Exploring the Strange Universe of the Original Island of Dr. Moreau: Warlocks, Witchcraft, and a Director in a Dog Costume, Plus Marlon Brando’s Fascination with the World’s Smallest Man

A story involving sex, drugs, suicide, mutant animals, monstrous Hollywood egos, a film director disguised as a dog, an English warlock and the smallest man in the world might be the plot of an especially weird film.

Instead, it is the remarkable true story of the making of a film, the 1996 flop The Island Of Dr Moreau, which came out to terrible reviews exactly a century after the publication of the HG Wells novel of the same name, on which it was based.

Now, with Sir Anthony Hopkins lined up to star in a new cinematic adaptation of Wells’ book, the film’s backers will be fervently hoping not to encounter the myriad problems that made the original production one of the most infamously troubled of all time.

The title character in The Island Of Dr Moreau, played by Marlon Brando, was a mad scientist with an oddball assistant (Val Kilmer) who, driven out of polite society by anti-vivisectionists, and holed up in a remote Pacific Ocean lair, created grotesque hybrids of animals and people in an ill-fated bid to combine their best characteristics and save humanity from itself.

A high-concept plot, then, but it was positively humdrum compared with the film’s truly outlandish back story.

It begins with Richard Stanley, a South African filmmaker who was still in his twenties when he persuaded Hollywood producer Ed Pressman to take a chance on him.

By 1993, Stanley had made a couple of films that – while flawed – showed him to be an up-and-coming writer-director with flair and vision. But they hadn’t made him any money; indeed, he was flat broke.

One day, from a phone box in South London, he made call after call, trying to drum up interest in his script for a new adaptation of Dr Moreau. His last call, providentially, was to Pressman.

Pressman invited Stanley to Los Angeles and introduced him to Bob Shaye, president of New Line Cinema, the studio that would later distribute Peter Jackson’s The Lord Of The Rings films.

Shaye agreed to make The Island Of Dr Moreau, envisaging it as a low-budget picture until Pressman approached Brando, then pushing 80. When Brando expressed interest in the title role it became a much more expensive project, so – with trademark Hollywood ruthlessness – the decision was taken to dump Stanley and hire the vastly more experienced Roman Polanski.

Devastated, Stanley asked if he could at least meet Brando and, in a documentary ABOUT THE BACKGROUND TO THE FILM, explained what happened next: ‘I knew the odds were stacked against me, so I resorted to witchcraft’.

Back in England he was friendly with ‘this warlock chappie’, Dr Edward James Featherstone, popularly known as ‘Skip’. So he contacted Skip and asked for help saving his movie.

While thousands of miles away Skip ‘convened his coven’ and muttered the necessary imprecations, Stanley was driven to Brando’s fortress-like compound high in the Hollywood Hills.

To Stanley’s amazement, Brando took a liking to him. He felt there was ‘a strong possibility that it may have been voodoo’, but either way, at Brando’s insistence Polanski was dropped and Stanley re-hired.

Next, the studio signed up another major star, Bruce Willis, to play the part of the UN negotiator who is washed up on Dr Moreau’s island after a plane crash.

With typical Hollywood hyperbole, the project was then billed in the industry press as a mouth-watering collaboration between the men behind Apocalypse Now (Brando), The Wild Bunch (Green) and The Time Machine (Wells). Cairns, in Australia, was chosen as the exotic filming location.

Soon, however, mouths would not be watering so much as frothing. First, Willis dropped out, apparently citing problems in his marriage to Demi Moore. The producers instead asked Val Kilmer, who accepted the job but demanded a 40 per cent reduction in the number of shooting days, which Stanley solved by giving him the smaller role of Moreau’s assistant. Meanwhile, Willis was replaced by Rob Morrow, the star of a TV hit, Northern Exposure.

Shortly before production was due to start, in April 1995, Brando’s 25-year-old daughter Cheyenne had hanged herself in Tahiti. Brando was distraught. Nobody knew whether he would even turn up.

An ever-more stressed Stanley busied himself with the things he could control. To play the ‘beast people’, a spectacularly motley cast was assembled – some of them abnormally tall, or short, or fat.

The supposed ‘shortest man in the world’, Nelson de la Rosa, who was just 28 inches tall, came all the way from the Dominican Republic where he was a ‘Michael Jackson-level’ celebrity, thinking he’d be the star of the film.

Stanley’s assistant was bitten by a poisonous spider living in her lampshade, making her flesh melt. And back in England, Skip the warlock succumbed to a terrible bone-crumbling disease, which according to Stanley, caused every one of his ‘fixes’ to come undone.

Half the set was washed into the Pacific Ocean by a violent hurricane, and the production was put on hold while a tempest of a different kind developed. By now Stanley was at the end of his tether and behaving increasingly erratically, so New Line fired him. He was replaced by the veteran director John Frankenheimer, whose credits included the 1962 film Birdman of Alcatraz.

Frankenheimer brought a different set of problems. Stanley had at least treated everyone with respect. In fact, actress Fairuza Balk was so aghast at his sacking that she threatened to cut her own heart out with a sushi knife.

But Frankenheimer was an old-school tyrant, causing a head-on collision of gigantic egos with Kilmer, whose antics reportedly extended to setting light to a focus-puller’s sideburns, for a laugh.

If Kilmer had a God complex, however, it was cast into the shade by Brando’s. He arrived ‘only’ a week late, refused to learn his lines (they were fed to him by his assistant, through an earpiece), and, to stay cool, insisted on wearing a makeshift upside-down ice-bucket on his head at all times, on screen as well as off.

Otherwise, Brando’s time on the Dr Moreau set was marked by two infatuations, one with pizza (the pizza delivery service in Cairns was stretched to its limit, by his demands alone), and the other with little Nelson de la Rosa, to whom he took such a shine that he insisted they must share every scene together. ‘(Marlon) put (Nelson) on his chest in his hammock and sang Frog Went-A Courting to him,’ recalls Ron Hutchinson, another writer brought in to help with the script. But being the superstar’s pet went to the little man’s head. He propositioned actresses and punched actors in the testicles.

The febrile atmosphere on set was matched off it. There was a huge amount of illicit sex and drug-taking, not least in nightclubs where, according to one of the crew, ‘we had to dance in a circle around Nelson so he didn’t get trodden on’. Yet perhaps the strangest episode was yet to occur.

Although New Line had paid Richard Stanley’s fare back to England, he had never boarded the plane. Instead, he had holed up in the rainforest and befriended the local Aborigines, whom he persuaded to place a curse on the set.

Then he went one step further, putting on a dog head and joining the extras. Declining to remove his disguise during regular drinks breaks for fear of being recognised, and consequently almost passing out from the intense heat, he watched at close hand what Frankenheimer was doing to ‘his’ film, plotting to sabotage it. But it didn’t need sabotaging.

The film received six nominations in the Golden Raspberry awards, or Razzies, ‘honouring’ the year’s biggest cinematic stinkers. Brando, described by one critic as a ‘waddling behemoth’, was voted Worst Supporting Actor.

As for Stanley, he disappeared from the industry for decades, living a reclusive life in the French Pyrenees, until he re-emerged to make the 2019 sci-fi film Colour Out of Space. It received considerable critical acclaim.

How much of this tumultuous story is familiar to the illustrious Sir Anthony Hopkins? Who knows. But as the 86-year-old prepares to play perhaps the strangest character ever dreamt up even by the lively mind of HG Wells, he can surely be confident that this version of The Island of Dr Moreau, to be titled Eyes In The Trees, won’t be anywhere near as bizarre as the last one.