Pryce as Little Paddy Lestrange Chad Timmermans as Infant Paddy Leo McKern as Paddy Button William Daniels as Arthur Lestrange Alan Hopgood as Captain Gus Mercurio as Officer Casting Brooke Shields was cast as Emmeline Lestrange based on her performance in Pretty Baby. Jodie Foster auditioned for the role of Emmeline Lestrange, but she was turned down. Kelly Preston also auditioned for the role. Diane Lane was offered the role but turned it down. Willie Aames was considered for the role of Richard Lestrange. Production The film was a passion project of Randal Kleiser, who had long admired the original novel. He hired Douglas Day Stewart, who had written The 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 at Nanuya Levu, a privately owned island in Fiji. The flora and fauna featured in the film includes an array of animals from multiple continents, including a species of iguana hitherto unknown to biologists. Herpetologist John Gibbons traveled to the island where the iguana was filmed after watching the film and described the Fiji crested iguana (Brachylophus vitiensis) in 1981. Shields was 14 years of age when she appeared in the film. All of her nude scenes were performed by the film's 32-year-old stunt coordinator, Kathy Troutt. Shields did many of her topless scenes with her hair glued to her breasts. Atkins was 18 when the movie was filmed, and he performed his own nude scenes (which included brief frontal nudity). Underwater moving picture photography was performed by Ron Taylor and Valerie Taylor. Reception Critical response On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an approval rating of 8% based on 25 reviews, with an average rating of 3.3/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "A piece of lovely dreck, The Blue Lagoon is a naughty fantasy that's also too chaste to be truly entertaining". On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 31 out of 100, based on 14 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Among the more common criticisms were the ludicrously idyllic portrayal of how children would develop outside of civilized society, the unfulfilled buildup of the island's natives as a climactic threat and the way the film, while teasing a prurient appeal, conspicuously obscures all