Interview: Color Out of Space director Richard Stanley on letting Nicolas Cage go wild, and bringing the “unfilmable” H.P. Lovecraft story to the screen

Nearly 25 years after unceremoniously being fired from directing 1996’s ill-fated The Island of Dr. Moreau, Richard Stanley is finally back with a new feature film, one that seems tailor-made for his brand of horrific playfulness. An avid H.P. Lovecraft fan since he was a child, Richard Stanley returns to the big screen with Color Out of Space, a wild adaptation of one of Lovecraft’s most iconic stories.

The film stars Nicolas Cage and Joely Richardson as Nathan and Theresa Gardner, a married couple who move out to a remote farm with their two children for a fresh start. When a meteorite crashes onto their land, strange things quickly begin happening on their property. The animals begin acting erratically, and an ominous glow begins to take over their grounds. Members of the family begin getting very sick, while their minds and bodies become warped and undone as they are exposed to the cosmic nightmares that lurk beyond our realm of understanding.

The pairing of Richard Stanley, Nicolas Cage, and H.P. Lovecraft had fans in titters when Color Out of Space was first announced back in 2013, and the film was definitely worth the wait. Lovecraft’s story gives Cage wide room to “go to ten” as Stanley puts it, and the entire film delivers the grand cosmic dread of the Lovecraft tale while managing the tricky balance of humour and horror that has become a staple of Stanley’s feature films over the years, dating back to his 1990 cyborg thriller Hardware.

We caught up with Richard Stanley to discuss shooting Lovecraft’s “unfilmable” story, letting Nicolas Cage loose, and his plans for completing a trilogy of Lovecraft films, continuing with The Dunwich Horror. Color Out of Space is in select theatres now.

Bad Feeling Mag: Congrats on the film Richard; I’ve been able to see it at a couple of festivals, and it really looks great on the big screen.

Richard Stanley: Crazily enough, at the moment our per-screen average is the highest in America, which is weird. I mean, we’re in a lot fewer screens than Bad Boys, which is the number one movie, but at the same time our per-screen average works out better. So, it means there’s a home for Lovecraft after all in the 21st century.

BFM: What was it about this particular Lovecraft story that spoke to you?

RS: Well, I’ve been wanting to do a major Lovecraft movie for a long time, and it seemed clear that it had to be one of the core cannon, one of the central stories, The Call of Cthulhu, Color Out of Space, The Shadow Over Innsmouth, or The Whisperer in Darkness. I think Color came about mostly because it’s, to some extent, the low-hanging fruit of the bunch. It’s set entirely on a farm in Massachusetts and involves one family. And the logistics are perhaps somewhat kinder for low to medium budget film production. And we don’t have to go to Antarctica like At the Mountains of Madness, or the bottom of the Mariana Trench like Cthulhu, who’s just shown up in that movie Underwater the other week.

“Lovecraft’s characters either die or go mad…”

BFM: Color Out of Space was announced back in 2013; was it a difficult process to bring it to the screen?

RS: Nothing in this world is ever easy if it’s worth having. I would say that it was a smoother transition from page to screen than anything else I’ve worked on. And that’s to SpectreVision’s credit. The completed film bears a very strong resemblance to the original screenplay, which is something that always pleases me immeasurably. We didn’t have to make any massive changes or drop anything that was way too ambitious for our budget. We succeeded in bringing home the beast as originally conceived, and that was a complete delight to me.

I mean, the hardest part of it really was — beyond nailing down the cast, because a lot of people are scared of appearing in movies where there’s such a negative dramatic arc. Lovecraft’s characters either die or go mad, there’s really no positive learning experience or a positive growth arc for any of the characters. [Laughs] In fact, most of their arcs are super negative; they’re either being dragged down the well or mutated or one thing or another, so locking down the cast was a bit challenging.

Probably the trickiest part was that Nic’s schedule meant that we could only get him for four weeks, at the end of January 2019. There was a four-week gap, which meant that shooting at the end of January, there was heavy snow in New England, on pretty much any location that we could imagine shooting the movie in. We were forced to find somewhere to double for Arkham County in autumn, or late summer, at the tail-end of January. So, the fact that we managed to produce the verisimilitude of Massachusetts in Portugal in the end, in Europe in January, is one of the film’s strongest achievements. [Laughs]

That was one of the things that was hardest to do and other people insisted that it was impossible. A lot of the production designers I spoke to, we had six weeks prep time, and it was right over Christmas and New Year, we got the sort of advance warning halfway through December. Most people said, “You should re-write the script and set it in Portugal,” or “re-write it and set it in Africa,” but I was very stubborn. And very fortunately, I got into contact with Katie Byron, who ended up being the production designer. Out of all the people I talked to, Katie was the one who was completely unperturbed and thought it would be no problem at all. [Laughs] Which was kind of alarming, but she succeeded in delivering on that promise. That was one of the biggest asks on the movie really; can we do Massachusetts in harvest time in the middle of the European winter?

