Ego vs Talent - A Nightmare Receipe for Making a Film
Caught this at its premiere at FrighFest in London and does make fascinating view about how great talent does not make for great film-making. The battle of wills between Brando, Kilmer and those actually trying to make the film are comical, yet truly disheartening when you consider the time and passion that many, most notably Richard Stanley had put into getting this film off the ground. However it is in light of this that it feels the makers of this documentary themselves got caught up in the whole madness of the production, and never really looked in depth and went wrong here. As the seeds for this film debacle were clearly sown in the pre-production phase.
i) The Casting - Brando was well known to no longer be a box office draw, and was difficult to work with. Two hard to avoid examples being the role he played in the nightmare production for Apocalypse Now, plus the crippling costs of employing him on Superman. Yet aside from one of the senior execs at New Line, nobody else seemed to question inflicting him on an inexperienced director. At least the casting of Val Kilmer makes some production sense, since at the time he was the new Batman, and was clearly seen as a big box office draw.
ii) Richard Stanley - the brief on-screen intro for him depicts him as a rising star, a visionary director, but fails to mention that both his previous films had ran into serious problems. A creative falling out with his second feature Dust-Devil, meant that it was eventually released in an 87 min version instead of the intending 120 min, after being cut by the distributors into something that made very little sense. While his first film Hardware praised as great piece of original low budget sci-fi, turned out to be a copy of a comic short story - Shok, not only in terms of story but also the look and design. Which after threatened legal action resulted in additional writing credits for Steve McManus and Kevin O’Neil.
iii) The producers - at numerous points during interviews it comes across that Stanley was an isolated figure, but what is not made clear is how this came to be. Was it his character or perhaps more to do with the producers trying to get him off the film. Certain choices about how the film was set-up are criticised, but if these were poor chaises then why weren't the producers raising the issues at the time.
At the end you do feel that there could have been some more pointed question for the producers and Richard Stanley, to really find out what was happening in those early stages, rather than focusing on the easier targets of two out of control actors with huge egos. Especially so as Richard Stanley "disappears" from this film for sometime as the attention switches to the antics of the actual film production, something which everyone freely admits had nothing to do with what he actually envisaged.