Saturday 20 April 2024

Henry Morton Stanley





Dr. Moreau : 
Permit me Mr.Douglas, to tell you something 
of The Devil, as I've come to know him. 
The Devil is that element in Human nature
that impels us to destroy and debase.

Edward Douglas : 
And what are you about upon This Island 
but Destruction and Debasement...?

Dr. Moreau : 
Oh well, I can tell you very plainly...

[Majai interrupts by putting his foot on the 
dinner table to which Dr.Moreau reacts]

Dr. Moreau : 
No please, don't do that.

[Majai removes foot from table]

Dr. Moreau : 
For 17 years I have been striving to create a... 
some measure of refinement in 
the human species you see. 

And it is here, on this very island, that I sir, 
have found the very essence of The Devil.

Edward Douglas : 
What do you mean?

Dr. Moreau: 
I've seen The Devil, 
in my microscope  and 
I have chained him,  and 
I suppose you could say in a sense 
metaphorically-speaking, 
I have cut him to pieces
The Devil, Mr.Douglas, 
I've found is nothing more xthan 
a tiresome collection of genes, 
and it is with great assurance 
that I can tell you, that 
Lucifer, Son of Morning 
is no more.

 
Montgomery : 
Well, things didn't work out. 
Moreau wanted to turn 
animals into Humans and 
Humans into Gods. 
But it's Instinct and Reason
Instinct and Reason. 
What's reason to a dog?

Azazello : 
To Hunt. To Kill, Master. 
To run with The Pack.

Montgomery : 
I wanna go to 
Dog-Heaven!

[Azazello shoots Montgomery dead --]


We recreated a couple of scenes from the imagined finished product. 
I sincerely believe that if Wells was 
alive now, he would write it differently.

 There's no way that Wells now would set the story in 1895. 
Plainly, the story would be set in the present. 
It's not a story about the past but is about the near future. 

The images... the first one we produced was actually an image of Dr. Moreau with a newborn creature, one of the lambs, with what actually looked like a halo around his head. So the whole point was to almost sort of play on the whole virgin and baby Jesus image. 

The dog-men are not entirely obeying his orders too, 
because we can see behind Moreau's back, 
some of the dog-men are actually licking the blood 
off the surgical instruments, and way in the back 
in the background in the tank, we see a big, 
three-eyed, intelligent Cthuloid octopus. 

There were going to be sea creatures as well. 

From that we decided actually..we produced a series of 12 images echoing the Stations of the Cross which began with this basic birth, birth of the baby Jesus, and then with the sort of crucifixion scene the end, which was actually Moreau's own death. 

Moreau was originally conceived was 
actually nothing like Marlon Brando. 

I think I had originally talked to Jurgen Prochnow about playing the part. I wanted Moreau to be something, a little bit of a New Ager. 

In some of the earlier pictures, we see 
he's still got the long hair and beard. 

I was making him into some type of a composite of. Timothy Leary and John Lilly the dolphin communication expert. 

As important as the character of Dr. Moreau were the beast-people. 
They were going to be civilized, at least more so 
than we've seen in the previous Moreau versions. 

They've decorated themselves. They've got piercings. 
They've got some degree of beast-person civilization. 

There is no cat-lady in book. The panther woman 
was added in the in the Erle C. Kenton movie 
in the process of making it more Hollywood, 
and we, in return, retained her. 

In reality, Aissa, our cat-lady is drawn from another novel. 
We stole it from Outcast of the Islands, the Joseph Conrad novel. We thought since there's this connection between. Conrad and Wells, borrowing characters from another Conrad story was vaguely in our agreement. I was determined on some level that I would provide that moment, that we were going to see the girl turn into a cat and be an animal. She would run on all fours. She would become furry and underneath her chilaba is furry all over and has a tail. The dog-people take the opportunity, while the master is away, to chase her up the wall, drag her down, and kill her. Being civilized, they then proceed to not just to eat her but to cook her and then serve her to the castaway. When he realizes what's happened in his absence, he immediately shoots a couple of the dog-men. The dog-men really love him. Not only that, they've got very short memories, because they're dogs; So they don't really remember that they've killed and cooked the cat-lady to begin with. They don't really understand why he's killing them. We also rationalize that Montgomery would undoubtedly be sleeping with the beast-people if he's been on the island for decades. I know in one version we had the thought of the pig-lady biting Montgomery's dick off during the final party, which... later in the story, the beast-people get into Montgomery's stash. So suddenly we're dealing with humanized animals on drugs, which is a very appealing thought, and then one starts wondering how they would behave and what they would see. And these were to prove to be controversial elements later in the development process. Here we see the muscular satire character cranking the handle to lower the lift cage. All the way down the shaft, there's other creatures living in the different layers of the complex. We see them through the cage of the elevator, and they're peeking out, and we notice that there's babies and fires burning down there. Here the bear-man reaches for the conch shell with a Lord of the Flies touch and then picks up the conch shell and blows it. Yes, there was going animal vision in this movie, just like toad vision or droid vision. Of course, we're going to see point-of-view shots from the beast people.

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