Richard Stanley on 'Island of Lost Souls' (2011 Video) User Reviews

Filming Dr. Moreau

[Michael_Elliott · 22 December 2015]

Richard Stanley on Island of Lost Souls (2011)

*** (out of 4)

Director Richard Stanley talks everything about THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU from Wells. This includes the original novel as well as the 1932 film ISLAND OF LOST SOULS as well as the Burt Lancaster remake and his own 1996 version, which of course was taken away from him. This featurette was produced by The Criterion Collection before the feature length LOST SOUL: THE DOOMED JOURNEY OF RICHARD STANLEY'S ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU so this here obviously doesn't have as much detail but it's still worth watching if you're a fan of the director or the films in question. Stanley spends more time talking about the novel and his impressions of it more than the 1932 film. The Lancaster film gets a brief mention and then the rest of the focus is on his own film as well as his hopes for another version. Overall this is a fun interview.

"H.G. Wells could see that humans were not that much different than . . . "

[oscaralbert · 8/10 · 2 February 2018]

" . . . microbes," filmmaker Richard Stanley says near the beginning of his video interview, RICHARD STANLEY ON ISLAND OF LOST SOULS. "The Victorians had a great fear of de-evolution," Stanley continues. He says that these trepidations are front & center in the movie adaptation of Wells' novel THE ISLAND OF DR. MOREAU, which he states Wells hated. (The novelist's antipathy toward the film stemmed from the fact that he viewed his book as an anti-vivisectionist tract, and perceived the movie as being a gross over-simplification pandering to the more macabre aspects of the story.) "Dr. Moreau is less of a sadist, and a more ambiguous figure in the original book," Stanley observes, compared to the Nazi-like mad scientist bozo put up on the screen by actor Charles Laughton. "In the book, Dr. Moreau dies fairly early on, and things get worse after the ship-wrecked castaway steps in to take his place as island ruler," Stanley makes a Cliff's Note of things. "Moreau is a religious man who is working just with animals, but he provides them with larynxes so that they can talk like us." Mr. Stanley than goes on to cover the basics about his own project to direct what would have been the fourth adaptation of H.G. Wells Dr. Moreau story, and more or less blames actor Marlon Brando for sabotaging the effort with outrageous demands. This never-finished film would have moved the story into the modern era, to put a Civil Rights spin on the yarn. It also would have included many more scenes of sexuality than any of the previous adaptations. After director John Frankenheimer was hired as Stanley's replacement in a last-ditch effort to salvage this fiasco, the original helms man says that he crashed the briefly reconstituted jungle set disguised as a dog-man. It'd be nice to think that Fletcher Christian remarked, "Director Stanley, I presume?" but if this exchange actually took place, no mention of it is made here.