the agreed course and we UM
we made a stop on the way which freaked them out.
So after the first food run we were stripped of
that position and grounded back in Frontier Province, Pakistan. We
(16:38):
then volunteered our services to the Moderate Guerrilla Party to
the Jamati's dummy under armored Chamasud and they took one
look at us and refused. So we volunteered ourselves to
the Who the heck would I want to take us today?
Over there? You couldn't give it away, but yeah, we have.
(16:58):
We've eventually gotten in with the servietive party. Instead was
the Hespis Love Me under Gilbert and Heck Mattia, who
are kind of the bad guys and in cahoots with
the CIA at that point in time. But they took
us and we were able to cross the borders through
a secret crossing at a place called now Our Pass
and entered the country indefinitely, stayed through till after the
(17:22):
end of the Soviet occupation. Now the give me the timeline.
How long do you last in that area before you
decided to go home? And where is the home you
go to? Do you go back to London? Yeah? We
got zapped after about three months. Um shot. Yeah, meaning
we got blown up by some kind of missile. It
(17:44):
hit us on the second day of the Siege of
jelal About. I don't really know what it was, but
that um this was it was early in the going.
You hadn't been there for very long. Yeah, I know
it was about the Russians left on Valentine's Day on
February fourteenth, This would have been about three months after.
(18:05):
It was the onset of the civil war. Essentially there
was it was, you know, um, our side, the Western backed,
Saudi backed muja hidden versus the remaining socialist back to
Afghans who were cornered inside of the city of Jelalabat
and under massive siege. But they had also been heavily
(18:27):
armed by the retreating Soviet forces, so there was a
full on confrontation. Unfortunately our side word where I found
out later also not taking prisoners and doing terrible things
to some of the folks they were capturing. So um,
no one was surrendering. So and when folks know that
they're fighting to their deaths um, they put everything they've
(18:48):
got into it. So it's a terrible scene and I
think approximately a thousand people a day were getting killed
and in the first week of the civil war. Yeah,
because thereafterwards devolved into a civil war, which is basically
between it was a struggle between the different Afghan warlords
to try to take power over the country. Once the
once the Soviet army had retreated Um. Eventually the sheer
(19:12):
chaos of that, which I think finally resulted in a
tank battle in the streets of couple Um, led to
the Taliban stepping in and saying, Okay, this has got
to end. UM. Now we need Shario, we need strict
religious government, and we need to clean this mess up.
The civil war kind of created the conditions that enabled
the Taliban to rise. So you were there for how
(19:34):
long total? UM? I was probably in country UM, not
much more than four months in total, and I was
probably I was probably stuck in Pakistan for about eight
months between are waiting trying to get in. There were
two different trips in and we've spent most of our
time trapped in Frontier Province on the wrong side of
the border. After falling out of Afghanistan, it was a
(19:57):
I didn't mean to actually leave when I did, but
the Romain was severely engined and had to had to
be taken to surgery. And then UM because of a
series of insane events, I've lost my I D I'd
lost my backpack and passport and had no way of
proving who I was. So yeah, I ended up in
(20:17):
a jail cell in Pakistan. Uh was sprung by the
British embassy and his lamabouts who gave me a fresh
set of travel documents and got me back to London
via ab Abu Dhabi is Stadfold and that finally Heathrow
(20:40):
writer director Richard Stanley. If you enjoy conversations with genre
bending filmmakers, listened to my episode with William Friedkin, director
of The Exorcist the films that I've made. I'm more
interested in spontaneity than anything else, so I don't rehearse.
(21:00):
I would talk to the actors and find the things
that move them, either that caused them to laugh or
cry or be frightened, and I would use those things
from time to time in the making of the film
to suggest, whenever it was necessary, some emotion. But I
(21:22):
would never tell an actor really how to do it.
Here the rest of my conversation with William Friedkin in
our archives at Here's the Thing dot org. After the break,
Richard Stanley tells us his critique of the Island of
Dr Moreau, film that got made without him. I'm Alec
(21:53):
Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Writer director
Richard Stanley had written a low budget horror screenplay when
he received a call from a high powered Hollywood producer
while I was away in in insane series of events,
the screenplay for Hardware, which had been written a while
before and been pushing around, had gotten passed from hand
(22:16):
to hand to hand and had somehow come into the
hands of Harvey Weinstein. Uh. Yeah, Harvey wanted to make hardware,
which I first found out about while I was still
in Frontier Province. A very um angry man managed to
get through to me on the switchboard at the Saudi
Red Crescent Hospital and in um Frontier Province, who was
(22:39):
a producer named Tricks Warrel and Tricks was freaked out
because he had been through share hell to actually reach
me on the telephone. So every third word was an
F word. You don't have fucking hard've been looking for
a mate, etcetera, etcetera making this fucking movie. And I
was trying to explain that hardware was getting set up
at Mirrormax. And I remember, because the had been long
(23:00):
and um the hospital was full of people who had
lost their eyesights, or children with berlins or missing limbs.
Tom hearing this guy swearing down the phone at me
was seemed somehow offensive, and my reaction was simply to
hang up on him, and then I tried to ignore
it for a while. I'm looking. I'm looking at the
(23:21):
one liner here on hardware. You shoot this movie it's
released in you must have gotten to it pretty quickly.
You must have shot it in eighty nine, or it's
released in September where you shot it in ninety. Dylan
McDermott is your lead, that's right? And what was when? When?
So so? Harvey Weinstein, I would presume and tell me
(23:42):
if I'm wrong. He's putting everything together, he's passing the
script onto the cast, he's producing the film. Uh, you're
in the Harvey business. Harvey's in control. Correct. Well, thankfully
not because it wouldn't have been hardware otherwise, but well,
it obviously became a grapple, the match for control over
what really happened, with some different schizophrenic forces trying to
(24:07):
change the material. I fell into it right after the war,
So I hard ware is what I had in place
of therapy. Um, that's my way of working out the
the PTSD. Essentially, Mirrormax put their money through a company
called Palace Pictures in the UK who brought on a
(24:27):
super tough, m young producer Joanne Seller, who had never
produced a movie before, but then did a bang on
job and produced the hell out of hardware and were
She was also strong enough to be able to keep
Harvey at base so that me and Harvey didn't kill
each other or achieve some kind of state of critical
mass because these insane directives from Mirrormax were coming in
(24:50):
on a daily basis, only we had fax machines in
those days. Like I think after three weeks in they
decided they didn't like John Lynch, the actor playing um Shades,
the space jockey of the movie, and suggested can we
write John out of the movie and replace it with
a dog, and that because we gave Dylan the dog,
it would make him bore acceptable to a younger audience
(25:15):
to pay less money. Well, we don't want kids to
like this this guy because it's it's an R rated
movie with shoot a good X rated film here. Uh, Well,
what's the matter if the kids like the dog? Or
it just got more more and more crazy as it
went log I think most of Harvey's directors whether he
wanted more kids in the movie, younger kids and was
(25:35):
constantly trying to push it towards a younger audience than
it was intended. So this is your first film. I
don't I don't want to dwell too much on Morrow,
but this is your first film Hardware. And you've got McDermott,
who has made quite a few films and TV shows.
I worked with him once and he's a very accomplished actor.
What was it like for you to go from ritualistic
(25:58):
dance who war torn a civil war Afghanistan and now
you're making a movie with an American actor? What did
you find was your strengths and weaknesses and directing actors
in narrative films. But I think the pleasure of coming
surviving the events in Afghanistan stumbling straight onto set was
that at least Hell held no fear for me. Other
(26:23):
different circumstances, I would have found it a lot more intimidating. Uh,
at least McDermot wasn't in the Taliban. Yeah, yeah, indeed,
And UM didn't brought a lot to it. Um it
was a mccab's state of affairs because Um. In fact,
the character each he plays changed a lot in the
course of setting the movie up. Because Moe is very
(26:43):
different in the Scriptum, I'd originally wanted Bill Paxton for
the part for whatever crazy reason. Um, this was coming
off the time of Near Dark. Um Mirrama's were really
anti Paxxton kind of dug their heels and and Dylan
was the best choice out of the very limited field.
