Josh Reviews Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau
I’m always fascinated by movie “what-if” stories and behind-the-scenes tales. It’s fascinating to discover how a great film got made, and it’s equally if not more fascinating to discover how a terrible film got made. How could so much money be spent, with so many people involved and working so hard, on a film that winds up being such a total stinker? Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau is a tale of a film in the latter category. It’s the behind-the-scenes saga of the making of the 1993 version of The Island of Dr. Moreau starring Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer. That film, despite the sizable for the time budget and the involvement of two huge (and incredibly talented) actors, could be one of the worst movies ever made. Lost Soul, on the other hand, directed by David Gregory, is a wonderful peek behind the curtain at the hard-to-believe shenanigans that went on during the making of the film, including the firing of the director Richard Stanley soon after filming had begun.
Lost Soul focuses on the story of Richard Stanley. The South African writer/director had started to get some notice in the early nineties with his low-budget horror films Hardware and Dust Devil. Mr. Stanley then began working on an adaptation of H.G. Welles’ novel The Island of Dr. Moreau for New Line Cinema. As he recounts in Lost Soul, Mr. Stanley had seen and enjoyed many aspects of the previous attempts to adapt Moreau to film, but he had never been entirely satisfied and so became passionate about spearheading a new adaptation. The project was conceived as a relatively low-budget affair costing less than ten million dollars.
What follows is a saga of escalating chaos and a fascinating exploration of why Hollywood turns out so many bad movies each year. True, the making of most films is not as catastrophe-filled as this doomed version of Moreau, but one can see in the Hollywood logic that helped send Richard Stanley’s Moreau off the rails the echo of many other bad decisions leading to the creation of many other bad movies.
In this case, New Line got excited by the originally small-scale project and started looking to attach big stars. This ballooned the scale of the project as now the budget had to be dramatically increased to pay for those stars, and now once you had a larger-budget film the scale of everything else had to be increased in turn because now this was a major film for the studio. This completely changes the dynamic of the film and, even in pre-production, resulted in alterations to the planned film designed to address the ideas of the afore-mentioned big stars.
The main difference of opinion found amongst the men and women interviewed for Lost Soul boil down to this: was Richard Stanley a good guy who was put in an impossible position and cruelly betrayed by the studio who kicked him off his own film only a few days into filming? Or was he an unhinged lunatic completely overwhelmed by the scale of the major motion picture he had been tasked to direct?
What’s fascinating is how completely divided so many of the people involved in the making of this film seem to be on this point! Lost Soul does an able job trying to tell all sides of the story, including that of Mr. Stanley himself (who has been practically unheard of ever since getting kicked off this movie). After watching the film I have any idea what the truth is! Mr. Stanley certainly seems an affable, reasonable guy. But I can also see how, as a younger man twenty years ago, he might have been totally out of his depth.
Wrestling with the truth of what went down is a fascinating aspect of this film. But my favorite thing about the film is that Mr. Stanley, whose once promising career as a director was abruptly ended by the debacle of Moreau, has at last been given a chance to tell his side of the story. This must feel like a type of vindication for him, and that’s nice to see.
It’s also fascinating to hear Mr. Stanley, and several of his original collaborators, describe the movie that Mr. Stanley had originally set out to make. Just like the amazing documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune pieced together the planned adaptation that the talented Chilean director had planned to make, so too does this film use interviews along with a variety of interesting production art and pre-production footage to paint a picture of the Moreau adaptation that Mr. Stanley had originally intended. Would that film have been any good? It’s hard to say, but it surely couldn’t have been worse than the film that got released to cinemas back in 1996.
I’d heard the story of Richard Stanley getting fired off his own film, but what really surprised me about the events chronicled in this Lost Soul is that, if anything, things only got crazier on the set of Moreau once Richard Stanley was fired! Because that’s when Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando arrived. And if there’s anything that the men and women interviewed for this film agree on, it’s that those two men behaved outrageously horribly on set. If half of the stories told in this documentary about the selfish, egomaniacal way that Mr. Kilmer and Mr. Brando behaved on set are true, it’s one of the most embarrassing tales of out-of-control Hollywood divas that I have ever heard. The stories told in this film about what went down on that set are insane.
I’m really glad to have seen this film. Director David Gregory has put together a great film, exploring a famous true story of Hollywood chaos. After watching this madness, I think we should all be thankful that ANY big budget movies wind up being any good at all!!