Richard Stan­ley: ​‘I got a phone call at 3am from a guy claim­ing to be Nic Cage’

Richard Stan­ley achieved cult sta­tus with his first two fea­tures, Hard­ware and Dust Dev­il, in the ear­ly 1990s. Poised for break­out suc­cess with an adap­ta­tion of HG Wells’ The Island of Dr More­au, the British-South African film­mak­er was kicked off the project fol­low­ing a series of alter­ca­tions with lead­ing man Val Kilmer (an inci­dent described in jaw-drop­ping detail in David Gregory’s 2014 doc­u­men­tary Lost Soul: The Doomed Jour­ney of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr Moreau).

More than two decades in the wilder­ness fol­lowed, before Stan­ley returned with his most com­mer­cial prospect to date, an adap­ta­tion of HP Lovecraft’s ​‘Col­or Out of Space’ star­ring Nico­las Cage. The film­mak­er gave us a call from his home in France to talk about his new acid hor­ror and what he’s been up to in the inter­ven­ing years.

LWLies: Col­or Out of Space is your first com­mer­cial­ly released fic­tion fea­ture since the Dr More­au tragedy back in the mid-’90s, but you’ve been mak­ing short films and doc­u­men­taries in the inter­ven­ing years.

Stan­ley: Yeah, I kept myself busy. I didn’t real­ly expect myself to be back in the film indus­try, but every now and again sto­ries present them­selves, and while I couldn’t afford to make them into mul­ti­mil­lion dol­lar fea­ture films, I want­ed to doc­u­ment them just the same. A lot of the doc­u­men­taries are sketch­es, per­haps, for movie projects that nev­er happened.

You’re now liv­ing in the south of France, which forms the back­drop to your 2013 doc­u­men­tary The Oth­er­world. Can you talk a bit about what led you there?

I took a very unlike­ly career turn after Dr More­au. I walked away from the film indus­try and for what­ev­er rea­son went look­ing for the Holy Grail, which ate up a good ten years of my life. I wouldn’t have had it any oth­er way. To an extent, Montségur, the Cathar citadel in the south of France, was a place that caused me to ques­tion my athe­ism. It budged me from my habit­u­al cyn­i­cism and opened the door a bit more to mak­ing me a believ­er in the supernatural.

The research I was doing was into the his­to­ry of Montségur and the cumu­la­tive events that have tak­en place there over many cen­turies. There was a lev­el of coin­ci­dence which bugged me from the very begin­ning. It seemed off the scale, or very unlike­ly. I had to do a lot of fact check­ing and found that things were stranger than they ought to be. Then in 2007, I basi­cal­ly wit­nessed an appari­tion on the moun­tain, and it forced to me to start look­ing at the local folk­lore more seri­ous­ly. In fact, I moved to the moun­tain and spent the next 10 years liv­ing as close to the cas­tle as pos­si­ble, because I fig­ured that his­to­ry was the sur­vival of con­scious­ness after death and this need­ed to become my priority.

Are you still work­ing as a guide there?

I’m still liv­ing in the moun­tains but haven’t been doing a lot of guide work this year. It’s look­ing like with the suc­cess of Col­or Out of Space, I’m going to be doing a lot more work on Lovecraft.

As some­one with a deep inter­est in the occult, do you think film – as a tool or a medi­um – has par­tic­u­lar mys­ti­cal or com­mu­nica­tive properties?

Film lets us see things from anoth­er person’s point of view, which is one of its most valu­able aspects. It’s the one medi­um that allows you to put some­one else into your mind for a while. It’s a kind of shared dream­ing. As a result, you can intro­duce peo­ple to con­cepts that are very alien to their nor­mal think­ing. Movies reflect the mass-dream­ing of the pub­lic. The world has dis­placed its dreams into its enter­tain­ment. One can def­i­nite­ly sees what’s going on in the mind of a cul­ture by exam­in­ing its movies, its visu­al out­put. There’s a rea­son why the work of HP Love­craft is now more pop­u­lar than ever. This peri­od of Trump’s Amer­i­ca and Brex­it, the fact that we’re now fac­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty of mass extinc­tion, has led to Love­craft being giv­en a bumper year.

Is there an under­ly­ing nihilism in his work that peo­ple are now con­nect­ing with?