(27:04):
Term there is a term they gave us. I think
there was three guys. They said you have to have
one of these three in the movie other as we
won't make the movie. It was very very very um
tight and um Dylan's came into it very pumped up,
very clean shaven, short hair. Um moas written was originally
a heroin addict dying of cancer, who has been irradiated
(27:29):
the zone and as seriously not well, who has already
had like one arm replaced the prosthetic limb and is
on the way out, which Dylan did not seem that way.
It was a powerhouse of energy and superbuff and just
didn't resemble the character as written. Um yeah, we essentially
rewrote it on the on the spot and reworked it
(27:52):
or so. Dylan came in as a card carrying Christian
with his copy of the Bible. U immediately noticed that
the main cyborg in the movie Marked thirteen was a
publical reference, which is something that had escaped my attention
up to that point. That that detail became a very
(28:12):
interesting plot pivot. Now you do this film and uh,
I mean, obviously there's all the legend and Laura about
Harvey and his hands on approach to filmmaking. Was the
film was something you were genuinely willing to take credit
force that you were filmed by and large or was
it completely co opted by other people. Hardware is pretty
(28:33):
much my beast. I'm happy with hardware. The worst that
happened was we had lost a couple of scenes which
were trimmed out afterwards in You're in Afghanistan And I'm
assuming that Moreau, which was released in ninety six was
probably shot in Have you seen Lost Soul? The Doomed
Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr Moreau? Have you
(28:56):
seen the documentary? Oh? Yeah, several any times? The film
is I mean, I'm a documentary junkie, and this is
one of my favorite docs of all time. But what
I realized was this movie is unusual in terms of
it's almost like everybody involved in the film just wanted
to get the funk out of there. I mean, nobody
wanted to be there. They all everybody phoned it in.
(29:18):
Frankenheimer phoned it in, Brando phoned it in. You know,
maybe not David Toulis or for Rusa Balk. Maybe they're
trying to keep their head above order. Val Kilmer phones
and and everybody just is coming for a paycheck. They're
all there for the wrong reason. And and the film
shows the film looks like there's so many missing scenes.
The film looks like they just slapped this thing together,
(29:39):
like let's just get this over with. Whatever we got,
we got shut down. Stop spending money. Initially, your work
on the film before You're gone involves, you know, a
lot of your greatest woric I mean the art conceptions
and all the art design and things like that for
what you wanted in the film. You were hired to
do the film, and who hired who was producing Pressman, Yeah,
(30:00):
it was a big ad ad pressman. Um it's my fault.
I mean, I developed Island of Dr Moreau for years
and years and years. Um. At the point of the
thing got going, Um, I made another movie between Hardware
and Moreau, I made a movie called Dust Devil in
um in the Mabia. By the tail end of Dust Devil,
(30:23):
which I was convinced Dust Devil was the worst fucking
thing that could ever happen to anyone. It was really
a thousand miles of rough road and a nightmare experience
beyond hell. But by the end of Dust Devil, I
was about yeah, forty grand in debt and basically on
my ass in London and needed to sell a property
(30:43):
fast in order to um basically payoff Dust Devil. Um
that somehow that became Island of dr Burrow Um. I
was in no position to hold onto Moreau. I mean
m coppola could make Apocalypse now and next he was
coming off the back of Godfather. I was coming off
(31:03):
I was coming off the back of Dust Yeah, I understand,
I understand. That's Dust Devil wasn't the ultimate calling card,
wasn't um. No, it didn't give me any power or
leverage over the over the majors at that point in time.
But what's the genesis? Meaning? Did you write the screenplay? Yeah?
(31:25):
I write the screenplay. But how did somebody get the
screenplay and say I'm gonna make this movie? Forget about
Dust Devil? This guy that made Dust Devil pressman's talking
to his investors or his backers. Everybody. Let's just put
Dust Devil out of your mind. And this guy in
this script, they've got it. Meaning how did Ed find
you or you pitched him? You know how it actually happened.
(31:48):
Was Ed found me? Um Ed found me and said,
I want you to direct Judge Dread was sliced alone.
I was hugely down in my luck and in trouble,
and he needed a break. Um I said, sure, but
he has to keep his helmet on. We need to
do Dread like he has the fucking covert book. Uh.
(32:10):
This was a sticking point. Uh yeah, that's right, it's
it's a Dread had to keep the helmet on. And
because I'm hardware owed and unacknowledged debt to two thousand
a d and to Judge Dread. I felt I couldn't
stab the Dread franchise in the back twice. I had
(32:31):
to be kind. I had to stand by Dread, so
I had to turn down the project. Um, but I didn't.
I didn't want to let the opportunity go. So in
the middle of it, I said, well, why don't we
do Island of Dr Brow instead. So in that sense,
were you similar to Brando and Frank and I were
and other people who they were. You were there for
a paycheck. You just wanted to do a job and
(32:52):
get a check and do your best work and get
the hell out of here. Now, I always wanted to
do round of Dr Brow. This was a und of
Dr Brow was a personal obsession that probably came into
my life when I was when I was a kid.
And as I mentioned to my producers here, the Island
of Dr Moreau is too horror films. What a star
is born is to melodrama, you know. I mean there's
(33:13):
been three incarnations, Island of the Lost Souls with Charles Lawton,
one of my favorites, Moreau with Lancaster Lancaster, and then
your version, which, uh, and you've been dreaming about this
for quite a while. Yeah, I mean I saw the
Bert Lancaster version of Cinemas as a kid, and as
(33:35):
a fan of the Wells novel, I came out so enraged.
It was probably the first time that I felt I
wanted my money back after seeing a film, and I
think that planted the seed in my head that I
could do a better job. Um, From that point in time,
I kept thinking about how to improve The mouse Trap
and what a better Dr Moreau would look like, because
(33:58):
I mean, there's all kinds of problems with the material.
For whatever reason, they insistent always playing the beast people
as monsters. But the potential inherent within giving animals vote
larynxes and vocal cords and what the hell would the
animals say and do is so huge, and it's such
tasty material that I really don't feel that the material
(34:20):
has been well understood or has yet found its cinematic potential. Perhaps,
and now that the effects and bow cap work has
moved on to the point that it's reached, a better,
more complex adaptation of Wells's book might finally reach the screen.
How deep into the pre production process did you go
(34:42):
before you were separated from the material? Shall we say? How? Well?
How far into where were you? I went all the
way through. I went through the hall of prep, cast
the film and we started shooting. Um. Well, the Brando
was the first to come aboard. The moment we had Brando,
we figured he was basically an actor magnet that even
(35:04):
though the script yeah yeah, So I immediately went after
Bruce Willets for the male lead, and for a while
Bruce was in and at the point when we had
Bruce and Brando for Mr Montgomery Um the third lead,
I went after James Woods Um. So there was there
(35:26):
was a point in time when Way Um and then
this enabled us to put together a formidable cast of
beast people with Ron Pullman as the Sayer of the Law,
m Frousa Bulkers u Asia the cat Lady, Um Tomorrow
Morrison as Um as a Zello the chief Dog, the
(35:47):
Bill Hootkins as the bristly bear Guy Um. It was
all of the beast people were tremendous actors, which is
one of the biggest tragedies of the Frankenheim evosionists that
none of these people get to do anything. They're standing
around the film and they've all lost everything, like every
one of them's lust, their scenes, lust, their material, and
it's just a huge number of geniuses on that set
(36:11):
who are not getting the chance to express themselves. Richard Stanley,
if you're enjoying this conversation, be sure to subscribe to
Here's the Thing on the I Heart Radio app, Apple
podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back,
Richard Stanley tells us what it was like to direct
(36:33):
Marlon Brando in the Island of Dr Moreau. I'm Alec
Baldwin and this is here's the thing from my Heart Radio.
(36:53):
The production snaff foods on the set of the Island
of Dr Moreau were no secret, so much so the
documentary film was made about the Troubled movie. I was
curious about the circumstances leading up to Richard Stanley's termination
as director of the Island of Dr Moreau and how
he learned he was being let go. Well, I guess,
(37:15):
um the first inkling it was the middle of a
hurricane as well. There was there was a tropical storm
bright blowing in and we were in the one of
the worst places in the world. We were in a
place called Cape Tribulation, which is named that for a reason.