BFM: How did you work with Nicolas Cage for his transformation (for lack of a better word) in the film? How much of that is in the screenplay, and how much of that is a collaboration between you two?

RS: I guess the word might be “degeneration.” A slow lapse into Lovecraftian insanity. A part of it obviously comes from the original Lovecraft story; we were forced to telescope the events, so the events in the movie take place over a few days, whereas in the book it takes place over the course of years. But I wanted to hit the same main points, and I’m super glad that we retained the scene where the sheriff comes around to the house and Nathan still thinks he’s talking with his family in the downstairs room, which is pretty much verbatim from the Lovecraft original. But we had to arrive at that point, and some of the other crazy emotional beats in the Lovecraft tale. In the story, the Nathan character, Nahum in the story, locks his wife and his child upstairs when they start to mutate in the attic. How many people in real life would lock their wife and their kid upstairs in the attic room or in the barn when they started to change, rather than getting them to the casualty ward? So, we had to find a way of making those essential Lovecraft moments feel like logical decisions, or feel dramatically cogent, which I think was one part of the challenge.

Me and Nic got our heads together in advance and Nic highlighted various areas of the script that he thought he could really run with the bull on. Quite early on, moments like freaking out in the car, or the tomato scene, were flagged as being areas where we could really push it a little bit further. I joked on-set about giving all of human emotions a number from one to ten and directing by numbers, so it was a matter of when you were allowed to go all the way to ten.

BFM: Where does the tomato scene fall on that scale?

RS: Yeah, I imagine for Nic that was like a nine. [Laughs] But I know Joely [Richardson] was always stuck around seven, I said, “You’ve got to counter-balance this.” And on the tomato scene, that was the point where I said, “Tomorrow, Joely, I’ll going to let you go to ten, and really cut loose.” [Laughs] She was getting frustrated at always having to be more subdued, and having to play off that insanity.

BFM: How did you land on the tone of the movie? Was it a tricky balance to navigate the horror and the comedy elements?

RS: Well, I guess the tone is quite possibly something I do naturally. And I think that pretty much everything I’ve done so far has a similar black comedic tone, I’d probably call it a kind of deadpan apocalyptic black comedy. The worse it gets, there’s still the sense that there is something undeniably a little funny about it, even if it’s to do with your mother and kids mutating or dying of cancer. It’s something that comes to me naturally. I probably don’t think about it too much.

But watching Color back afterward and seeing what the hell it is that I’d done, I realized that as a director, I’m probably a shade closer to Tobe Hooper [The Texas Chainsaw Massacre] and Don Coscarelli [Phantasm] than I might have imagined. I love both those guys. The Chainsaw Massacre movies, particularly number two, tries to wring laughs out of the most diabolical scenes, and I find myself giggling for instance when the lead is trussed up like a turkey over the bucket and Grandpa is trying to kill her with the hammer. I find myself laughing even though I shouldn’t be laughing, and it’s like, “This is barbaric and terrible, did Tobe just get a laugh out of me?” And Don with Phantasm and Bubba Ho-Tep and his work, tries to also blend humour and horror, but also with pathos. There’s always some part of Don’s work that leaves me feeling slightly tearful, and slightly choked. You can actually get tears out of me at the same time as revolting me and making me laugh. After Color, I’ve kind of moved those two guys much higher up in my pantheon of favourite directors, because I realized we’re somehow doing the same thing.

BFM: How did you settle on visualizing the “color” in the film?

RS: Yeah, that was a consistent…I guess, battle from the beginning. The color was almost the last thing to fully take form, because all the way through until the VFX stage, we were still tweaking it and changing it. A lot of the time on set, it was represented in such a stylized way that we still had a lot of room to play with. Like, when it’s attacking Theresa and Jack, on set really all we had was something covered with black velvet, with a long black stick with a bright lantern giving out ultraviolet light that moved around them so there would be a light source. All the rest of us held our breath and kind of moved around them with this purple light. [Laughs] We were still thinking, “What exactly is this going to look like?”

