- Born
- Height5′ 10¾″ (1.80 m)
- Richard Stanley is the award-winning South African-born filmmaker, who made a name of himself with his first feature film, the sci-fi movie Hardware (1990). A low budget movie about a mad-dog android loose in an apartment was released in 1990. Critics slammed it as a Terminator rip-off, yet the film became a financial success. The 1.5 million dollar budget was paid back quite handsomely and continuation was imminent.
In 1992, Stanley followed Hardware with Dust Devil (1992), a story based on the myth of a Namibian serial killer. A fallout with the distributors led to the re-cutting of the US version, while the bankruptcy of the British-based production company Palace Pictures temporarily shut the post-production down in Europe and the film remained mauled or unfinished, depending how you look at it. Finally Stanley himself managed to finance a new, restored print from the original negative, which has later gained a cult following similar to Hardware.
His third feature was to be The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), an adaptation of the famed H.G. Wells novel. Unfortunately it ended up a victim of creative disputes, leading to him being sacked a few days after production began. The finished film, released in 1996, carries little to no resemblance to the version he was originally set to make, using only about two words of his original script.
This, however, hasn't beaten the visionary filmmaker down and horror movie fans are now waiting for him to come back... with a one mean vengeance.- IMDb Mini Biography By: sic_est
- ParentsPenny Miller
- Typical elements of his movies are extreme violence, occultism, oneiricism and visionariness.
- Often sets his films in the South African desert.
- Frequently uses red and sepia color filters.
- Removed as director of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) after one to four (accounts vary) days of filming. He snuck back onto the the set in a dog-man mask.
- Wrote a script called "Nemesis" (inspired by the H.P. Lovecraft poem with the same title) about a group of robbers who break into the vault of a very old Dutch bank to get some diamonds, but end up trapped inside the building fighting a demon who possessed one of them. The project was planned as a starring vehicle for Jean-Claude Van Damme and Sam Raimi was looking to direct it in the 90s, but sadly it didn't happen.
- His adapted material includes: 'Shadowland' by Peter Straub (one of Stanley's favorite novels), "The Damnation Game" by Clive Barker, "The Three Stigmata Of Palmer Eldritch" by Philip K. Dick, "Flicker" by Theodore Roszak, "Cocaine Nights" by J.G. Ballard and "The Great God Pan" by Arthur Machen.
- The great grandson of the explorer Henry M. Stanley, Richard was inspired to make a film from H. G. Wells's story, "The Island of Dr. Moreau", not only because it appealed to him on its own merits but because Wells had claimed that Joseph Conrad's character, Kurz, in his novel "Heart of Darkness" was based on Dr. Moreau, and Conrad, in his own defense, claimed that Kurz was based on Henry M. Stanley.
- Dario Argento is one of his favorite directors.
- I do not feel that at any time it was ever my decision to make any of the movies I made, although I don't regret them.
- I've always had the desire to show people things they have never seen before, which is difficult, because Hollywood prefers things which are like something else. I want to find something that people have never seen before and put it on screen. The desire to bring people back something they don't know about or haven't seen is pretty strong.
- Hardware (1990) - $12,000
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