"I must confess that the pain and chaos of the island made me lose faith in the sanity of the world," Dr. Moreau's island reads and nobody agrees more than Richard Stanley . With only three feature films to its credit (to which an imprecise number of short films and documentaries should be added), the history of cinema has reserved a place of honor for this South African of 52 years more famous perhaps for what he did not do that for, indeed, the glory of his filmography.
Until the mid-90s, this man with a broad hat and cowboy manners from another time could boast of owning a promising career with two films ( Hardware, Ready to Kill and The Demon of the Desert ) between terror, science- fiction and the most delivered absurd that time has become objects of worship. That year, the pain and chaos of the quotation marks made an appearance and ... until now that reappears at the Toronto Festival with Color out of space by the hand of Mandy's producer, Panos Cosmatos, and with Nicolas Cage inside . And, yes, it all starts again.
Legend has it and the delirious documentary Lost soul , by David Gregory, records with anarchic precision that Stanley was fired three days after filming began, in effect, Dr. Moreau's Island that would be released in 1996. A simple fax of the He took care of the news before. The one that ended up being the third adaptation for the HG Wells text screen was finally shot by John Frankenheimer, but in justice it was such a personal project that the vicissitudes of a mad production could not make our man's signature disappear altogether. It is not clear what the reason for his removal was, but, in view of the evidence, it could be any one or just one and only: again, chaos.
A film starring a Marlon Brando already twilight and devastated by the suicide of his daughter Cheyenne and with a Val Kilmer in a permanent boiling state promised everything but calm. So it was. First a tropical storm swept through the shooting set . What came next was a cataract of insubordinations starring, first, by an actor unable to memorize a script line while demanding all kinds of whims (including his morbid fascination with the tiny castmate Nelson de la Rosa), and, second, on the other that he professionalized in taking the opposite to the director. Brando and Kilmer. In the middle, a set turned into an endless camping of makeup people in the strangest way and that did not meet any shooting plan. Stanley, who could not overcome seeing his dream sink, was camouflaged extra to spy on the development of all that. Until it disappeared.
And so on until today. "I think I exhausted all the bad luck that corresponded to me in life with that movie," Stanley says at the gates of his return. But Color out of space , in addition to the return of the legend, is also a good summary of Stanley himself. Starring a Nicolas Cage out of his way as he is the norm (maybe a little more if possible), the film adapts the classic HP Lovecraft story. He does, of course, in his own way. The story is told of an extraterrestrial visit that will fall like a curse on a remote place where, suddenly, nature will acquire an extra and completely uncontrolled life. The plants are animated, the animals mutate and the palette of primary colors is enriched with a new one. The color that fell from space is the title in Spanish of the Providence story.
The film, more prone to disorder than to heterodoxy , does not give up anything: neither to the shabby nor to the excessive nor to the laughter nor, of course, to a Cage turned into the best special effect. The whole film breathes the virtue of the chaos that the version of The Island showed on the screen ... from which Stanley was left, while living happily in his own and most intimate delirium. "Lovecraft," Stanley reasons, "said that all his work attempts to evoke the sensation of cosmic horror in the face of humanity's vulnerable position in the universe. And I do that." And in the statement goes the best summary of an entire existence, that of Stanley, chaired by chaos. And the pain. Who knows if the best metaphor of all this does not rest in your life. Stanley, the filmmaker who fell from the sky, we are all.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
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