It’s the same Hollywood story that’s been told a hundred times before. One minute, you’re the director of a prestigious, multi-million-dollar adaptation of a classic novel, starring two of the biggest actors in the business. The next, you’re disguised in a hooded cloak and a latex dog mask, destroying the set with a fire axe and a can of petrol, after having been sacked three days into the shoot.

This wasn’t how Richard Stanley had expected things to pan out. For the then-29-year-old South African filmmaker, it was the sorry climax of his four-years-in-the-planning dream project: an ambitious new adaptation of H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, with Marlon Brando in the title role.

His script was a darkly satirical updating of Wells’ 1896 story of a mad scientist and his tribe of monstrous human-animal hybrids, very different in tone to the handful of film versions already in existence, and not an obvious commercial hit-in-waiting. But the success of his first two features – the Terminator-like dystopian cyborg thriller Hardware and a desert-bound pagan horror called Dust Devil – had brought the prospect of it actually getting made lurching into the realm of the possible.

It was 1994. Stanley’s star was rising, and studios had suddenly started taking his calls. One, in particular, was keen to build the kind of maverick reputation that Stanley’s film might bring: an upstart outfit called New Line Cinema, that had built itself on the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise and other assorted drive-in chillers and shockers, and was looking to make a move upmarket.

Stanley’s pitch, which included a series of lavish illustrations inspired by the Stations of the Cross, so impressed Robert Shaye, New Line’s founder, and Michael De Luca, one of his most trusted lieutenants, that they drew up a dream team to bring the project to life.

Indulged: Val Kilmer in The Island of Dr Moreau Credit: Rex

Michael Herr, a former Vietnam War correspondent who’d contributed to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, was charged with polishing the script, while Edward R Pressman, the shrewd producer who’d ushered previous tricky propositions such as Badlands, Das Boot and Bad Lieutenant into being, was tasked with wrangling the rights from the Wells estate and working out how to secure Brando. The two-time Oscar-winning star of The Godfather was a crucial piece of the puzzle. With him on board, the budget necessary to bring Stanley’s dark vision to life would surely follow.

Things could have hardly started more promisingly – and the unbroken string of catastrophes that would follow over the next 12 months is perhaps the single most disastrous making-of story in the history of the movies. It’s recounted, in hilariously toe-curling detail, in the documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau.

Talking to me on Skype from his home in Montségur, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, Stanley, now 48, seems sanguine about the experience. It’s the day of the village’s Lammas festivities. Earlier, girls carrying garlands marched through the ancient village followed by a brass band, to give thanks for the harvest: “All very Wicker Man,” he says, approvingly. Now the evening sunlight is slanting in through the windows, painting the room a genial blue. Stanley, wearing a lace-up shirt and broadbrimmed hat, is drinking something from a steaming coffee mug and smoking something from a hand-rolled cigarette.

The filmmaker holds none of the previous adoptions of Moreau in particularly high regard (other notable attempts include Erle C. Kenton’s 1932 take, Island of Lost Souls, with Charles Laughton and Bela Lugosi, and the 1977 Don Taylor version, with Burt Lancaster and Michael York).

“The truth of the matter is The Island tends to come around every time the Planet of the Apes films come back in business,” he says. “And it’s the grandfather of all kinds of movies, including Jurassic Park. But the original remains a tough nut to crack – mostly because of its themes, which could never be properly explored in a family movie. At its core it has a Darwinist message, which is at odds with the regular American summer movies, and its view of the impossibility of creating a utopian society is a little dark, even for science-fiction.”

Nevertheless, Stanley’s first problem wasn’t convincing people his film was worth making: it was warding off rivals who thought they could make a better job of it. One of them was Roman Polanski, who was desperate to work with Brando, even though the actor’s on-set reputation had recently been inching from “difficult” towards “impossible”. New Line hired Polanski in a heartbeat, and Stanley, furious at the betrayal, demanded a meeting with Brando to talk about his own, personal hopes for the project.

The director had two aces up his sleeve. The first was his specific concept for the film. He’d written Moreau as a fantastical take on Colonel Kurtz, Brando’s totemic character from Apocalypse Now – and what’s more, Stanley’s own great-grandfather, Henry Morton Stanley, was widely thought to have been the inspiration for the original Kurtz character in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

His second ace, unlikelier still than the first, was witchcraft. Unbeknown to New Line, Stanley had engaged the services of an English warlock called Skip, who convened his coven, cut his arm and drawn a magical sigil as the director wound his way to Brando’s palatial house at the top of Mulholland Drive for their fateful meeting.

Director Richard Stanley (right), with one of his beasts

Stanley had known him for a number of years, and had been impressed with the results of a similar ritual which he’d carried out for a friend, who in the immediate aftermath had received a £1 million investment. “So I suppose, with my tongue slightly in my cheek, I asked Skip to do the same thing for me,” he says.