Um Mount Sorrow as the big mountain brooding over it
because the places broken the backs of all kinds of
(37:35):
folk in the past. Um and yeah, the production vehicles
stopped responding to my orders, so I couldn't basically get
an uber um. Um. Yeah. That was yeah, the end
of the wedge then, um, yeah, we've censed it coming
for a few days particularly was a hurricane. Because we've
(37:57):
been desperately trying to shoot, but it had really reached
a point where it was like horizontal rain. We were
unable to go and get a shot off the set
and washed away. How much did you shot before they
fired you? Um? We shot for about two days. I
shot some basically second unit stuff before the before principal
photography started, So she didn't shoo, didn't shoot any of
(38:18):
the principal photography. No, I mean we shot two days
of principal photography that wasn't used in the eventual films.
You did? You shot two days? Prince who was in
those scenes? Val Kilmer and Rob Morrow and yeah some
bits with some yeah throughs the bulk and Morrow eventually
(38:39):
left to be replaced by two lists. Correct, that's right. Yeah.
By the time all this came down to Morrow couldn't
take it anymore. He was pretty much broken on day one. Um,
I think, but like all of us, by the circumstances, Um,
we were on a tramp freighter at sea with a
hurricane blowing in of off Endeavor Reef by tape tribulation
(39:04):
of tribulation, not sorrow. Yeah, Yeah, it was on a
tramp freighter full of live animals. Uh yeah, there was
a puba on board. Um so I would live puba.
Um so yeah, Rob was I think on day one
already in the on the telephone and the captain's a wheelhouse,
(39:29):
desperately trying to get hold of his agent and trying
to find some way out of there. So just two
days of principle, you did the prep. You're you're, you're
really kind of the starter's pistol has been fired and
you're off to the races here. And who tells you?
Who gives you the official? Was it ed? It d
take responsibility and call you and say we're going to
(39:50):
replace you? Or how did you find it? It It was?
It just some But I always say that Hollywood likes
to take a note and they write down you're fired,
and they put that note in a bottle and they
throw off the end of the Santa Monica pear and
they hope it gets to you. Yeah. I think I
got it from Tim Zinnaman, the line producer faced the facer.
(40:11):
My phone, It was my phone. Um. Then there was
the followed a desperate scene in a sushi restaurant in Kent's, Queensland,
where um, I seem to recall Um for ruiser. Um
stood up and passionately. Um defended me. Um cried real tears,
(40:35):
explained to Tim the bottomless pits of chaos and everlasting
hell fire that would be opened if they made that decision.
Rue was one hundred percent right. Uh, one hundred percent
didn't listen to her. I think she said, if you
do this, I will cut out my heart with the
sushi life right here. And it was. It was a
(40:57):
flabboratory scene that but if it's pointless, they weren't gonna
listen to her. They didn't understand what they were doing
and what was what was coming as a results, So
then the documentary comes out a lost soul. And one
of my favorite moments is for Rousa talks about going
in to speak to Brando and she wants to talk
to Brando, and Brando says, you know, what can I
(41:19):
do for you? And she said, when we have these
scenes together and I want to talk to you about
the scenes, maybe we could chat a little about the
scenes and maybe run some lines. And there's a pause
and Brando says, oh no, no, he said, I haven't
even read the script, and uh, do you feel Um?
Because I'm somebody who as much as I worshiped Brando,
(41:41):
and I do worship Brando and I and I went
to go meet him at his home once and at
a lengthy meeting, a lunch that went on for four
hours while I was trying to enlist him to do
a TV movie with him with me because I knew
he wanted money. So we were gonna do Cat on
a Hot Tin Roof for CBS. I was gonna play Brick,
he was gonna play Big Dead. It was my one
chance to work with the unensurable Brando. You know, this
(42:04):
is Brando at a time when nobody would write a
policy to hire him. And I went to his house
and he was, you know, unhealthy, he was big. We
talked a little bit about his acting career. He could
tell he was pretty much done with though he didn't
have any passion for that. I mean, Brandon was a
guy who just stopped caring a long, long time ago.
Do you feel like you dodged a bullet that you
(42:25):
didn't have to deal with that or were you really
looking forward to working with Brando? Um? Now, I was
vastly looking forward to working with Brando, and I feel
that one of the great tragedies of the Island of
Dr Burrows, that we were deprived of a potentially great
um Swan song performance by the man. I'm super sorry
(42:47):
that I've heard about the chance to try and direct him.
I did actually direct him a little with because um
I also went up to Mulholland a bunch of times
before I did. How did you approach him someone who?
I mean when you when you go on a set.
I'm not Marlon Brando, and I still go to want
to set in the latter twenty years of my career,
and people are reluctant to direct me. Well, they're too
(43:10):
eager to direct me. They really feel that they have
to come in with a whip and a chair and
feel like they've got to kind of tame me of
what I well, what path I might go off on.
And so relationships between actors, forget about how celebrated you are.
Relationships between actors who are experienced and directors can always
be potentially thorny. How did you approach him when you
(43:32):
talk to him? Well, I guess m We came into
Morows through the character of Cuts, because Brando is still
very hung up on Cuts from Apocalypse Now and kept
trying to turn Moreau into cuts, suggesting initially that he
should be wearing black, just be a face hanging in
the shadows and disappear into darkness, which he'd done before
(43:54):
on Apocalypse Now, and no intention going down that route.
So instead, I seem to recall we entered into a
very lengthy roundabout discussion about the horror of whiteness, and
the particular horror of the ship of the shade of white,
going through Melville and Moby Dick and Edgar Allen Poe
and um the whole colonialist underpinnings of Well, it's just
(44:22):
the number of shock horror moments in post stories which
come down to being white, like Madeline Usher and her
white dress outside the door and Roderick and the House
of the Usher opens it, or the death of the
characters in same manuscript found in the Bottle, or Arthur
Gordon Perm surrounded by ice, the inhabitants of the black
(44:47):
Island of Salal and Arthur Gordon Perm who have a
horror of whiteness, the a bunch of different Yeah, Takidi
lee is what the seagulls scream, and Arthur Gordon Perm
keidy Lee, which is apparently the word for white in
the post story, but even the seagulls scream and scream
(45:07):
at the explorers. So this horror of whiteness theme and
yeahs coming around through Melville as well. Um was something
was I think the way I lead it with some
brando and that's actually why he's wearing that white gauze,
the white zinc cream. In the movie. It went to
the opposite of the black. Um, here's we've got to
(45:28):
get away from Kurts and go the other way. The
white zinc cream was because of that. It's meant to
be in the near future. It's meant to be in
the original draft that Gottamp things after them a nuclear
exchange legitimately worried about skin councer and the lack of
the ozone layer, which but this reasoning has taken away
in the Frankenheimer movies, so we never get an explanation
(45:49):
as to wine Burrow is wearing this white zinc cream
and these white veils when he's going outside. But there
there is a legitimate reason for it. It's not just
because he's screwing around. Um. If there had been something
resembling a script and if it hadn't been a complete
abbot far On the actual set, um Brando was also
(46:11):
coming off the recent death of his daughter's cheyenne and
was in terrible emotional shape. Um, and he wasn't given
a lot of help in um in Australia. I don't
think he got a lot of moral support out there.
I think by the time he reached the place and
found that the island was a total shambles, that the
script had imploded. Um, yeah, he stopped caring. But there's
(46:34):
there's the ghost of a performance and there, yeah, where
you see that in the biography the that wonderful duck
listened to me Marlon where once the daughter killed herself,
it was just kind of much of the life went
out of him. Um. So you take off several years
before you're back on a set with Nick Cage and
you're into the love crafty and vain there. I love
(46:54):
real Lovecraft as well. How did that come together? How
did you put that film together after how many years
of taking off a series of events. I've always been
a lifelong Lovecraft fan, been huge him since I was
a kid. Really feel that the man's time has come
the term for whatever reason, A lot of the concepts
and the Lovecraft stories are landing extremely well now in
(47:17):
the in the twenty one century, and that there's probably
some kind of crazy reason for that. So it's been
something of a crusade. It was. It was largely the
commitment of Nick Cage that enabled Color out of Space
to get made the Color out of Spaces of script
you wrote, Yeah, I adapted Color out of Space from
(47:40):
the classic HP Lovecraft story myself co writer. How did
you connect with Nick? Yeah? I was put in touch
with Nick and around about way it was actually I
think the producer Josh Waller who managed to get a
copy of the script into into Nick's hands. Then he
read the thing and it turned out he too was
a Lovecraft fan, uh, connected with the material and wanted
(48:04):
to be on Nathan Gardner. That then enabled us to
get the Beast rolling. We only had Nick for four weeks. Um, um,
we're basically able to put together a two month shoot
in Portugal which I got the thing done. What's next?
