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Trivia / The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)

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  • Actor-Inspired Element:
    • It was Marlon Brando's idea for Doctor Moreau's chair to have peacock feathers on it. The art director managed to get them from a peacock at a nearby farm. He also suggested that Doctor Moreau resemble The Pope, as he felt that he was blaspheming against nature.
    • Ron Perlman wrote in his memoir that it was his idea to play The Sayer blind. He suggested it to John Frankenheimer, who loved the idea and allowed the makeup team to give him milky contact lenses. When he wore them, he was actually blind.
  • Awesome, Dear Boy: Ron Perlman, Val Kilmer and David Thewlis signed due to the prospect of working with Marlon Brando, with Thewlis also motivated by a trip to Australia and a nice paycheck. Thewlis, for his part, regretted it.
  • Billing Displacement: Protagonist Edward Douglas (David Thewlis) is nowhere in the cover, unlike both Moreau himself (Marlon Brando) and Dr. Montgomery (Val Kilmer).
  • Box Office Bomb: Budget, $40 million. Box office, $27,663,982 (domestic), $49,627,779 (worldwide).
  • Career Resurrection: The only one who benefited in any way from this film had been director John Frankenheimer. He'd been doing TV movies at the time he was brought in to replace Richard Stanley, and sensing New Line's desperation, agreed to step in for a hefty paycheck and a three-movie deal. He got them, one of those movies was Ronin, which was a smash hit.
  • Cast the Runner-Up: Val Kilmer was originally cast in the lead role of Edward Douglas. When he found out he was getting a divorce, he tried to get his part reduced. That was impossible, so he took the role of Montgomery.
  • Contractual Obligation Project:
    • Val Kilmer wanted to drop out of the film in order to deal with his ongoing divorce, but he was contractually obliged to stay on.
    • Fairuza Balk had grown so close to Richard Stanley during pre-production that when Stanley was fired, Balk attempted to leave the production and only continued out of contractual obligation.
  • Creator Backlash:
    • David Thewlis had such a miserable time making the film that he skipped the premiere and refuses to ever watch it.
    • Fairuza Balk had grown close to Richard Stanley during the pre-production. When Stanley was fired, Balk attempted to leave the production; she only continued out of contractual obligation and is not proud of the film.
  • Creator Breakdown: Val Kilmer was going through a divorce, while Marlon Brando was dealing with the suicide of his daughter and accusations of nuclear testing at an atoll he owned. The original director, Richard Stanley, had a nervous breakdown after being fired. After being told of Stanley's firing, Fairuza Balk threatened to cut out her own heart with a sushi knife and later tried to flee the country. And that's just the start of it.
  • Creator Killer: Even though the end product was essentially not his, the film was a huge blow to Richard Stanley's directing career. After this, he directed documentaries, only returning to narrative filmmaking 25 years later when he directed an adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's Color Out of Space.
  • Creator Cameo: A rather loose case with Richard Stanley as one of the mutants, as he had been replaced by the time it happened and mostly did it to keep tabs on the trash fire the movie's shoot had further devolved into with the help of some crewmembers.
  • Hostility on the Set:
    • Val Kilmer and Marlon Brando made things difficult to the point where Richard Stanley got fired and John Frankenheimer was hired partially because he had a history of controlling inflated egos. Frankenheimer was reported to have shouted "Cut! Now get that bastard off my set!" once Kilmer had no more scenes left, and stated after release that "There are two things I will never do in my life. I will never climb Mount Everest, and I will never work with Val Kilmer again. There isn't enough money in the world."
    • Even Brando got fed up with Kilmer, telling him, "You're confusing your talent with the size of your paycheck." There was one reported incident where the actors playing Moreau's creations, having spent hours in makeup, were kept waiting because Brando and Kilmer refused to come out of their trailers until the other did.
    • For his part, Kilmer denied having a feud with Brando. He shared some of the behind-the-scenes footage of friendly moments he had with Brando as well as him and David Thewlis complaining about Frankenheimer's work ethic in the documentary Val. In his memoir I'm Your Huckleberry, Kilmer said:
      Kilmer: John Frankenheimer went on to blame me publicly for ruining the movie. I always thought it an odd thing to try to do, blame me for his failure to make an entertaining film, because my character dies halfway through, and the last half of the film sucks as bad as the first.
