The movie Marlon Brando was “hell-bent on sabotaging”
In the prime of his career, Marlon Brando was on absolute fire and gave the utmost dedication to his movies, bringing them into a light of unbridled excellence. Known for his sheer intensity in front of the camera, Brando cut a legacy for himself as one of the greatest to ever perform.
A proponent of the Stanislavski system of method acting, Brando delivered countless evocative and mesmerising performances over the years. Whether playing the head of a crime family in The Godfather or a renegade Colonel in the Vietnam War in Apocalypse Now, it’s fair to say that, for the most part, Brando always delivered his best.
However, by the end of his career, it appeared that Brando had largely had enough of the entire enterprise of acting, having given so much to the cinematic medium over the preceding decades. While Brando would always retain his status as one of the all-time greats, his reputation was shattered in the eyes of the screenwriter of one of his final movies.
The Island of Dr. Moreau, based on H.G. Wells’ 1896 novel of the same name, was directed by John Frankenheimer and saw Brando feature alongside the likes of Val Kilmer and David Thewlis. The film was a production nightmare, though, with Frankenheimer being brought in to replace original director Richard Stanley a week after filming had begun.
Ron Hutchinson had written the screenplay for Dr. Moreau with Stanley, but the writer soon found that Brando had no interest in genuinely offering his talent to the film. Brando had recently lost his daughter to suicide, so he was perhaps not in the best frame of mind to take on the role, but Hutchinson pointed out his complete refusal to engage with anyone.
According to Hutchinson, Brando was a “monster” who arrived on location “weighing 300 pounds” and “hell-bent on sabotaging” the film. Hutchinson had been looking forward to working with one of his idols, but when Brando appeared to want to improvise all his lines and spent most of his time in his trailer, his view of the legendary actor quickly diminished.
“Brando was only answering the door when the pizza man came,” Hutchinson once told The Guardian. “Brando was consuming industrial quantities of pizza while ruminating on what the hell he was going to do when he had to face the cameras. I think there might have been an existential terror there.”
In Hutchinson’s memoir Clinging to the Iceberg, he explained that Brando had become “beyond bored with the making of movies” and was “overweight, unprepared, mocking, dismissive” and generally only on set in order to “sabotage” the movie. However, it wasn’t only Brando who seemed to have an issue on set.
After all, The Island of Dr. Moreau was a true disaster of a production. Bruce Willis left the film early on amid his divorce from Demi Moore, with Val Kilmer being brought in as a replacement. However, Kilmer could only shoot half of what Willis had originally agreed to and proceeded to behave obnoxiously on set.
Original director Richard Stanley was sacked by New Line, so Frankenheimer was brought in to salvage the job. All in all, the film was an absolute disaster, leading to awful reviews and a worse box office take, so if Brando really had sought to sabotage The Island of Dr. Moreau, he certainly succeeded.
