I just
watched this one too!Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley's Island Of Dr. Moreau
I find the nuts and bolts of movie making fascinating. I find directors that make big budget films fascinating too because of the knowledge they must possess to do their job. Directors are basically building contractors in charge of a multi-million dollar project. They must know about construction, electrical, cameras, lighting, financial issues and how to deal with a wide range of eccentric people and on top of it all, they are artists. And they must complete their job under enormous pressure from the investors in a very short period of time.
So, what we have with this documentary is a movie that went terribly wrong and it's quite a spectacle to see. Richard Stanley had made a couple of small budget movies that were well received and New Line offered him an opportunity to do a film for them. He loved the HG Wells story and was very excited about doing The Island Of Dr. Moreau. He did a script everyone liked and the project was given a budget and a green light. Everything was going pretty good with the preliminaries until New Line somehow got Marlon Brando to be in the movie. When that happened (along with some other things) the budget swelled and Richard Stanley was in charge of something a lot bigger than he was prepared for. What turned out to be a great idea in the beginning turned into one of the worst movies ever made and the journey to that point is quite something to watch with a fired director and Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer sabotaging the film. Marlon Brando was just making stuff up as he went along to see how weird he could be. If you like this kind of stuff, this doc is one of the best.