There remain long standing rumors of tension between Universal’s commercial goals and producers Dino and Raffaella De Laurentiis and Lynch’s more artistic vision (Lynch famously refuses to discuss the film to this day). Had he succeeded in making it, there’s a good chance it would have made a fine addition to his body of work, but there’s little evidence that it would have added much to the Duniverse.ĭavid Lynch’s 1984 film, by contrast, achieves a striking harmony of Lynch and Herbert. But it’s also clear that Jodorowsky had almost entirely recreated his source material in his own image.
At the very least, it’s wildly entertaining to listen to him explain it years later in the doc. His story, ridden with creative liberty, was intriguing enough. Giger, Chris Foss, and Jean Giraud for design, and Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, Mick Jagger, Salvador Dali and a robot recreation of Salvador Dali for the cast) was an embarrassment of riches. The talent he had either assembled or was in the process of recruiting (including Pink Floyd for music, H.R. He preferred something in the 10-14 hour range.) The documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, though, gives the impression that if the project hadn’t collapsed under his ambition, the final product would have buckled under his ego. (Jodorowsky’s producers wanted something under two hours. Officially, production stalled on Chilean-French cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s mid-1970s attempt due to budgetary constraints and an unresolvable disagreement over run time. Not to mention how best to balance the characters, perspectives, backstory, plot points, concepts, themes and personal touches that make the cut.
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The major stumbling block for everyone who has tried hasn’t been a matter of how to bring it to the screen, but how much of its almost 500 pages (not including the appendixes) they can and should include. Many of its most iconic scenes-Paul Atreides’ shield practice, his visions of a mysterious woman he feels he knows, the Reverend Mother’s test, Lady Jessica using the voice, the appearance of Baron Harkonnen-have successfully made the leap from the page multiple times now, with each variation offering its own effective mix of faithfulness to the text and artistic license.ĭune isn’t so much unfilmable as it is uncontainable. Its landscapes, its technology, its people and its fantastical creatures, from the sandworms to the guild navigator, are all primed for visual realization. There’s a great deal about Dune that is inherently cinematic, though. An unfilmable project is something like James Joyce’s Ulysses or Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a book that has been specifically crafted for its medium and cannot be transferred to another one and removed from its prose and structure without losing most if not all of what made it compelling. Over the 56 years of its existence, Dune has earned a reputation for being “unfilmable.” But that’s not the most accurate way to describe the continuing struggles that filmmakers have faced in bringing the book(s) to the screen. Even if it were possible to film a definitive interpretation-and that’s a massive, sandworm-sized if-would there ever be enough of an audience consensus to recognize it as such? A story more uncontainable than unfilmable
But it’s ultimately what confounds us, too. The seemingly limitless approaches to the source material and all of the possibilities that arise from it are part of what draw artist, reader and viewer alike to Dune. My own Dune experience is something else entirely. The other cathartically wept over an exchange between two people in the final pages. One was impressed by the world-building, and fascinated by how effectively Herbert kept him invested in the characters despite cultivating little in the way of emotional attachment to any of them. A few years ago, I happened to know two people who were reading Herbert’s fifth book, Heretics of Dune, at the same time. Even among the most dedicated Dune nerds, these viewpoints can be wildly divergent. That work then joins the rest of the canon in creating the various impressions held by its audience. All Rights Reserved.Īll of the above is filtered through artists’ visions each time Dune makes it to the screen.
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