The plan was that Skip’s spell would magically bind Stanley and Brando to the project, if the director’s Kurtz spiel didn’t do the trick. And in the end, something must have worked. The next thing the studio knew, Brando had agreed to make the film, but only if Stanley was directing it.

With Brando in place, everything else came together: the $40 million budget, the behind-the-scenes talent (the animal hybrids would be created by Stan Winston, the monster designer behind the Terminator and Predator films), the far-flung shooting location (Cape Tribulation in northeast Australia) and also the co-star. Keen to work with Brando, Bruce Willis signed on to play Edward Douglas, a stranded U.N. negotiator who stumbles on Moreau’s gruesome operation.

A few months before filming was due to begin came the first major setback: Willis unexpectedly dropped out. To replace him, New Line fancied the then-red hot Val Kilmer, and Stanley was dispatched to Tokyo, where the actor was taking part in the press tour for Batman Forever, to win him over. It was made clear to Stanley that this close to shooting, Kilmer’s involvement would be the only way to save the movie. So when the actor accepted on condition that his projected filming schedule would be cut by 60 per cent, Stanley could do nothing but agree.

Then tragedy struck, trailing chaos in its wake. Brando’s 25-year-old daughter Cheyenne hanged herself at her mother’s home in Tahiti. Stanley’s leading man was out of action indefinitely – but in Cape Tribulation, the film’s set was already being built, and the bespoke costumes for the extras who would play the beast people were already being made. Perhaps aware that the mounting panic around the shoot could be used to his advantage, Kilmer met with Michael De Luca in Bel Air and, over a miserable breakfast, browbeat him into giving him the significantly less labour-intensive role of Moreau’s assistant, Dr. Montgomery. Kilmer’s previous role went to Rob Morrow, from the television series Northern Exposure: the best replacement New Line could find at such short notice.

This panicked back-and-forth is the part of the story Stanley is most pleased to have cleared up in Lost Soul. (He’s also pleased that a persistent anecdote in which he supposedly climbed up a tree after a particularly miserable day’s shooting and refused to come down is debunked.)

“The film went wrong because it turned into a corporate fiasco: it wasn’t just a case of Brando being mad,” he says.

Mini-me: Brando with his companion

“Of course Val’s demands had a lot to do with it, but Val would have never acted up if the people around him hadn't kept saying yes to him. All he had to do was make a demand, and the company would give it to him. And the moment everyone else saw that he was getting away with it, they all thought it was worth a try.”

Meanwhile, dark omens began to mount up. In Australia, Stanley’s personal assistant was bitten by a venomous spider while turning on a lamp, while in London, Dr. Featherstone, his useful warlock, was hospitalised with a bone disease, then became infected by a flesh-eating parasite. His mother’s house was struck by lightning three times, and neighbours reported seeing the spectral form of a hyena prowling the surrounding countryside.

With Brando on his side, Stanley had felt untouchable. But with the star missing, his position had suddenly become vulnerable. Increasingly paranoid, he confined himself to his rented home near Cape Tribulation, where nightly rehearsals took place – dominated by Kilmer. Shooting began, and was almost immediately disrupted by a hurricane, which flooded large parts of the set. In a howling rainstorm, Morrow contacted his agent in Los Angeles using a ship’s radio and pleaded with him to get him off “this flaming picture”.

On the rare occasions any filming took place, Kilmer was rude and abrasive: during one scene, he reportedly sat on the ground and refused to stand up. Brando was still nowhere to be seen. Three days after the cameras had started rolling, New Line told the cast and crew to down tools and took Stanley off the picture. “We had planned a film that would be like a lucid dream, but it had turned into a nightmare,” he says.

And that was when things started to get really weird.

Back in Los Angeles, Michael De Luca began to suspect that Stanley might try to sabotage the film if control was handed to another director, so he charged a production assistant with personally escorting him to the airport and ensuring he got on a flight back to America. But when the plane landed at LAX the following day, De Luca discovered Stanley hadn’t been on board at all.

Stan Winston's creature designs

Having a director with a grudge going Awol was bad enough, but New Line still needed someone to make their film. They turned to John Frankenheimer: a 65-year-old industry veteran on a career downswing, but with a hard-won reputation for bringing difficult actors into line. (Rob Morrow was also shown clemency, and was replaced by David Thewlis.)

Finally, Brando arrived on set, and filming recommenced … after a fashion. From that point on, a typical working day ran as follows. Brando would arrive at 9am or thereabouts and go directly to his trailer. Frankenheimer would follow, and the pair would discuss the film in private. Around an hour before lunch, the duo would emerge and tour the set, while Brando suggested various ideas he’d had for the general improvement of the movie, and the script would be rewritten to accommodate.

