Jóhannsson died this past February, before he could collaborate with Stanley on the long-mooted The Colour Out of Space, which Waller says is getting very close to going before the cameras. “It’s moving along. We announced that we were going to be doing it, what, three years ago? Let’s just say that we’re getting a lot closer. Significantly closer. Like, it’s coming up, so I will be busy with Richard on set with that sometime in the near future.”
When he is, he vows that SpectreVision will give Stanley the support he famously did not receive on the notoriously ill-fated The Island of Dr. Moreau. “He got a bad rep because of what happened on Moreau,” Waller says, “and to me, Moreau is nothing more than an example of bad producing. It’s not his fault, what happened there, and when you watch [David Gregory’s documentary] Lost Soul, you’re like, ‘You fucking assholes, throwing him under the bus!’ It was an opportunity for some experienced producers and studio execs to work with a gifted young filmmaker, and help cradle him into the next phase of his career—not to be like, ‘Huh, why does this little gifted indie filmmaker not know how to handle all this money and all this pressure?’ It’s like, ‘Well, of course he fuckin’ doesn’t know how to handle this shit. He’s never done this before.’ You’ve got to nurture, and it hurt him for many years. Not just in the public eye, but I think it hurt him; it instilled in him a bit of doubt that he didn’t have the vision he clearly has.
“So part of our main goal with Colour will be to let him know that all producers aren’t dicks, and that some of us actually, 100 percent just want what’s best for him and the film. You don’t necessarily always align; sometimes filmmakers can get too focused on certain things to the point that they don’t know what’s best for the movie in the moment, and that’s when producers come into play. Good producers, where there’s a real strong sense of trust, where I can walk up to Adam or Panos and be like, ‘I love you, I think you’re amazing, I think you’re brilliant. This is a bad idea.’ [Laughs] You know what I mean? There’s a way of talking to artists that can be beneficial to them, where you can make the exact same point you’re trying to get across to them, and say it in a different tone. It’s like parenting, I would imagine; you can ask your child to do something politely and nicely, or you can yell at them and scold them, and then they just close off. Richard has been amazing, and I can’t wait to be on that set with him.”
