The Blue Lagoon (1980 Film) - Production

Production

The movie was a passion project of Randal Kleiser, who had long admired the original novel. He hired Douglas Day Stewart, who had written Boy in the Plastic Bubble, to write the script, and met up with Richard Franklin, the Australian director, who was looking for work in Hollywood. This gave him the idea to use an Australian crew, which Franklin helped supervise.

The film was shot in Jamaica and Nanuya Levu, a privately-owned island in Fiji, whilst the blue lagoon scenes were shot in Champagne Bay, Vanuatu. The flora and fauna featured in the film includes an array of animals from multiple continents. As it turned out, the iguanas filmed on Fiji were a species hitherto unknown to science; this was noted by the herpetologist John Gibbons when he watched the film, and after traveling to the island where the iguanas were filmed, he described the Fiji Crested Iguana (Brachylophus vitiensis) in 1981.

In the DVD version of this film, it was stated that many of Brooke Shields' nude scenes were in fact done by older body doubles. In addition, the film's stunt coordinator Kathy Troutt was one of the body doubles as well as the dolphin trainer. It was also stated that Brooke Shields had done many of her topless scenes with her hair glued to her breasts.