Now that Dune: Part Two is in theaters, it may be worth your time to revisit an earlier attempt to create a Dune movie by Chilean-French filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky Prullansky. The 2014 film, Jodorowsky’s Dune, discusses the filmmaker’s elaborate plans in the 1970s to create a 12-20 hour film covering the life of Paul Atreides. The planned combination of surrealistic art (Moebius), contemporary music (Pink Floyd), and stars (from Orson Welles to Dali) were being aligned to create something that might of been magical or just catastrophic. We will never know because the American film industry turned him down, even if they did use some of his ideas for future films such as Star Wars and Aliens.
When the film rights to Dune were sold again and Peter Lynch was given a green light to direct the film, we got the 1984 cultish mess that still haunts the streaming services. In the 2014 flim, Jodorowsky said he watched the Lynch film and was “happy because the picture was awful.’
In terms of the latest Dune films by Canadian filmaker Denis Villeneuve, in an interview Jodorowsky said he saw the trailer for the first Dune film and thought it was “well done” for standard industrial cinema, but noted that “industrial cinema is incompatible with auteur cinema.”
In my opinion, after a failure and then a flop, we are lucky to have the determination of Denis Villeneuve to finally give us a high-quality, memorable Dune. That said, it would have been fun to see Dali as the Emperor.
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