Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau

David Gregory – 2014 – USA

Like Lost in La Mancha (2002) and the more recent Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013), David Gregory’s Lost Soul is another fascinating chronicle of a troubled production’s collapse.  Unlike those other cases, however, here a film actually emerged from the ashes – John Frankenheimer’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) – that bore little resemblance to the project that had been initiated.  (I happen to be in a tiny minority that actually likes that film, warts and all.)  Eccentric and visionary South African filmmaker Richard Stanley, who originated the production before being fired from it, is simultaneously the hero and the villain of the story.  On the strength of two thought-provoking, low-budget thrillers – Hardware (1990) and Dust Devil (1992) – Stanley was able to interest a Hollywood studio and A-list actors, including none other than Marlon Brando, in his updated adaptation of H.G. Wells’ classic novel, which he correctly believed had never been done justice on the screen.  The only trouble was that Stanley, on his best day, was never Hollywood material; (that’s not a bad thing, incidentally).  He probably bit off more than he could chew and I regret the fact that we don’t have Stanley’s version, because it certainly would have been unique.  It almost as surely would have sent Stanley’s career on a different trajectory instead of more-or-less foundering it.  (In the decades since the Dr. Moreau debacle, his output has mostly been experimental shorts and abstract documentary work.)  It is frustrating to hear the story unfold because Stanley was clearly wronged in many ways, and yet if he had been more resolved and clear-headed, he might have found a way to prevail.  Instead, he seems to have been mired in superstition, solipsism, and unwarranted paranoia, (as being separate from the warranted paranoia).  Stanley’s firing led to veteran John Frankenheimer being brought in to get the film made efficiently since everything was ready and waiting – cast, crew, sets, costumes – and the cost of cancelling the shoot would have been greater than simply making the film, in whatever incarnation.  Frankenheimer was a great auteur in the 60s but by the 90s he was a lower-tier journeyman with little clout left.  He was also an authoritarian, which offended the team put together by Stanley, but was needed in order get some sort of product on film with all the resources at hand.  Refusing to go home, Stanley retreated into the surrounding wilderness where the film was being shot in Australia, and even sneaked onto the set in disguise and was photographed in some group scenes as an extra.  Stanley has a slight penchant to spin tall tales, so I wouldn’t accept everything he says in his interviews as complete fact, but he is definitely an interesting guy as well as a gifted raconteur with a broad range of knowledge.