What do you do next? Well, um, I want to
make another Lovecraft movie and I've got a script and
(48:27):
I think it's the best god damnthing I've ever written.
I think my entire life has been leading up to it.
And it's a movie called Dunwich. It's much horror away
and it's going to take it. We need to go
back on campus and we need to go back to
Miss Quoton at university now in the present day, um um,
(48:48):
confront the things that are in that story. And yeah,
what I wanted to ask you is, what do you
consider making a Lovecraft movie? Yes, this is ending. I
mean most of this is ending on a note I
only dreamed of. I mean, it's very hard for me
to pitch myself. And here I am with you. I
am a great admirer of yours. I think you are.
(49:08):
I mean, this is an overworked word, but you are
a visionary. You are a visionary filmmaker. I will come
and just play the butler. I don't care. I'll ring
the dinner bell and say, you know, dessert has served,
my Lord, I don't care. I'd like you to read
for Professor Armitage, who is the lead and he's also
essentially the script's version of Richard Dawkins. I'm very interested
(49:31):
in Dawkins, a series about religious memes, and consider that
the Cosla Mythos is a perfect illustration of his series.
I think you are an amazing filmmaker and I really
want to explore this with you because I would love
to work with you. I would love to work with you,
and I would love to work with you. Sir. I
think you're a super fine actor and it's a run privilege,
(49:57):
Director Richard Stanley. You can learn more about his work
at the official Richard Stanley dot com. This episode was
recorded at c DM Studios in New York City. Were
produced by Kathleen Russo, Zack McNeice, and Maureen Hoban. Our
engineers Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Daniel Gingrich.
(50:18):
I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the Thing is brought to you
by iHeart Radio.
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from My Heart Radio. South African filmmaker Richard Stanley
is hard to define, part anthropologist, part journalist, and part
Hollywood outsider, making boundary pushing films. Stanley grew up in
apartheid South Africa, shooting tribal dances and rituals, and later
(00:26):
filming in war torn Afghanistan, choices that have greatly informed
his perspective. In the nineties, he wrote and directed the
film's Hardware and Dust Devil, blending the science fiction and
horror genres. His next film was the third adaptation of H. G.
Wells novel The Island of Dr Moreau, a terrifying morality
(00:49):
play on scientific ethics, starring Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer.
The troubled production went quickly downhill, and Stanley was removed
from the project only three days in. The chaos was
captured in the documentary Lost Soul, The Doomed Journey of
Richard Stanley's The Island of Dr Moreau. Following the fallout,
(01:12):
Stanley produced several documentary films and covered events in Rwanda
and Uganda. He returned to mainstream movie making with the
two thousand nineteen film Color Out of Space and Escalating
Extraterrestrial Spiral, based on the HP Lovecraft short story and
starring Nicholas Cage. Richard Stanley is one of the most
(01:35):
intelligent and articulate filmmakers I've ever met, and articulate about
the actual work itself. So I wanted to know how
with such an interesting background, Stanley first found his way
to film. I started messing around with some super eight
cameras from early childhood. I think it wanted into my life.
(01:58):
When I was about four years old, Dad brought home
a sixteen millimeter Prince of King kong um Um kind
of fancied himself as a filmmaker and there was sixteen
million meter equipment lying around and I remember playing on
I say, as a toddler, and cong caught my attention
very early, and I kind of it was a gateway
(02:19):
drug to the Ray Harry Housing movies. And by the
time I was ten, I was messing around with claymation
dinosaurs like a lot of other kids. Have you know
that I ordered a copy of the film Fearlessly Scrapbook.
That's why Harry completely important. Yeah, I ordered a copy
from online today, We're inspired by you. The Ray Harry
(02:42):
House and the film Fantasy scrap Book was really the
first time I saw raised artwork, as well as the
drawings by Willis O'Brien and Mario Laranaga and some of
the other folks. And it's just such incredible work that
even in black and white reproductions, I was mesmerized at
an early age. I see my own children. So we
have quite a few kids running around, and my son
(03:05):
a couple of them have four boys and two girls,
and the oldest son who's about six. When I think
about it, and I get honest about it, I shouldn't
be surprised by his fascination with all things horror. He
wants to watch Alien, and he wants to watch the
monster come shooting out of John Hurts Thorax in the
(03:25):
middle of Alien, and he and and he loves and
when I think about when you mentioned Harry Housing in
this book. When I was a child, I had a friend,
my best friend, and his brother, Kevin and Keith Cornelius
lived behind me, and they would subscribe to Famous Monsters
of Filmland magazine. Famous Monsters was hugely significant, absolutely massive.
(03:49):
I saw my first copy when I was four years old.
Famous Monsters and the other warrant titles Creepy and Erie
and Vampirella that came at the same time in the
late sixties early seventies, just had covers that was so
bright and so i popping that they completely jumped off
the stands into your life and my family. We didn't
have the money, we didn't have the resources to buy,
(04:12):
but they would buy, like the Latex, like the rubber claws,
the hands of the creature of the Black Lagoon. They'd
buy Frankenstein's sutured hands. They'd get the headpiece with the
bolts for Frankenstein. They get and we would make movies.
He had a Brownie, he had a little Super eight,
and we go in the background. We would take two
picnic benches and we laid them on their side so
(04:34):
that the legs of the bench were there, and for
a child, you could lay down in between, and we'd
put some sheets or towels down and that was the
casket of Dracula. We made a casket for Dracula, and
we'd see the hand come up and gripped the side
of the coffin. Slowly. We'd film We're obsessed and we
were very young, we were six and seven, with the
(04:55):
maccabb and all that other stuff. And I'm wondering, why
do you think, I mean a lot of kids just
love that. Is it just the drama? I guess so.
And there's also a sense of taboo about it. Um.
The harder that people try to sense of things or
take things away from you, the more it bestows value,
and the more you feel that you actually need them.
I mean, to some extent, horror movies were never any
(05:16):
fun anymore after I was old enough to watch them.
Do you understand what they were trying to do to you? Yeah?
At the moment you hit eighteen, you've got other concerns.
There's a woman in your life, and you have to
make money, and life goes out. But and somehow it's
not important. But up to that point there a kind
of a forbidden fruit in a way. They also speak
(05:38):
some kind of truth that you can't get from the
adults or the school teachers. I think that my kids,
if they were like me, it was forbidden And it
was also just the chance to completely occupy someone that
was not you. You know, you really could play a character.
But to get back to um, your you go to
the South African College of Music. Correct well, I got
(06:01):
I got a job there basically shooting for their archival
section when I was a teenager who had got me
posted to some of them what they used to call
the homeland states in Apartheite era South Africa. I should
make a note that growing up in Apartheite era South Africa,
which was essentially a police state, the horror movies, in
(06:24):
the genre movies and particularly the horror comics of that
period of the nineties seventies were really the place that
I acquired my social conscience from. It definitely didn't come
from my school teachers, or from the government, or from
my parents, God bless their souls. All of that was
coming from the comic book writers and California in places
(06:45):
who are doing a lot of LSD at that point
in time, and who were writing yeah, super challenging material
or very politicized at that point in time, and all
of it came through UM, through the genre. So I
was super glad for that. Basically ended up was a
cameraman in UM in the Truant sky shooting tribal dance
(07:06):
and initiation rituals, which was another area that's always drawn me.
If it hadn't been for the regrettable geopolitical circumstances, I
think I might have stayed in South Africa and become
an anthropologist. When we know in your childhood, when you're
growing up your mother was an English anthropologist and you
moved to South Africa. Was it Cape Town? Is at
(07:28):
the city you grew up in? Yeah, I grew up
in Cape Town. When my mom initially quit England and
went to Africa, she went first to m Zimbabwe. She
went to Bulawayo first because it had the word away
in it. It was a sufficiently long way from hub. Yeah,
post war England. She just wanted to get the hell out,
more or less pected a random but because she trailed
(07:51):
with her an interest in witchcraft and in the fairy culture,
the fairy folklore of the West Country, I think she
um I saw a side of Africa that the other
um colonial um European settlers were oblivious to. She pursued
that doggedly and ended up writing a cornerstone book on
(08:13):
African mythology. But accordingly, in the first few years of
my life, for the first three or four years she
was dashing around to one bunch of tribal people after another,
and always trying to find the sangoma or the the
traditional healer. Um I guess instilled a set of values
in me where I came to see these people as
(08:35):
figures of extraordinary value and power. What about your dad?