    • Screenwriter Ron Hutchinson said that "everybody behaved monstrously to each other" and that Brando had "poisonous" relations with most actors. One anonymous actor was legally forbidden from having a gun.
    • Nelson de la Rosa was instantly loved by Marlon Brando, and essentially replaced Daniel Rigney as Moreau's assistant. de la Rosa lorded it over Thewlis, once punching Rigney in the balls in an elevator.
  • Method Acting: Ron Perlman's character is blind. Perlman had lenses put over his eyes so he actually played the role blind.
  • Money, Dear Boy: When he finally arrived to the set, Marlon Brando made it absolutely clear to everyone that the only thing that made him show up was the paycheck he was promised.
  • One for the Money; One for the Art: According to Marco Hofschneider, John Frankenheimer agreed to step in as director in exchange for a three-picture deal.
  • Orphaned Reference: Assassimon, the baseball bat-wielding ape-creature, seems to be a remnant of an earlier draft of the screenplay in which some of the Beast People put together a baseball team.
  • The Other Marty: Rob Morrow was originally cast as Edward, but quit when Richard Stanley was fired. He was replaced by David Thewlis, who, ironically, was one of the actors Stanley wanted but couldn't get.
  • Star-Derailing Role:
    • Marlon Brando's career was already in free-fall, but this movie, along with his incredibly insufferable behavior during production, obliterated what little star-power he still had. He would turn to supporting roles for the remainder of his life.
    • After the success from Batman Forever bumped Val Kilmer to the A-list, this movie, along with the stories about his Prima Donna behavior during production, greatly damaged his career.
    • Fairuza Balk's career as a female lead essentially ceased to exist thanks to her involvement in this movie. Ironically, she only stayed because her agent told her up front that if she left, the execs would ruin her career and she would never star in anything again.
  • Throw It In!: Since John Frankenheimer was a total Promoted Fanboy of Marlon Brando, whatever Brando wanted, Brando got. One scene has Moreau wearing an ice bucket on his head, because Brando showed up with it and no one had the guts to ask him to take it off.
  • Troubled Production: Hoo boy, did this one go through hell getting to the screen, and the final result shows how bad it was. It was the subject of a 2014 documentary, Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island of Dr. Moreau, which only scratched the surface as to how insane things got.
    • To start with, just as production was about to start in earnest, Richard Stanley discovers via the trades that he was replaced with Roman Polański before a single frame was even shot, as New Line Cinema had little faith in his ability to helm a big-budget blockbuster. Stanley enlisted a British warlock to carry out a blood magic ritual to ensure his job security and get star Marlon Brando (who played Dr. Moreau and enthusiastically endorsed Stanley's vision for the film) to vouch for him at meetings. One could say that it worked, as he kept his job, but things started going wrong almost from the moment production started up near Cairns, Queensland. The boat bringing the exotic animals to the set got caught in a hurricane, and Stanley stayed on the ship to ensure the animals' safety — which meant that he got peed on by a restless puma.
    • As if due to a Faustian Bargain, the warlock that enacted the ritual Stanley had asked for had to go to the hospital due to irradiation affecting his bones and in the hospital said warlock then was afflicted with necrotizing fasciitis! Stanley's mother's house was also struck by lightning and his assistant was bitten by a poisonous spider.
    • Bruce Willis was originally cast as Edward Douglas, but had to drop out due to the proceedings for his divorce from Demi Moore preventing him from leaving the USA. Willis was replaced by Val Kilmer — who immediately started behaving like a prima donna, demanding a 40% cut in the days he was required onset and the construction of a treehouse to "get into character", having Marco Hofschneider’s role heavily cut down to avoid being outshined, and frequently butting heads with Stanley to the point that all of his footage from the first few days of filming was deemed unusable. As such, he was recast in the smaller part of Dr. Montgomery so as to limit the amount of damage he could do; the part of Douglas was recast with Rob Morrow, but he only lasted two days before the sheer hostility on set led him to drop out, causing him to be replaced in turn with David Thewlis. (Kilmer attributes his obnoxious behavior to learning, upon the start of filming, that his wife Joanne Whalley was suing him for divorce.)
    • Speaking of Thewlis, he joined the production due to the prospect of travelling to Australia, working with Marlon Brando, and getting a hefty salary for it. He had such a terrible time making the film that he skipped the premiere and has vowed to never watch it.
