Harry Potter actor David Thewlis has recalled working with Val Kilmer on the “spectacularly bleak and awful” film The Island Of Dr Moreau.
Top Gun star Kilmer – whose varied career saw him play Batman, Jim Morrison, and Elvis Presley – recently died from pneumonia, his daughter told the New York Times.
He played Montgomery in the 1990s film, which was a reimagining of the HG Wells’ novel that follows a shipwrecked man who is left on the island home of Doctor Moreau, a mad scientist who creates human-like hybrid beings.
Recalling what it was like shoot the movie, Thewlis, 62, said: “I spent the most bizarre five months of my entire life with Val Kilmer, out in the Australian rainforest, on the ill fated Island Of Dr Moreau.
“It was so spectacularly bleak and awful it was almost wonderful. Look it up sometime.
“As Val wrote in his final mail to me: ‘What an incredible story we lived, you and I. One of the greatest.’
“Bittersweet to be back here in Australia and hear the heartbreaking news. He was one of the most extraordinary people I have ever met. Proud to have called him a friend and co-conspirator.”
The film was overwhelmingly voted as one of the worst movies of the year by Oscar spoof ceremony the Golden Raspberry Awards in 1997.
After being rescued by Kilmer and taken to the island, Thewlis’ character, Edward Douglas, discovers the eponymous doctor, played by Marlon Brando, has been messing around with gene-splicing and has created a race of troublesome humanoid beasts.
The Godfather star Brando wears a flowing white robe, a hat, a scarf and purple lipstick in the film, with no explanation as to why he is dressed this way.
During the making of The Island Of Dr Moreau, Brando reportedly told Kilmer: “You confuse your talent with the size of your paycheck.”
Stephen Hopkins, who directed Kilmer in The Ghost And The Darkness, said he could not have been easier to work with considering he was “completely exhausted from doing The Island Of Dr Moreau” and “dealing with unfavourable publicity from that set”.
“I worked with him for six or seven days a week for four months under really adverse conditions and he came through. He had a passion for the film”, he said.