What did he do? He was basically a travel writer.
UH had a gig for UM mobile oil that ready
worked for him where he was writing UM kind of
little travel brochure things for mobile and return for free
(08:56):
gasoline and doing star rating guides for hotels and campsites.
So that kept him on the move and kept the
gas tankful. That's pretty much yeah, what he did the
whole of his life. Now, um, when you go and
shoot the tribal dances and initiation which was which was
did you accompany your mother? Were you working with your mother? Then?
(09:17):
Now I was out of my own by the time
I actually got to start shooting material in the tran
sky and the other Homeland places. This was when I
was in my early teens, and my mom's interest in
tribal witchcraft and tribal magic um I guess um influenced
me hugely, mostly because it was something that none of
the other kids had any real interest, and when I
(09:40):
went to when I was old enough to go to
school and mix with um other European kids, I was
shocked to find that they didn't believe in any of
the stuff or had only the the most horrifying kind
of prejudiced notions about it. Now, when you're there, described
briefly if you can, about these tribal dances in initiation rituals.
(10:02):
And how did what I'm assuming was the richness on
any level style, wardrobe, music, the choreography itself. How did
this What effect did this have on you in terms
of your own film career? Did you bring some of
the things you observed to your other films? Almost certainly,
and in a way it actually pushed me into filmmaking.
(10:24):
At the at the top, I wasn't sure I wanted
to be a filmmaker. But the more time I hung
out in the on the wrong side of the tracks
in South Africa with long hair and a camera, the
more trouble I got into was the arm authorities, and
the more I was construed as basically having a political
context because that's the only way they saw things back there,
(10:46):
and eventually did to me basically fleeing the country, Um
when I ended up finding asylum in London and in England. Um,
the only thing I had to show for myself was
a bunch of deeply weirdly dressed people, um dancing and
doing strange things a number of yeah, spectacular locations, which
(11:08):
I was eventually able to translate into a job making
music videos for the Yeah, the music business. It gave
me an end, you know what I was going to say.
Then at some point you go and make music videos
for Public Image limited s Express Noir Desire. These are
all African. Ban's South African. These are British bad Son.
(11:32):
If you went back to this when you went to London, Yeah,
public Image, it's John Lyden's bound. Yeah. The first It
was the first proper union shooter I ever did. When
I graduated from a Super eight coverare to a full
Union Crew and honey Wagon and you know the makeup fans,
the full Monty. It was a terrifying day, but it
(11:52):
was the potential for getting drafted into the the angle
in war that propelled you don't want to leave and
go to London? Correct? Yeah. I was in the cadet
school for two years and I was supposed to go
straight into the South African Defense Force and become an officer,
and I'm going to the Golden Bush War. The family
had a long military tradition that was just like what
(12:14):
you did at a certain age as you were supposed
to go in the army. By then, I developed a
huge antithesis for the Apartheit regime. The notion of having
to pick up a gun and defend them kind of
stuck in my craw And I didn't really believe the
propaganda anyway, which was telling us that the Russian Army
and the Cubans were across the border in Angola. Unless
(12:36):
we confronted them, they would be Russian t sixties. Who's
on the streets and Pretoria in twenty four hours or
whatever the bullshit was at the time. I chose not
to believe it and upstakes and left. Now, when you're
in you go to the UK and you're there, and
then you make your way to Afghanistan to film the
(13:00):
Soviet Afghan War. What was the impetus for that? Why
did you want to go do that? And I'm assuming
put yourself a tremendous risk. Correct, Yeah, it was a
crazy time. I don't regret it. Unfortunately, the cameraman was
very badly injured. UM he did make a full recovery.
So I regret the cameraman's injuries, but I'm glad that
(13:21):
we took that decision. It was an insane thing to do. Basically,
it came out of three years of doing music video
work in London and it had gotten to the point
that in order to pay everyone's rent and keep everything moving,
we had to do pretty much one music video a month,
which meant the quality started sliding. We weren't able to
(13:41):
pick the bands and the songs as well as I
would have liked. UM I was on a particularly lousy
music video shoot. I've got a generally in my career,
I've taken a first on, last off policy. I'd like
to get their first thing in the morning before the
crew arrives, and UM I like to stay until after
all the cable is washed and all the lenses have
gone safely back into their boxes and everything's wrapped. So
(14:05):
UM I was coming out of the shoot and the
last van to UM to leave the location. UM the
driver was grumbling about the stick shift on the van
and said, this thing is as hard to drive as
a BTR sixty, which I recognized as a lightweight Soviet
troop transporter used in the invasion of Afghanistan. And I
(14:25):
asked him what the funk you'd been doing driving a
BTR sixty to begin with, and he told me that
he was a g hardy uh, that he was down
his luck and M London was trying to doing odd
jobs essentially to try and save up enough money to
go back to Afghanistan and fight the g Hard And
I was in such a vile mood after the promo
(14:48):
shoot that day, I said, look, if I give you
the Boddy to go back to the g Hard, will
you take me with you and allow us to bring cameras? So, um,
that's pretty much. Yeah, how it happened. It was the
spur of the moment. I've been obsessed with Afghanistan for
a long time ever since, so I guess reading about
it as a kid and the works of Robert E.
(15:09):
Howard or U. Rudget Kipling's um Man, it would be king.
So when you arrive in Afghanistan, when you first give
him this is eighty nine? Correct? Yeah, what do you mean?
Is there a lot of is it very furtive? Are
you sneaking around and you're having to kind of here
with this guy. You're accompanying him, are you? You're still
(15:30):
with him when you get there. You we're following him.
But you had yeah, and we had to. We had
to trick our way over the over the border and
UM coming well. First we tried doing it legitimately the
first way. The first trip we made in we did
with the Red Cross was the United Nations and UM
we drove in trucks of flower to UM a bunch
(15:54):
of locations in Ningraha Province. So we came in first
ULL saying legit un food delivery. That was the first
time that I was in country. UM had my first
um yeah vision of Afghanistan, saw the light and the
space of the place and got the smell of it.
But UM, on the first trip out with the u N,
(16:16):
we deviated from the path. When you're around doing those
kind of runs for around the u N, you have
to really stick to the agreed course and we UM
we made a stop on the way which freaked them out.
So after the first food run we were stripped of
that position and grounded back in Frontier Province, Pakistan. We
(16:38):
then volunteered our services to the Moderate Guerrilla Party to
the Jamati's dummy under armored Chamasud and they took one
look at us and refused. So we volunteered ourselves to
the Who the heck would I want to take us today?
Over there? You couldn't give it away, but yeah, we have.
(16:58):
We've eventually gotten in with the servietive party. Instead was
the Hespis Love Me under Gilbert and Heck Mattia, who
are kind of the bad guys and in cahoots with
the CIA at that point in time. But they took
us and we were able to cross the borders through
a secret crossing at a place called now Our Pass
and entered the country indefinitely, stayed through till after the
(17:22):
end of the Soviet occupation. Now the give me the timeline.
How long do you last in that area before you
decided to go home? And where is the home you
go to? Do you go back to London? Yeah? We
got zapped after about three months. Um shot. Yeah, meaning
we got blown up by some kind of missile. It
(17:44):
hit us on the second day of the Siege of
jelal About. I don't really know what it was, but
that um this was it was early in the going.
You hadn't been there for very long. Yeah, I know
it was about the Russians left on Valentine's Day on
February fourteenth, This would have been about three months after.
(18:05):
It was the onset of the civil war. Essentially there
was it was, you know, um, our side, the Western backed,
Saudi backed muja hidden versus the remaining socialist back to
Afghans who were cornered inside of the city of Jelalabat
and under massive siege. But they had also been heavily
(18:27):
armed by the retreating Soviet forces, so there was a
full on confrontation. Unfortunately our side word where I found
out later also not taking prisoners and doing terrible things
to some of the folks they were capturing. So um,
no one was surrendering. So and when folks know that
they're fighting to their deaths um, they put everything they've
(18:48):
got into it. So it's a terrible scene and I
think approximately a thousand people a day were getting killed
and in the first week of the civil war. Yeah,
because thereafterwards devolved into a civil war, which is basically
between it was a struggle between the different Afghan warlords
to try to take power over the country. Once the
once the Soviet army had retreated Um. Eventually the sheer
(19:12):
chaos of that, which I think finally resulted in a
tank battle in the streets of couple Um, led to
the Taliban stepping in and saying, Okay, this has got
to end. UM. Now we need Shario, we need strict
religious government, and we need to clean this mess up.
