Loosely based on actual events, the plot centers around famous American director Nicholas Ray's 1960s stay in SFR Yugoslavia on invitation by Ratko Dražević [sr], the head of Avala Film studio and former Yugoslav state security operative.
[2] In 1964, celebrated director Nicholas Ray — who had been the toast of Hollywood only a decade earlier having made the iconic picture Rebel Without a Cause starring James Dean — arrives in communist Yugoslavia desperately trying to re-ignite his spiraling career.
Problems with drugs and alcohol have made him fall on hard times, but his name in the world of cinema still holds enough cache to get him a lucrative offer of shooting a movie with Yugoslav state funds — a spectacular costumed horror-drama based on Dylan Thomas's 1953 screenplay The Doctor and the Devils.
Contracted by the state-owned studio Avala Film, headed at the time by the powerful and controversial former UDBA operative Ratko Dražević, Ray was approved a US$1.7 million budget to come up with the adapted screenplay from Dylan Thomas's novel The Doctor and the Devils and use it to direct a movie for which Maximilian Schell, Susannah York, and Geraldine Chaplin had been cast.
A notorious alcoholic, compulsive gambler, and heavy drug user, Ray spent his time in Belgrade living in Hotel Moskva and getting acquainted with the city's cultural elite.
In the end, Ray never made The Doctor and the Devils due to variety of reasons mostly having to do with Avala Film's financial problems caused by one of its co-productions — French-Italian historical adventure spectacular La Fabuleuse aventure de Marco Polo by Noël Howard and Raoul Lévy that ran severely over budget.
Problems with Marco Polo forced Avala into looking for a foreign production partner for The Doctor and the Devils; when it couldn't get one on board, it scrapped the project and Ray left the country.
Originally cast to play Nicholas Ray was Willem Dafoe, however, problems with the film's financing forced Tucaković into pushing the production start date back on several occasions.
[6] Politika's Dubravka Lakić disliked the movie, calling it "self-indulgent film prose that arbitrarily mixes fiction with fact" and referring to it as "Tucaković's 30-year-long obsession that's now out of his system, hopefully for good".