April 2020 | Sight&Sound | 47CREDIT IN HERETIMELINE
RICHARD STANLEYRichard Stanley is born in Fish Hoek,
South Africa on 22 November 1966.
He is descended from the 19th-century
explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley.
He makes his first short Rites of
Passage in 1983. His second, Incidents
in an Expanding Universe (1985), is set
in a dystopian future, and anticipates
his debut feature, Hardware. In
the mid-1980s he also works on an
unfinished 16mm short set in the
Namibian desert, entitled Dust Devil.
Stanley moves to the UK in 1987,
becoming a regular at London’s Scala
cinema, and making music videos
for acts including Public Image Ltd.
In the late 1980s Stanley travels to
Afghanistan to document the Soviet-Afghan war. The experience results in
the 1990 documentary Voice of the Moon.
In 1990 Stanley also makes his feature
debut: the low-budget post-apocalyptic
cyberpunk film Hardware. It becomes
a cult hit and grosses $70 million.
Stanley’s second feature Dust Devil
follows in 1992. The film was shot
in the desert in Namibia. Numerous
different cuts of the film are released.
In 1996 Stanley begins work on an
adaptation of H.G. Wells’s The Island of
Dr. Moreau for New Line Cinema, but
he is fired after only three days on set.
Stanley makes a number of shorts
and documentaries through the late
1990s and 2000s, before returning
to features with Color out of Space.The main thing that has happened while I was out of the
office is that the world has gone digital. It certainly has its
advantages. We were able to move a lot faster and shoot
in low lighting conditions that we would never have
been able to pull off on 35mm. Another difference is that
it is impossible to do anything without everyone know-
ing. It’s all digital, so there are backers and different pro-
ducers back in video-city watching the take at the same
time as you. There’s no way you can sneak subliminals
into the edit like I used to do, because now they can see
every cut you make and every frame you shoot.
MB: Like Lovecraft’s deities controlling things from another
dimension?
RS: Yeah. On some level it was a lot more efficient,
though, and the film crew we worked with was arguably
the best I’ve ever had the privilege of directing. It’s also
the first time I’ve worked with a crew that hasn’t muti-
nied at least once somewhere in the course of the shoot-
ing, which I really give them credit for.
MB: If you don’t mind me mentioning The Island of Dr.
Moreau, what were some of the lessons that you took from
what must have been an incredibly difficult experience?
RS: I was a lot more relaxed this time. I went into Color
out of Space prepared to accept anything that came next. I
took the same approach in that I pre-planned the hell out
of it, storyboarded it and looked at it from every imagin-
able direction. I ended up creating a little piece of New
England in a very remote location in Portugal. We shot in
the middle of a forest, moved trees around, created a field
and brought in alpacas. It was a much smaller budget
than Moreau, but it was the same kind of approach I
would have taken back then. The good thing is that this
time it worked. All the things that backfired on
Moreau seemed to pay off here and a lot of that is
HARDWARE (1990) DUST DEVIL (1992)