D: David Gregory. P: Carl Daft, David Gregory. Interviewees: Richard Stanley, Graham Humphreys, Edward R. Pressman, Robert Shaye, Fairuza Balk, Marco Hofschneider, Graham “Grace” Walker, others. US dist (Blu-ray/DVD): Severin Films.

David Gregory’s Lost Soul is a fine addition to the growing list of anti-Making Ofs documenting The Films That Might Have Been, proudly joining the ranks of Vassili Silovic and Oja Kodar’s Orson Welles: One Man Band (a.k.a. The Lost Films of Orson Welles) (1995), Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe’s Lost in La Mancha (2002) and Frank Pavich’s Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013). Gregory takes as his subject the notoriously troubled 1996 production of The Island of Dr Moreau, a film which crushed the career of a promising young director and fast became a byword for Hollywood hubris. New Line Cinema founder Robert Shaye is one of many interviewees whose testimony can be summed up with a tired shake of the head, and a “whaddya gonna do?” shrug. Former pop promo director Richard Stanley – a marginal talent, whose first two features (Hardware [1990], Dust Devil [1992]) proved him capable of some nice sub-Jodorowskian visual ideas, if little else – had long cherished a dream of filming the Wells novel, concocting what sounds like a genuinely off-the-wall scenario for his proposed remake. Enlisting British movie poster artist Graham Humphreys (probably best-known for his Evil Dead quad) as his pre-production artist, Stanley set about creating a portfolio of images to shop around Hollywood. Humphreys’s designs are a model of outré insanity, with no lurid implication (zoological or sexual) left unexplored; it seems Stanley had found the ideal collaborator to visualise his dream project.

When Stanley managed to snag Marlon Brando to play Moreau, the project quickly gained unexpected traction. New Line wasted little time greenlighting the show, seeing it as their chance for big-time credibility: their first megabucks show, with real stars and a top-notch team of multi-national creatives behind the camera. The shooting location New Line approved was a secluded island off the coast of Australia – far from the prying eyes of production chiefs in Tinsel Town. It was to be the first of many fateful decisions.

Once at the location, bad luck dogged Stanley from the start. Weather destroyed the entire set, which had to be rebuilt from scratch. Human agencies were no less destructive. Not only did Brando treat the entire production as a joke, disdaining to learn his lines and behaving, generally, like the Emperor Caligula for the entire shoot – with self-indulgent antics carefully designed to see how far he could push director and producer before they snapped (an example: his decision to play Moreau as an epicene grotesque in Fellini fancy dress – white pancake makeup, mummy-like bandages, kaftan and ice-bucket headdress) – but there was even more trouble in store from Brando’s co-star. First-choice Bruce Willis had already dropped out, to be replaced by the production’s kiss of death: Val Kilmer.

Kilmer (a narcissist a-hole of the first water, according to literally everyone) coolly rubbished all of Stanley’s ideas, changing his character into a drug-addled dick – presumably so he didn’t have to act. Brando and Kilmer forged a mutual loathing, with Brando hardly acknowledging his co-star’s existence. Kilmer responded by mocking Brando’s lisping delivery in his own onscreen performance. While the stars locked horns in the prima donna Olympics, the shoot rapidly descended into an anything-goes sex-and-drugs orgy lasting six months. Stanley was fired, ostensibly because of his failure to keep his unruly stars in line, but his replacement – Hollywood veteran John Frankenheimer, no less – fared little better, despite his grizzled no-nonsense reputation. Kilmer continued to act like an entitled prick, prompting Frankenheimer to fume: “If I was making a movie called The Val Kilmer Story, he’d be the LAST guy I’d hire.”

Desperate to drag the juggernaut back on-track, New Line mandated drastic rewrites to Stanley’s original script, further diluting his creative input. Meanwhile, Stanley himself – slowly emerging from a nervous breakdown occasioned by his summary dismissal – was living in a tent a mile or so from the shoot, brooding on his betrayal and vowing revenge. With the aid of friendly co-conspirators still employed on the production, Stanley sneaked back onto the set made-up as one of Moreau’s beastly hybrids; he can actually be seen in the finished film, somewhere in the background, figuratively flipping the finger to his former employers.

Richard Stanley – a soft-spoken South African expat, sporting a costume that’s a mixture of shamanic bijouterie and Spaghetti Western chic – is our chief witness, so the story we see is largely shaped by his wry testimony. We hear nothing, unsurprisingly, from Kilmer – a shame, as it might have been fun to see him justify his behaviour. David Thewliss is also conspicuously absent from the roster of interviewees; whether that’s because he’s chosen to purge the whole sorry business from his memory, or a result of scheduling conflicts, we may never know. Much of the pro-Stanley support comes from co-star Fairuza Balk, who candidly relates the not-so-subtle threats she was subjected to when she threatened to walk off the shoot in sympathy with her director. (“You’ll never work in this town again,” was the basic gist. She got the point.) There’s also bemused commentary from Aussie pros like production designer Graham “Grace” Walker, and various unit drivers, wranglers and suchlike; the overall impression is of a colossal, spiralling train-wreck beyond anyone’s control.

Lost Soul is the tragic flipside to Hearts of Darkness (1991), George Hickenlooper’s documenting of Apocalypse Now – another dream project which threatened to tear itself apart, and yet (thanks to its principal creator’s own iron self-conviction) emerged, after years of strife, as an artistic triumph. The Island of Dr Moreau, on the other hand, became an artistic joke: rightly dismissed as a gigantic, misconceived embarrassment, more E. D. Wood than H.G. Wells. Seeing his cherished project dragged in the dirt, it’s no wonder Stanley lost his marbles. (He’s never directed another feature since.) While Lost Soul is certainly less than impartial, it’s commendably frank in its assessment of what went wrong, and who was to blame. Maybe Richard Stanley was kidding himself to believe he could possibly pull off such an audacious project. But he may console himself with the thought that his ideas, at least, were big. It was only reality that let him down.