The civil war kind of created the conditions that enabled
the Taliban to rise. So you were there for how
(19:34):
long total? UM? I was probably in country UM, not
much more than four months in total, and I was
probably I was probably stuck in Pakistan for about eight
months between are waiting trying to get in. There were
two different trips in and we've spent most of our
time trapped in Frontier Province on the wrong side of
the border. After falling out of Afghanistan, it was a
(19:57):
I didn't mean to actually leave when I did, but
the Romain was severely engined and had to had to
be taken to surgery. And then UM because of a
series of insane events, I've lost my I D I'd
lost my backpack and passport and had no way of
proving who I was. So yeah, I ended up in
(20:17):
a jail cell in Pakistan. Uh was sprung by the
British embassy and his lamabouts who gave me a fresh
set of travel documents and got me back to London
via ab Abu Dhabi is Stadfold and that finally Heathrow
(20:40):
writer director Richard Stanley. If you enjoy conversations with genre
bending filmmakers, listened to my episode with William Friedkin, director
of The Exorcist the films that I've made. I'm more
interested in spontaneity than anything else, so I don't rehearse.
(21:00):
I would talk to the actors and find the things
that move them, either that caused them to laugh or
cry or be frightened, and I would use those things
from time to time in the making of the film
to suggest, whenever it was necessary, some emotion. But I
(21:22):
would never tell an actor really how to do it.
Here the rest of my conversation with William Friedkin in
our archives at Here's the Thing dot org. After the break,
Richard Stanley tells us his critique of the Island of
Dr Moreau, film that got made without him. I'm Alec
(21:53):
Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Writer director
Richard Stanley had written a low budget horror screenplay when
he received a call from a high powered Hollywood producer
while I was away in in insane series of events,
the screenplay for Hardware, which had been written a while
before and been pushing around, had gotten passed from hand
(22:16):
to hand to hand and had somehow come into the
hands of Harvey Weinstein. Uh. Yeah, Harvey wanted to make hardware,
which I first found out about while I was still
in Frontier Province. A very um angry man managed to
get through to me on the switchboard at the Saudi
Red Crescent Hospital and in um Frontier Province, who was
(22:39):
a producer named Tricks Warrel and Tricks was freaked out
because he had been through share hell to actually reach
me on the telephone. So every third word was an
F word. You don't have fucking hard've been looking for
a mate, etcetera, etcetera making this fucking movie. And I
was trying to explain that hardware was getting set up
at Mirrormax. And I remember, because the had been long
(23:00):
and um the hospital was full of people who had
lost their eyesights, or children with berlins or missing limbs.
Tom hearing this guy swearing down the phone at me
was seemed somehow offensive, and my reaction was simply to
hang up on him, and then I tried to ignore
it for a while. I'm looking. I'm looking at the
(23:21):
one liner here on hardware. You shoot this movie it's
released in you must have gotten to it pretty quickly.
You must have shot it in eighty nine, or it's
released in September where you shot it in ninety. Dylan
McDermott is your lead, that's right? And what was when? When?
So so? Harvey Weinstein, I would presume and tell me
(23:42):
if I'm wrong. He's putting everything together, he's passing the
script onto the cast, he's producing the film. Uh, you're
in the Harvey business. Harvey's in control. Correct. Well, thankfully
not because it wouldn't have been hardware otherwise, but well,
it obviously became a grapple, the match for control over
what really happened, with some different schizophrenic forces trying to
(24:07):
change the material. I fell into it right after the war,
So I hard ware is what I had in place
of therapy. Um, that's my way of working out the
the PTSD. Essentially, Mirrormax put their money through a company
called Palace Pictures in the UK who brought on a
(24:27):
super tough, m young producer Joanne Seller, who had never
produced a movie before, but then did a bang on
job and produced the hell out of hardware and were
She was also strong enough to be able to keep
Harvey at base so that me and Harvey didn't kill
each other or achieve some kind of state of critical
mass because these insane directives from Mirrormax were coming in
(24:50):
on a daily basis, only we had fax machines in
those days. Like I think after three weeks in they
decided they didn't like John Lynch, the actor playing um Shades,
the space jockey of the movie, and suggested can we
write John out of the movie and replace it with
a dog, and that because we gave Dylan the dog,
it would make him bore acceptable to a younger audience
(25:15):
to pay less money. Well, we don't want kids to
like this this guy because it's it's an R rated
movie with shoot a good X rated film here. Uh, Well,
what's the matter if the kids like the dog? Or
it just got more more and more crazy as it
went log I think most of Harvey's directors whether he
wanted more kids in the movie, younger kids and was
(25:35):
constantly trying to push it towards a younger audience than
it was intended. So this is your first film. I
don't I don't want to dwell too much on Morrow,
but this is your first film Hardware. And you've got McDermott,
who has made quite a few films and TV shows.
I worked with him once and he's a very accomplished actor.
What was it like for you to go from ritualistic
(25:58):
dance who war torn a civil war Afghanistan and now
you're making a movie with an American actor? What did
you find was your strengths and weaknesses and directing actors
in narrative films. But I think the pleasure of coming
surviving the events in Afghanistan stumbling straight onto set was
that at least Hell held no fear for me. Other
(26:23):
different circumstances, I would have found it a lot more intimidating. Uh,
at least McDermot wasn't in the Taliban. Yeah, yeah, indeed,
And UM didn't brought a lot to it. Um it
was a mccab's state of affairs because Um. In fact,
the character each he plays changed a lot in the
course of setting the movie up. Because Moe is very
(26:43):
different in the Scriptum, I'd originally wanted Bill Paxton for
the part for whatever crazy reason. Um, this was coming
off the time of Near Dark. Um Mirrama's were really
anti Paxxton kind of dug their heels and and Dylan
was the best choice out of the very limited field.
(27:04):
Term there is a term they gave us. I think
there was three guys. They said you have to have
one of these three in the movie other as we
won't make the movie. It was very very very um
tight and um Dylan's came into it very pumped up,
very clean shaven, short hair. Um moas written was originally
a heroin addict dying of cancer, who has been irradiated
(27:29):
the zone and as seriously not well, who has already
had like one arm replaced the prosthetic limb and is
on the way out, which Dylan did not seem that way.
It was a powerhouse of energy and superbuff and just
didn't resemble the character as written. Um yeah, we essentially
rewrote it on the on the spot and reworked it
(27:52):
or so. Dylan came in as a card carrying Christian
with his copy of the Bible. U immediately noticed that
the main cyborg in the movie Marked thirteen was a
publical reference, which is something that had escaped my attention
up to that point. That that detail became a very
(28:12):
interesting plot pivot. Now you do this film and uh,
I mean, obviously there's all the legend and Laura about
Harvey and his hands on approach to filmmaking. Was the
film was something you were genuinely willing to take credit
force that you were filmed by and large or was
it completely co opted by other people. Hardware is pretty
(28:33):
much my beast. I'm happy with hardware. The worst that
happened was we had lost a couple of scenes which
were trimmed out afterwards in You're in Afghanistan And I'm
assuming that Moreau, which was released in ninety six was
probably shot in Have you seen Lost Soul? The Doomed
Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr Moreau? Have you
(28:56):
seen the documentary? Oh? Yeah, several any times? The film
is I mean, I'm a documentary junkie, and this is
one of my favorite docs of all time. But what
I realized was this movie is unusual in terms of
it's almost like everybody involved in the film just wanted
to get the funk out of there. I mean, nobody
wanted to be there. They all everybody phoned it in.
(29:18):
Frankenheimer phoned it in, Brando phoned it in. You know,
maybe not David Toulis or for Rusa Balk. Maybe they're
trying to keep their head above order. Val Kilmer phones
and and everybody just is coming for a paycheck. They're
all there for the wrong reason. And and the film
shows the film looks like there's so many missing scenes.
