H.P. SOURCE
COLOR OUT OF SPACE I Richard Stanley returns with a masterly Lovecraft alien saga…
After making a splash with early-’90s cult curios Dust Devil and Hardware, Richard Stanley’s career was torpedoed when he was fired from 1996’s notorious Marlon Brando-starring disaster The Island Of Dr. Moreau. After helming shorts, docs and finding peace in his Pyrenees home, the 53-year-old has finally returned to features, with Color Out Of Space, a gloriously unhinged adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s 1927 book.
Starring Nicolas Cage as a father increasingly disturbed after an alien meteorite hits his Massachusetts home, Stanley was roped in after some producers cornered avowed Lovecraft fan Cage in a Las Vegas bar. “In the course of the evening Nic ran up a bar tab in excess of $30,000, which was extraordinary,” laughs Stanley, who recollects getting a call at 3am – he was in France, sound asleep – from an excited Cage.
So how did this make him feel? “After all these years, I’ve gotten pretty sceptical,” shrugs the South African born director, sporting a t-shirt from Portland’s niche H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival. “I might respond by petting my cat or having a smoke outside, taking a look at the stars and going back to bed. But I try not to run around, waving my arms and hollering about it.”
Yet Cage was good to his word, filming his sequences over the course of four weeks in early-2019. “He pretty much singlehandedly restored my faith in Hollywood,” says Stanley. “On Moreau, there were something like 40 or 44 days that were lost because the cast didn’t show up or didn’t come out of the trailer.
Nic was always there, always full of energy, very invested in every scene.”
Co-star Joely Richardson, who plays Cage’s wife Theresa, also took a step into the unknown – never having done much fantasy-horror – for some particularly gruesome scenes. “My catchphrase throughout the movie was, ‘Slime is no crime!’” say Stanley, who benefitted from some stunning physical effects created by British-born Dan Martin (a regular with Ben Wheatley).
The result is that rare beast: an H.P. Lovecraft movie (both Guillermo del Toro and James Wan have tried to adapt, respectively, At The Mountains Of Madness and The Call of Cthulhu and stalled). “I’d love to actually see a proper studio high-budget Lovecraft movie. I think it would connect very well with the current-day audience because I believe there’s an appetite for it.”
After making Color Out Of Space, Stanley is back in the filmmaking groove, and keen to make more features. “I’m fairly sorry that I haven’t been a little bit more prolific,” he laments. “But I think I’m probably a saner and better person for having been up the [Pyrenees] mountains. Had Moreau worked out well – and I’d gone Hollywood – I don’t know what would be left of me by now.” JM
ETA | 28 FEBRUARY / COLOR OUT OF SPACE OPENS NEXT MONTH.