    • Brando, meanwhile, didn't show up to the set at all initially. His daughter Cheyenne had just killed herself, sending him into a deep depression that prevented him from even leaving his private island, let alone flying out to Australia. Not only did this force Stanley to shoot Kilmer's scenes first, but not having Brando to vouch for him left him more vulnerable to pressure from New Line. When he finally did get to the set, Brando proved to be almost as bad as Kilmer. He stopped trying to memorize lines and would hear from a radio receiver instead; according to Thewlis, the receiver also picked up other transmissions like police scanners, meaning Brando would randomly announce things like "there's been a robbery at Woolworth's" in the middle of a scene. Brando also had the script revised to give more screen time to Nelson de la Rosa, the "world's smallest man" who he'd befriended during filming, he and Kilmer got along spectacularly poorly, and in one famous instance, he wore a bucket on his head and refused to take it off; this wound up in the finished film.
    • Stanley was eventually fired on the third day of shooting, and he did not take it well, destroying his notes, storyboards, and production art and then disappearing to a remote farm in the jungle, where he lived for two months. Co-star Fairuza Balk, upon learning of Stanley's firing, walked off the set in outrage and tried to escape the shoot with the help of one of the crew, only relenting upon being informed that, if she dropped out, her career would likely be ruined. Stanley would later be discovered by a number of crew members still loyal to him, and he was smuggled back to the set in disguise as an extra wearing a rubber dog mask (security had been tightened in case he tried to sabotage the film). Nobody was the wiser and some of the scenes filmed with Stanley (including the Trash the Set finale) can be seen in the final product.
    • John Frankenheimer took over after Stanley's firing, using New Line's desperation as leverage to secure a massive paycheck and a three-picture deal. He faced Kilmer and Brando on the same coin: apparently, he once replied to Kilmer with "I don't give a fuck. Get off my set!" And on another occasion, "Even if I was making a movie titled 'The Life of Val Kilmer', I wouldn't want that prick in it." (He had nothing but bad things to say about his experience directing Kilmer, and vowed to never work with him again.) Stanley's script was also discarded, and the new one was being rewritten on a daily basis. Frankenheimer's arrival was by all accounts a case of Tyrant Takes the Helm — he was a very "old-fashioned" director whose dictatorial control of the production led to constant clashes with the cast, the crew, and the studio. What's especially ironic is that New Line chose him specifically because he had a reputation for being a stubborn jackass who could dish out as much abuse to his prima-donna actors as they gave him. What they didn't count on was him being double-teamed by both Brando and Kilmer, and when he wasn't dealing with fending off their antics, he continued to act shitty to the rest of the cast and crew who didn't deserve it.
    • The constant delays meant that the extras playing Moreau's "children" were frequently bored and had nothing to do... so they descended into sex, drugs, and all-around debauchery. Desperate for extras to replace them, Frankenheimer eventually hired some random hippies.
    • The film finally entered theaters after a harrowing six-month shoot, whereupon it was met with a scathing reception and bombed at the box office. Kilmer described the shoot as "crazy", while Brando compared making the film to trying to do a crossword while falling down an elevator shaft.
    • Majai, Moreau's Mini Mook, was Nelson de la Rosa. The production hired him because of his 2'4" height to play a fetal creature. What the producers didn't know was that de la Rosa was famous in South America. Brando met him on the set, and immediately took a liking to him, replacing Daniel Rigney's The Dragon role with de la Rosa, expanding his original role as background.
  • Wag the Director: Both Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer did this:
    • Kilmer did not respect Richard Stanley at all, and would constantly question his decisions, such as complaining that several scenes Stanley had planned were "not going to work" and demanding that M'Ling's role be reduced. At one point, he responded to Stanley attempting to direct him with "Richard, actors stand in front of the camera, directors stand behind it. Now go stand behind the camera". Stanley was eventually fired in part because he couldn't get Kilmer under control.
    • John Frankenheimer was brought in and he did manage to get Kilmer under control (though he vowed never to work with him again)... and then Marlon Brando showed up. Other cast members claimed Brando was the only person Frankenheimer respected/feared and as such managed to get away with every ridiculous request, such as Moreau's all-white outfit and makeup, and making Majai his new sidekick. At one point, Brando even conceived of an entire alternate backstory and ending for Moreau — he would never be seen without a hat of some kind, until it would be knocked off during the climax and reveal he himself was a human-dolphin hybrid with a blowhole. Fortunately (or unfortunately), Frankenheimer said no.
  • What Could Have Been:

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