The film looks like they just slapped this thing together,
(29:39):
like let's just get this over with. Whatever we got,
we got shut down. Stop spending money. Initially, your work
on the film before You're gone involves, you know, a
lot of your greatest woric I mean the art conceptions
and all the art design and things like that for
what you wanted in the film. You were hired to
do the film, and who hired who was producing Pressman, Yeah,
(30:00):
it was a big ad ad pressman. Um it's my fault.
I mean, I developed Island of Dr Moreau for years
and years and years. Um. At the point of the
thing got going, Um, I made another movie between Hardware
and Moreau, I made a movie called Dust Devil in
um in the Mabia. By the tail end of Dust Devil,
(30:23):
which I was convinced Dust Devil was the worst fucking
thing that could ever happen to anyone. It was really
a thousand miles of rough road and a nightmare experience
beyond hell. But by the end of Dust Devil, I
was about yeah, forty grand in debt and basically on
my ass in London and needed to sell a property
(30:43):
fast in order to um basically payoff Dust Devil. Um
that somehow that became Island of dr Burrow Um. I
was in no position to hold onto Moreau. I mean
m coppola could make Apocalypse now and next he was
coming off the back of Godfather. I was coming off
(31:03):
I was coming off the back of Dust Yeah, I understand,
I understand. That's Dust Devil wasn't the ultimate calling card,
wasn't um. No, it didn't give me any power or
leverage over the over the majors at that point in time.
But what's the genesis? Meaning? Did you write the screenplay? Yeah?
(31:25):
I write the screenplay. But how did somebody get the
screenplay and say I'm gonna make this movie? Forget about
Dust Devil? This guy that made Dust Devil pressman's talking
to his investors or his backers. Everybody. Let's just put
Dust Devil out of your mind. And this guy in
this script, they've got it. Meaning how did Ed find
you or you pitched him? You know how it actually happened.
(31:48):
Was Ed found me? Um Ed found me and said,
I want you to direct Judge Dread was sliced alone.
I was hugely down in my luck and in trouble,
and he needed a break. Um I said, sure, but
he has to keep his helmet on. We need to
do Dread like he has the fucking covert book. Uh.
(32:10):
This was a sticking point. Uh yeah, that's right, it's
it's a Dread had to keep the helmet on. And
because I'm hardware owed and unacknowledged debt to two thousand
a d and to Judge Dread. I felt I couldn't
stab the Dread franchise in the back twice. I had
(32:31):
to be kind. I had to stand by Dread, so
I had to turn down the project. Um, but I didn't.
I didn't want to let the opportunity go. So in
the middle of it, I said, well, why don't we
do Island of Dr Brow instead. So in that sense,
were you similar to Brando and Frank and I were
and other people who they were. You were there for
a paycheck. You just wanted to do a job and
(32:52):
get a check and do your best work and get
the hell out of here. Now, I always wanted to
do round of Dr Brow. This was a und of
Dr Brow was a personal obsession that probably came into
my life when I was when I was a kid.
And as I mentioned to my producers here, the Island
of Dr Moreau is too horror films. What a star
is born is to melodrama, you know. I mean there's
(33:13):
been three incarnations, Island of the Lost Souls with Charles Lawton,
one of my favorites, Moreau with Lancaster Lancaster, and then
your version, which, uh, and you've been dreaming about this
for quite a while. Yeah, I mean I saw the
Bert Lancaster version of Cinemas as a kid, and as
(33:35):
a fan of the Wells novel, I came out so enraged.
It was probably the first time that I felt I
wanted my money back after seeing a film, and I
think that planted the seed in my head that I
could do a better job. Um, From that point in time,
I kept thinking about how to improve The mouse Trap
and what a better Dr Moreau would look like, because
(33:58):
I mean, there's all kinds of problems with the material.
For whatever reason, they insistent always playing the beast people
as monsters. But the potential inherent within giving animals vote
larynxes and vocal cords and what the hell would the
animals say and do is so huge, and it's such
tasty material that I really don't feel that the material
(34:20):
has been well understood or has yet found its cinematic potential. Perhaps,
and now that the effects and bow cap work has
moved on to the point that it's reached, a better,
more complex adaptation of Wells's book might finally reach the screen.
How deep into the pre production process did you go
(34:42):
before you were separated from the material? Shall we say? How? Well?
How far into where were you? I went all the
way through. I went through the hall of prep, cast
the film and we started shooting. Um. Well, the Brando
was the first to come aboard. The moment we had Brando,
we figured he was basically an actor magnet that even
(35:04):
though the script yeah yeah, So I immediately went after
Bruce Willets for the male lead, and for a while
Bruce was in and at the point when we had
Bruce and Brando for Mr Montgomery Um the third lead,
I went after James Woods Um. So there was there
(35:26):
was a point in time when Way Um and then
this enabled us to put together a formidable cast of
beast people with Ron Pullman as the Sayer of the Law,
m Frousa Bulkers u Asia the cat Lady, Um Tomorrow
Morrison as Um as a Zello the chief Dog, the
(35:47):
Bill Hootkins as the bristly bear Guy Um. It was
all of the beast people were tremendous actors, which is
one of the biggest tragedies of the Frankenheim evosionists that
none of these people get to do anything. They're standing
around the film and they've all lost everything, like every
one of them's lust, their scenes, lust, their material, and
it's just a huge number of geniuses on that set
(36:11):
who are not getting the chance to express themselves. Richard Stanley,
if you're enjoying this conversation, be sure to subscribe to
Here's the Thing on the I Heart Radio app, Apple
podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back,
Richard Stanley tells us what it was like to direct
(36:33):
Marlon Brando in the Island of Dr Moreau. I'm Alec
Baldwin and this is here's the thing from my Heart Radio.
(36:53):
The production snaff foods on the set of the Island
of Dr Moreau were no secret, so much so the
documentary film was made about the Troubled movie. I was
curious about the circumstances leading up to Richard Stanley's termination
as director of the Island of Dr Moreau and how
he learned he was being let go. Well, I guess,
(37:15):
um the first inkling it was the middle of a
hurricane as well. There was there was a tropical storm
bright blowing in and we were in the one of
the worst places in the world. We were in a
place called Cape Tribulation, which is named that for a reason.
Um Mount Sorrow as the big mountain brooding over it
because the places broken the backs of all kinds of
(37:35):
folk in the past. Um and yeah, the production vehicles
stopped responding to my orders, so I couldn't basically get
an uber um. Um. Yeah. That was yeah, the end
of the wedge then, um, yeah, we've censed it coming
for a few days particularly was a hurricane. Because we've
(37:57):
been desperately trying to shoot, but it had really reached
a point where it was like horizontal rain. We were
unable to go and get a shot off the set
and washed away. How much did you shot before they
fired you? Um? We shot for about two days. I
shot some basically second unit stuff before the before principal
photography started, So she didn't shoo, didn't shoot any of
(38:18):
the principal photography. No, I mean we shot two days
of principal photography that wasn't used in the eventual films.
You did? You shot two days? Prince who was in
those scenes? Val Kilmer and Rob Morrow and yeah some
bits with some yeah throughs the bulk and Morrow eventually
(38:39):
left to be replaced by two lists. Correct, that's right. Yeah.
By the time all this came down to Morrow couldn't
take it anymore. He was pretty much broken on day one. Um,
I think, but like all of us, by the circumstances, Um,
we were on a tramp freighter at sea with a
hurricane blowing in of off Endeavor Reef by tape tribulation
(39:04):
of tribulation, not sorrow. Yeah, Yeah, it was on a
tramp freighter full of live animals. Uh yeah, there was
a puba on board. Um so I would live puba.
Um so yeah, Rob was I think on day one
already in the on the telephone and the captain's a wheelhouse,
(39:29):
desperately trying to get hold of his agent and trying
to find some way out of there. So just two
days of principle, you did the prep. You're you're, you're
really kind of the starter's pistol has been fired and
you're off to the races here. And who tells you?
Who gives you the official? Was it ed? It d
take responsibility and call you and say we're going to
(39:50):
replace you? Or how did you find it? It It was?
It just some But I always say that Hollywood likes
to take a note and they write down you're fired,
and they put that note in a bottle and they
throw off the end of the Santa Monica pear and
they hope it gets to you. Yeah. I think I
got it from Tim Zinnaman, the line producer faced the facer.