“…Lovecraft was kind of a prophet.”

The color for me was always going to be something like a gas with fingers, something that wasn’t really organic and wasn’t quite a gas, so it wasn’t quite anything we could really put down. Somewhere between that and some kind of deep-sea organism. We didn’t want it to fit into any sort of animal, mineral, or vegetable basket, and it’s not easy to identify even by Lovecraftian terms. The color doesn’t have a name, it’s not Cthulhu or Yog-Sothoth, or any of the main deities, it’s something which is almost completely indefinable. A lot of people were saying, “No, with Lovecraft you can’t show the monster.” But effectively, Lovecraft does always show the monster. It’s usually in italics, and it usually comes at the last page of the stories, but even Lovecraft does eventually bring the creature on, and different characters go mad at the sight of it. I mean, we’re fortunate in that a lot of his ideas I think are easier for us to comprehend now in 2020 than they were in 1926.

BFM: Why do you think that is?

RS: My only suggestion is that Lovecraft was kind of a prophet. I mean, he dreamed a lot of this stuff. And some of his ideas are so far ahead of their time that I think people had a hard time wrapping their heads around them, which is why we believed the stories were unfilmable for such a long time. I mean, the fact that he was writing these stories before they invented LSD, or before psychedelics became part of our culture. Just simple things, like his reference to non-Euclidean alien geometry. He uses this term non-Euclidean quite a lot in his work. I recall at school when I tried using the phrase “non-Euclidean ” in an essay my teacher put a big red ring around it and said, “There’s no such thing.” And marked me down for it, but by 2020, we now have fractal geometry, we have chaos science, and we understand that even non-chaotic forces like waves or explosions or supernovas have a kind of pattern within them, there’s an ordering principle that works within them. The energy within the wave comes with a distinct pattern, and we use fractals, not only to describe that, but the VFX that we ultimately used to create the color. So, in a way, Lovecraft hinting at a different form of geometry to describe the forces of chaos is really barking up the right tree, it all kind of makes a degree of sense.

The color distortion when something enters your consciousness, human consciousness, has its limits. And those limits in the visual spectrum, ultraviolet and infrared, and I guess magenta is what happens when you mix the two, a kind of neural bridge between the two, the same as the auditory spectrum between ultrasound and infrasound. And different animals and other creatures can sense things way beyond our capacity. I mean, dogs can hear silent dog whistle sounds which are too high up in the frequency for us humans to pick up on them, so I had to imagine that the animals around the farm would be seeing or apprehending the creature long before the humans. And I wanted to feel that low-level interference or irritation that you get when you know that something is there but you can’t actually hear it. Ultrasound or infrasound causes what can be described as a “sick building syndrome” in a lot of office places. It’s a problem they also have at NASA with the rocket engines and their craft, which is that they generate ultrasound and infrasound that affect people subliminally.

So yeah, I tried to grab onto those elements. It’s like applying fringe science or mad science to Lovecraft. It made a degree of sense. And I know that coming at that in the 1920s, it would have been way harder to try and figure out what he was talking about.

BM: Can you talk about your plans for The Dunwich Horror? Is the idea for it to become a Lovecraft trilogy?

RS: That’s the plan. I want to tackle three of the most popular stories of the prime Lovecraft material, and Dunwich Horror presents itself as the next one. Actually, Dunwich was the one I’d have liked to have done first if I’d had the opportunity. I’ve been wanting to get at the Whateley family for a long time, with all due respect, Dean Stockwell was not enough. We needed to actually have the notion of a whole backwoods inbred family, who have actually cross-bred with ultra-dimensional beings, which is so juicy that I’m very surprised that people haven’t grabbed that idea and run with it before. The Whateley’s are long overdue to have their moment. And being a big fan of Tobe’s Sawyer family, I’ve been itching to get at them.

And of course, Dunwich Horror also takes us on-campus, and we get to go back to Miskatonic University for the first time since Re-Animator. It also positions the Necronomicon very squarely in the center of the story, and we’ll be dealing with the original Necronomicon and the restricted documents section of the Miskatonic library, which I can’t wait to do. I’m currently studying libraries at Yale, Harvard, and the other Ivy League Universities because I know the Miskatonic Library has to be really the main set and the central creation for the second movie. I’m hoping the full trilogy is going to be a bit of a beast because I’m aiming for something that will be stand-alone, but which you can also watch as a continuous sitting. It’s going to be kind of like three episodes of one big Lovecraft movie.

Color Out of Space is in select theatres now.