44 | Sight&Sound | April 2020
he career of director Richard Stanley has
been as eccentric and wayward as anything
found in his films, and is the stuff of legends.
He burst on to the genre scene in his early twenties
in 1990 with the low-budget post-apocalyptic techno
shocker Hardware, before returning to his South Af-
rican roots two years later for the supernatural folk
tale Dust Devil. The young filmmaker looked firmly
on course for great things. And then came The Island
of Dr. Moreau (1996).
Following months of painstaking development on
his dream project (the third big-screen adaptation of
H.G. Wells’s novel), Stanley was just a few days into
shooting when he found himself adrift in a sea of
creative differences and personality clashes. The sad
details – from Marlon Brando’s erratic and reclusive
behaviour after the suicide of his daughter Cheyenne,
to Bruce Willis’s sudden departure, to the volatile con-
duct of his replacement Val Kilmer – are laid bare in
2014’s fascinating documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed
Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau. But
wherever the blame lay, Stanley was promptly fired asdirector and replaced by veteran John Frankenheim-
er, and a once-promising career stalled dramatically.
In the years that followed, the director made a
handful of documentaries – including The Secret Glory
(2001), about the German medievalist and SS officer
Otto Rahn’s quest for the Holy Grail; and The White
Darkness (2002), an exploration into Haitian Vodou –
and there were innumerable rumours linking him
to films both likely and ludicrous. As time went by,
it seemed increasingly improbable we would ever see
another fiction feature from him.
But, almost miraculously, now Stanley is back –
with a breathlessly inventive (and satisfyingly faith-
ful) horror sci-fi hybrid adapted from H.P. Lovecraft’s
short story ‘The Color out of Space’, which sees Nico-
las Cage play Nathan Gardner, a New England farmer
battling a mysterious alien entity after a meteor
crash-lands on his property. The sudden arrival of
this cosmic force has strange effects on each member
of his family – teenage daughter Lavinia (Madeleine
Arthur), young sons Benny (Brendan Meyer)
and Jack (Julian Hilliard), and wife Theresa PHOTOGRAPHY BY GARETH CATTERMOLE/CONTOUR BY GETTY IMAGEST
Almost 25 years after his career hit the skids when he was unceremoniously sacked from the set of ‘The Island of Dr.
Moreau’, cult director Richard Stanley is back with a new feature, ‘Color out of Space’, a superb sci-fi horror tale based on
an H.P. Lovecraft story, about a family on a remote farm plagued by a mysterious alien force. He talks to Michael Blyth