(40:11):
My phone, It was my phone. Um. Then there was
the followed a desperate scene in a sushi restaurant in Kent's, Queensland,
where um, I seem to recall Um for ruiser. Um
stood up and passionately. Um defended me. Um cried real tears,
(40:35):
explained to Tim the bottomless pits of chaos and everlasting
hell fire that would be opened if they made that decision.
Rue was one hundred percent right. Uh, one hundred percent
didn't listen to her. I think she said, if you
do this, I will cut out my heart with the
sushi life right here. And it was. It was a
(40:57):
flabboratory scene that but if it's pointless, they weren't gonna
listen to her. They didn't understand what they were doing
and what was what was coming as a results, So
then the documentary comes out a lost soul. And one
of my favorite moments is for Rousa talks about going
in to speak to Brando and she wants to talk
to Brando, and Brando says, you know, what can I
(41:19):
do for you? And she said, when we have these
scenes together and I want to talk to you about
the scenes, maybe we could chat a little about the
scenes and maybe run some lines. And there's a pause
and Brando says, oh no, no, he said, I haven't
even read the script, and uh, do you feel Um?
Because I'm somebody who as much as I worshiped Brando,
(41:41):
and I do worship Brando and I and I went
to go meet him at his home once and at
a lengthy meeting, a lunch that went on for four
hours while I was trying to enlist him to do
a TV movie with him with me because I knew
he wanted money. So we were gonna do Cat on
a Hot Tin Roof for CBS. I was gonna play Brick,
he was gonna play Big Dead. It was my one
chance to work with the unensurable Brando. You know, this
(42:04):
is Brando at a time when nobody would write a
policy to hire him. And I went to his house
and he was, you know, unhealthy, he was big. We
talked a little bit about his acting career. He could
tell he was pretty much done with though he didn't
have any passion for that. I mean, Brandon was a
guy who just stopped caring a long, long time ago.
Do you feel like you dodged a bullet that you
(42:25):
didn't have to deal with that or were you really
looking forward to working with Brando? Um? Now, I was
vastly looking forward to working with Brando, and I feel
that one of the great tragedies of the Island of
Dr Burrows, that we were deprived of a potentially great
um Swan song performance by the man. I'm super sorry
(42:47):
that I've heard about the chance to try and direct him.
I did actually direct him a little with because um
I also went up to Mulholland a bunch of times
before I did. How did you approach him someone who?
I mean when you when you go on a set.
I'm not Marlon Brando, and I still go to want
to set in the latter twenty years of my career,
and people are reluctant to direct me. Well, they're too
(43:10):
eager to direct me. They really feel that they have
to come in with a whip and a chair and
feel like they've got to kind of tame me of
what I well, what path I might go off on.
And so relationships between actors, forget about how celebrated you are.
Relationships between actors who are experienced and directors can always
be potentially thorny. How did you approach him when you
(43:32):
talk to him? Well, I guess m We came into
Morows through the character of Cuts, because Brando is still
very hung up on Cuts from Apocalypse Now and kept
trying to turn Moreau into cuts, suggesting initially that he
should be wearing black, just be a face hanging in
the shadows and disappear into darkness, which he'd done before
(43:54):
on Apocalypse Now, and no intention going down that route.
So instead, I seem to recall we entered into a
very lengthy roundabout discussion about the horror of whiteness, and
the particular horror of the ship of the shade of white,
going through Melville and Moby Dick and Edgar Allen Poe
and um the whole colonialist underpinnings of Well, it's just
(44:22):
the number of shock horror moments in post stories which
come down to being white, like Madeline Usher and her
white dress outside the door and Roderick and the House
of the Usher opens it, or the death of the
characters in same manuscript found in the Bottle, or Arthur
Gordon Perm surrounded by ice, the inhabitants of the black
(44:47):
Island of Salal and Arthur Gordon Perm who have a
horror of whiteness, the a bunch of different Yeah, Takidi
lee is what the seagulls scream, and Arthur Gordon Perm
keidy Lee, which is apparently the word for white in
the post story, but even the seagulls scream and scream
(45:07):
at the explorers. So this horror of whiteness theme and
yeahs coming around through Melville as well. Um was something
was I think the way I lead it with some
brando and that's actually why he's wearing that white gauze,
the white zinc cream. In the movie. It went to
the opposite of the black. Um, here's we've got to
(45:28):
get away from Kurts and go the other way. The
white zinc cream was because of that. It's meant to
be in the near future. It's meant to be in
the original draft that Gottamp things after them a nuclear
exchange legitimately worried about skin councer and the lack of
the ozone layer, which but this reasoning has taken away
in the Frankenheimer movies, so we never get an explanation
(45:49):
as to wine Burrow is wearing this white zinc cream
and these white veils when he's going outside. But there
there is a legitimate reason for it. It's not just
because he's screwing around. Um. If there had been something
resembling a script and if it hadn't been a complete
abbot far On the actual set, um Brando was also
(46:11):
coming off the recent death of his daughter's cheyenne and
was in terrible emotional shape. Um, and he wasn't given
a lot of help in um in Australia. I don't
think he got a lot of moral support out there.
I think by the time he reached the place and
found that the island was a total shambles, that the
script had imploded. Um, yeah, he stopped caring. But there's
(46:34):
there's the ghost of a performance and there, yeah, where
you see that in the biography the that wonderful duck
listened to me Marlon where once the daughter killed herself,
it was just kind of much of the life went
out of him. Um. So you take off several years
before you're back on a set with Nick Cage and
you're into the love crafty and vain there. I love
(46:54):
real Lovecraft as well. How did that come together? How
did you put that film together after how many years
of taking off a series of events. I've always been
a lifelong Lovecraft fan, been huge him since I was
a kid. Really feel that the man's time has come
the term for whatever reason, A lot of the concepts
and the Lovecraft stories are landing extremely well now in
(47:17):
the in the twenty one century, and that there's probably
some kind of crazy reason for that. So it's been
something of a crusade. It was. It was largely the
commitment of Nick Cage that enabled Color out of Space
to get made the Color out of Spaces of script
you wrote, Yeah, I adapted Color out of Space from
(47:40):
the classic HP Lovecraft story myself co writer. How did
you connect with Nick? Yeah? I was put in touch
with Nick and around about way it was actually I
think the producer Josh Waller who managed to get a
copy of the script into into Nick's hands. Then he
read the thing and it turned out he too was
a Lovecraft fan, uh, connected with the material and wanted
(48:04):
to be on Nathan Gardner. That then enabled us to
get the Beast rolling. We only had Nick for four weeks. Um, um,
we're basically able to put together a two month shoot
in Portugal which I got the thing done. What's next?
What do you do next? Well, um, I want to
make another Lovecraft movie and I've got a script and
(48:27):
I think it's the best god damnthing I've ever written.
I think my entire life has been leading up to it.
And it's a movie called Dunwich. It's much horror away
and it's going to take it. We need to go
back on campus and we need to go back to
Miss Quoton at university now in the present day, um um,
(48:48):
confront the things that are in that story. And yeah,
what I wanted to ask you is, what do you
consider making a Lovecraft movie? Yes, this is ending. I
mean most of this is ending on a note I
only dreamed of. I mean, it's very hard for me
to pitch myself. And here I am with you. I
am a great admirer of yours. I think you are.
(49:08):
I mean, this is an overworked word, but you are
a visionary. You are a visionary filmmaker. I will come
and just play the butler. I don't care. I'll ring
the dinner bell and say, you know, dessert has served,
my Lord, I don't care. I'd like you to read
for Professor Armitage, who is the lead and he's also
essentially the script's version of Richard Dawkins. I'm very interested
(49:31):
in Dawkins, a series about religious memes, and consider that
the Cosla Mythos is a perfect illustration of his series.
I think you are an amazing filmmaker and I really
want to explore this with you because I would love
to work with you. I would love to work with you,
and I would love to work with you. Sir. I
think you're a super fine actor and it's a run privilege,
(49:57):
Director Richard Stanley. You can learn more about his work
at the official Richard Stanley dot com. This episode was
recorded at c DM Studios in New York City. Were
produced by Kathleen Russo, Zack McNeice, and Maureen Hoban. Our
engineers Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Daniel Gingrich.
(50:18):
I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the Thing is brought to you
by iHeart Radio.
Host
Alec Baldwin
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