I think so. It’s a weird com­bi­na­tion of peo­ple sud­den­ly fac­ing up to the notion that we might be wiped out as a species and simul­ta­ne­ous­ly real­is­ing that we don’t real­ly have the cer­ti­tude of ortho­dox reli­gion to retreat to. Very few peo­ple are able to buy into the exis­tence of an all-wise, all-lov­ing Chris­t­ian cre­ator, giv­en that those con­cepts are falling away. The rather more ter­ri­fy­ing Love­craft­ian take on human­i­ty being cre­at­ed almost by chance, by inhu­man, extrater­res­tri­al forces we can’t com­pre­hend seems to be speak­ing to people’s hearts more loud­ly than ever.

Can you talk about your jour­ney back to main­stream filmmaking?

Every­thing in my life has been a com­plete fluke. It was a series of ridicu­lous coin­ci­dences. Post-More­au, I hung around the periph­eries of the film indus­try for 10 years, writ­ing screen­plays and doing odds and sods, turn­ing up in cameo parts. I’d basi­cal­ly com­plete­ly giv­en up, and start­ed mak­ing a liv­ing tak­ing peo­ple up the moun­tain, retreat­ing fur­ther into the Pyrenées. I prob­a­bly would have stayed there had it not been for me and two friends muck­ing about with a glow-in-the-dark oui­ja board from Toys R Us. The oui­ja board told us to write Moth­er of Toads, a short film based on the work of Clark Ash­ton Smith. In fact, it dic­tat­ed most of the script and the struc­ture, and as a joke we did it. This 20-minute short then became an episode in an anthol­o­gy film called The The­atre Bizarre that the US-based pro­duc­er David Gre­go­ry put togeth­er; we did it for 20 grand.

The backer of the film, a man named Dar­ryl Tuck­er, who was the CEO of the West Vir­ginia Con­crete Com­pa­ny, real­ly dug our seg­ment and flew out to Montségur to see the loca­tion. He said he’d throw down $10,000 if we’d write a fea­ture-length script based on ​‘Col­or Out of Space’, which I was ini­tial­ly reluc­tant to do because I thought, ​‘How the hell are we going to cre­ate a colour that doesn’t exist?’ But being shy of a few pence, I wrote the screen­play, and by the time I’d fin­ished it, Dar­ryl and his con­crete com­pa­ny was already bank­rupt. So the movie wasn’t forth­com­ing but the script float­ed around. Dur­ing the shoot­ing of Mandy, Nic Cage let slip that he was a Love­craft fan, and the pro­duc­ers were keen to work with him again. So they grabbed my screen­play, pressed it into Nic’s hands and it sud­den­ly came into being.

I got a phone call from a guy claim­ing to be Nico­las Cage, call­ing me from a bar in Las Vegas at about 3am Montségur time. The whole thing seemed pret­ty bizarre and I remained scep­ti­cal for a long peri­od of time, it just seemed too far-fetched. The pro­duc­ers had to dri­ve up to the Pyrenées even­tu­al­ly, and banged on my front door. I gave them cof­fee and they told me to get in the car, where they drove me south to Por­tu­gal and into pre-production.

You once said that on a $75m film, ​“You can’t trust your own moth­er.” After your expe­ri­ences on More­au, were you ner­vous about ques­tions of trust and con­trol when it came to re-enter­ing the sphere of com­mer­cial filmmaking?

It was def­i­nite­ly daunt­ing, but it helps that Col­or is a much small­er movie. The oper­a­tional bud­get of Col­or was prob­a­bly around 3m Euros, and as a result there was a lot less pres­sure. We had six weeks to prep it, and six weeks to shoot. Col­or prob­a­bly made the tran­si­tion from page to screen much more smooth­ly than any­thing else I’ve ever writ­ten. The fin­ished film is very close to the orig­i­nal script.

You made your 1999 doc­u­men­tary Voice of the Moon in Afghanistan dur­ing the Sovi­et-Afghan war when you were just 22. There’s var­i­ous sto­ries about how you got into the coun­try to shoot the film, from join­ing up with a fun­da­men­tal­ist group to trav­el­ling in with hero­in smugglers…

They’re both true. The first time I went in with the Unit­ed Nations, with the UN food con­voy, deliv­er­ing flour to Nan­garhar province. Then we got into trou­ble with the UN for devi­at­ing from the path, because they were very strict about going in and drop­ping off the flour on the agreed route. Of course, the whole point of being in Afghanistan was there was all this stuff that I was des­per­ate to see. The UN got real­ly pissed and wouldn’t let us do it again. Deter­mined to get back in, we went with one of the guer­ril­la par­ties. The deal was fixed for us by a guy who was lat­er impli­cat­ed in hero­in smug­gling, which we didn’t know about at the time.