Some that made it into the finished film include: Moreau covering his face in thick white make-up outdoors, Moreau occasionally wearing an ice bucket on his head, and Moreau never appearing without an identically dressed midget – the original Mini-Me, right down to the tiny grand piano – after Brando took a shine to a two-foot-tall actor in the supporting cast. One of the few Brando brainwaves that did not end up on screen was the actor’s suggestion that Moreau would wear an elaborate hat throughout the film. In the final scene, this would be removed – revealing him, in a dramatic twist, to have been a dolphin all along.

With changes being made to the script on a daily basis, actually learning it seemed pointless, so Brando had his dialogue read aloud to him line by line via an earpiece during filming. Sometimes the signal would be drowned out by a local police scanner, and Thewlis would later reminisce about Moreau shouting in the middle of a scene: “There’s a robbery at Woolworths”.

Anxious not to be upstaged, Kilmer kept on Kilmering, often refusing to emerge from his trailer until Brando was on set. “Even if I was directing a film called The Life of Val Kilmer, I wouldn’t have that prick in it,” Frankenheimer was heard to remark after a typically trying encounter. In this way, days would pass without a single frame of usable footage being shot, while the extras sat around in their animal costumes, drinking, getting high and playing chess.

With all this going on, perhaps it’s unsurprising that New Line forgot about Richard Stanley. Around a month after his disappearance, a group of extras found him living rough in the jungle: he’d fled from the airport to a fruit plantation, where he’d been subsiding on yams, cassava and coconuts, along with his substantial personal stash of marijuana. Sensing an opportunity for mischief, Stanley concocted a plan with the extras to get back on set, even though his discovery would surely result in the forfeiture of his severance pay.

Dressed in a stolen dog-hybrid costume, Stanley arrived back at Cape Tribulation just in time for the filming of the violent finale, in which Moreau’s creations overthrow the island and put their master’s compound to the torch. As such, he spent the night being ordered by the unwitting Frankenheimer to destroy the very thing he’d dreamt of building for years. As Stanley wryly notes, his own transformation from creator to beast was now complete.

'Even if I was directing a film called The Life of Val Kilmer, I wouldn’t have that prick in it': Kilmer and Brando Credit: Rex

“But I did find it reassuring and psychologically helpful in the long term,” he says of his time spent undercover on set. “It made me realise the situation was even more shambolic without me.”

Stanley recalls watching Frankenheimer ordering the film’s animal behaviour specialist, Peter Elliott, to take over general directing duties while he grappled with Brando and Kilmer. This was tricky, since Elliott also happened to be playing a baboon, and his commands were mostly unintelligible through his costume.

“This little baboon-man was stomping around in a bright Hawaiian jacket, ordering people around through a loud-hailer,” says Stanley. “And because of his animatronic snout – very nicely made by Stan Winston’s boys – no one could understand what he was saying, and if they did understand they’d pretend they didn’t. So he’d start jumping up and down and shouting. All we heard were inhuman screeches and grunts.”

It’s hard to say what lessons should be learned from the Moreau debacle, because the toxic stew of ego, hubris, tragedy, natural disaster and baboon masks that wrecked it would be impossible to repeat. Unsurprisingly, when the film was released in 1996, it was a laughing stock and lost New Line a considerable amount of money, although the gigantic success of David Fincher’s Se7en the previous year – exactly the kind of prestigious psychological shocker they’d been looking for when Moreau was greenlit – must have softened the blow.

As for Stanley, he withdrew from Hollywood to Montségur, where he makes documentaries – although his dream of retelling Wells’s story remains. He draws succour from the success of the new Planet of the Apes films and Guardians of the Galaxy: “studios prepared to take beast-folk seriously as characters,” he says. He adds that New Line’s determination to make Kilmer’s supporting role a starring one back in 1995 would have been like the most recent Apes film centring on Gary Oldman’s human survivor rather than Caesar, Andy Serkis’s alpha-chimpanzee.

In fact, he’s recently reworked his original screenplay into a three-part graphic novel, which will be released next year by the French comic book publisher Humanoids. His initial plan was to bring the script back to its pre-Brando state: “but,” he laughs, “I’ve inevitably ended up rewriting it pretty much completely.”

Foremost among his new ideas is one that sounds as if it may be grounded in experience.

“The one part that’s become very clear to me is that Moreau’s going to be funded by corporate money, rather than being an isolated, obsessive individual,” he says. “The issue of the beast people being property – that they’re essentially a copyright of the company that’s made them, and aren’t free to have their own lives – amused me.”

There’s one final twist in the tale. Hollywood has been in touch. Once the graphic novels have been finished, they’ll be adapted back into a script, with a view to finally bringing Stanley’s interpretation of Wells’s novel to the screen.

“The chances of it ever coming together seem at the moment very remote,” he says, and no doubt previous experience has taught him to pessimistic. But as he talks me through the specifics – a younger Moreau, performance capture for the creatures, that ultra-topical corporate spin – it sounds more and more appealing. Perhaps more than two decades after the fiasco, the time is finally right. After all, stranger things have happened.

Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau is available to watch on Netflix now and will be released on DVD and Blu-ray in September