We then joined the Hezbi Isla­mi under Gul­bud­din Hek­mat­yar, who was this ter­ri­fy­ing, black-tur­banned guy who looked likes the bad guy from The Gold­en Voy­age of Sin­bad. I liked them because ini­tial­ly I thought they were against smok­ing, and if we were with them we’d be forced to give up. It didn’t real­ly work that way in the field. It turned out they were all hyp­ocrites. The moment they were out of sight of civil­i­sa­tion they were all smok­ing, wear­ing leather jack­ets and trad­ing Leonar­do DiCaprio videos.

But it was an inter­est in lycan­thropy, rather than polit­i­cal jour­nal­ism that first drew you there?

Part­ly, yeah. I was inter­est­ed in shaman­ism and shape-shift­ing in gen­er­al. There had been a shaman­ic pagan cul­ture in the Hin­du Kush until 1910, which is incred­i­bly recent, as pret­ty much every­where else in the world the tra­di­tion­al pagan, shaman­ic cul­tures were wiped out thou­sands of years ago. The fact that this had a ful­ly func­tion­al pagan soci­ety – an ecsta­t­ic, dance-based reli­gion – up until less than a hun­dred years before we arrived made me feel very opti­mistic that, in a place where most peo­ple can’t read or write and infor­ma­tion trav­els very slow­ly, it was a good place to look for a tru­ly pri­mor­dial, dark age experience.

Instead you were hit by rock­ets and your pro­duc­er was killed by the CIA.

Yeah, well, we didn’t see that part com­ing. We were young and naïve, the point being that when we went in every­one was on the same side. At that point, the peo­ple who were going to become the Tal­iban, our­selves, the CIA, Eng­land, Amer­i­ca – every­one was unit­ed against the Rus­sians. We didn’t see ⁹⁄₁₁ com­ing, and nev­er thought things would get as tricky as they did.

And yet your first instinct, when you thought you were about to get caught after the siege of Jalal­abad, was to swal­low all the LSD you had with you.

I cred­it that with get­ting me out of there. For some rea­son I was the only one out of the bunch of us that wasn’t killed or bad­ly injured. I’m not par­tic­u­lar­ly tough, so I cred­it the fact that I was trip­ping balls at the time for my abil­i­ty to get through it. I was a lot more relaxed, didn’t take things too seri­ous­ly and devel­oped this stu­pid idea that I could tele­path­i­cal­ly tell where boo­by traps were. I hitched my Ger­man friend who was injured in both legs onto the back of a don­key and took off across the mine fields with­out wor­ry­ing about it too much. I think if I hadn’t been trip­ping, I would have frozen and panicked.

Didn’t LSD play a part in an ear­ly meet­ing with Har­vey Weinstein?

Yeah, that was a bad call. I’d made Hard­ware just after get­ting back from Afghanistan. Under nor­mal cir­cum­stances, these days peo­ple would have coun­selling, but Hard­ware was what I had instead of PTSD. I was in a pret­ty strange frame of mind dur­ing that pro­duc­tion, but I didn’t touch alco­hol, soft drugs or psy­che­delics through­out the entire pro­duc­tion, I was on the straight and nar­row. Then we did the damn movie, and it turned out alright; we pre­miered the thing at Cannes. Then there was a sec­ond one, which was a sold out mid­night screen­ing with a pre­dom­i­nant­ly young audi­ence. So I thought, ​‘Okay, everyone’s seen the movie, I’ve done my job, now I can let my hair down a little.’

I took a bunch of psy­che­delics for that mid­night screen­ing, for the first time in about a year. I’d been walk­ing the line pret­ty good, and it was the first time since work­ing on the film that I was able to see it from a new per­spec­tive. I real­ly enjoyed the expe­ri­ence, but unfor­tu­nate­ly the movie is only about 95 min­utes, so by the time it end­ed and I came out of the audi­to­ri­um, I was still pret­ty messed up. The first that hap­pened was I ran into Har­vey Wein­stein, who was com­ing right at me with his hand out­stretched – but from my twist­ed, drug-laced per­spec­tive he seemed like a huge, grey ogre. I remem­ber see­ing beads of sweat cling­ing to his flesh, and I just pan­icked. I pushed past him and ran.

Col­or Out of Space is kind of struc­tured like a trip.

Yeah, I always try to struc­ture my movies that way. Hard­ware is also struc­tured like that. Col­or takes that lit­tle bit of time com­ing up at the begin­ning, then once it does start to get weird it con­tin­ues to do so.

Col­or Out of Space is released in cin­e­mas on 28 Feb­ru­ary, and Blu-ray, DVD and Dig­i­tal on 6 April. Read the LWLies review.