Alien and Blade Runner. Salvador Dali and Orson Welles. Lennon. Jagger. Pink Floyd. All these movies, actors, and artists are connected by one film. A film that does not exist.
Miserly production companies, disjointed scripts, stubborn directors: films can fall apart just as fast as they’re imagined. Unfinished movies often become urban legends in their own right. Look no further than Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon, a passion project supposed to amalgamate a private collection of more than two hundred historical books into one colossal epic. For the director of classics such as 2001 and Dr Strangelove, it was a life-long obsession destined to become his masterpiece. It also never saw day one of filming. On the other side of history, there’s the strangeness of Tim Burton’s Superman Lives, a bizarre fever dream starring a wavy-haired Nicholas Cage in a battle against a giant spider. Not quite a masterpiece. Even with the absurdity of the Man of Steel donning a mullet, there’s one unfulfilled project that’s crazier. It transcends the status of a good coffee shop story, leaving its fingerprints throughout all of film: it’s Jodorowsky’s Dune.
In 1976, Hollywood executives walked into a meeting looking forward to greenlighting a sure-fire hit. It was a blockbuster adaptation of Dune, Frank Herbert’s biblical saga of interstellar empires. They walked out having shut down a 14-hour-long kaleidoscopic leviathan starring Mick Jagger and Salvador Dali. The next year, a young American filmmaker passionate about Samurai films and Arthurian mythology released a B-movie space opera. It was called Star Wars. It made history, Dune disappeared. Let’s rewind the clock.
We’re only a couple of years into a post-Beatles world, and John Lennon has just spent one million dollars funding a mystical hallucination of a film, The Holy Mountain. It eventually found its audience in underground circles (Kanye West watched it on repeat when recording “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy”), inspiring and horrifying audiences with its provocative imagery. The man behind it all was a Chilean Parisian by the name of Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Somehow, scenes of genital-shaped ice sculptures and characters defecating gold weren’t enough for the filmmaker, the boundaries had to be pushed even further. Enter Dune. A restless storyteller, Jodorowsky claimed that a deity told him in a dream that it was to be his next film. Decades later he said, “I didn’t read Dune, but had a friend who said to me it was fantastic”. Jodorowsky is strange, almost not a real person. When watching his interviews, you struggle to decipher whether his impression as a deranged madman is a self-aware gag or the real thing. “One day, someone showed me a glass of water that was half full. And he said, ‘Is it half full or half empty?’ So I drank the water. No more problem.” For Jodorowsky, obstacles did not exist. Armed with a perpetual-motion machine of a brain, Frank Herbert’s encyclopaedic novel was something he was prepared to go to war for.
And he did. The film’s aesthetic concept was conceived by Swiss artist H.R Giger, who infused his biomechanical style into Dune’s world of alien architecture. French cartoonist Jean “Moebius” Giraud created a psychedelic storyboard composed of 3,000 illustrations. Jodorowsky’s ferreting for comrades to join him on this absurd mission sounds like a superhero team-up: Marvel’s The Avengers, starring the most iconic artists on the planet.
First stop, casting tyrant Baron Harkonnen. “[Harkonnen] has anti-gravitational implants, he is in the air all the time because he is too heavy. Orson Welles!” The celebrated director of Citizen Kane was known to indulge in drink and fine dining. So, like a secret service operative, Jodorowsky instructed his secretary to investigate all the gastronomic restaurants in Paris. One evening, Welles sat at his usual table to find a bottle of his favourite wine. The waiter pointed out the man who offered the gift. Jodorowsky sat there, smirking. With one foot in the door, all he had to do was explain his operatic vision. How could a trailblazer of cinema not want to be part of such a massive project? Apparently, not. Welles was already fatigued by the industry, and uninterested in the Chilean’s drunken meandering. That was until Jodorowsky made a counteroffer. “If you do the picture, I will hire the chef of this restaurant and you will eat every day as you do now”. The promise of culinary excellence was more serious than any film. “I will do it”.
For the role of the emperor, the director could have settled on any Hollywood star. Instead, he was determined to hire Salvador Dali. The artist was less interested in acting itself and more in the prestige that came with the profession. He wanted to be the highest-paid actor in Hollywood history, demanding 100,000 dollars per hour. Jodorowsky shook his hand, before cunningly cutting out all his scenes so that he would only be needed for no more than one hour of work. The rest of his lines would, strangely, be performed by an animatronic look-alike. Dali didn’t bother, on condition that the robot would be donated to his museum, its throne being a toilet of two intersecting dolphins. Even for a story about two surrealists, it’s too odd to be true.
But it is, and Jodorowsky’s quest didn’t end there. A fan of progressive rock, he crashed Pink Floyd’s recording session, before urging them to do the film’s score during a lunch break where they stuffed themselves with Big Macs. The role of Dune’s prophetic protagonist, Paul Atreides would go to Jodorowsky’s 12-year-old son, who had undergone two years of intense martial arts training in preparation for the character. As the cunning Feyd-Rautha, The Rolling Stones’ frontman Mick Jagger was brought on board. By now Jodorowsky’s ship was too heavy to set sail. With a script the size of a phonebook, it was no surprise that Hollywood shelved it. Dune was unfilmable, and Jodorowsky’s passion project ended where it began, as just a dream. As Jagger had sung several years earlier, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.”
In spite of its spectacular death, the ghost of Dune lived on, its DNA embedded in films that followed. H.R Giger took his sketches to the production of a science-fiction horror led by a well-known director of commercials, Ridley Scott. Alien became a film that defined its genre, winning Giger’s team an Academy Award for Visual Effects. Moebius’ concept art was sent to all major studies. If you held his sketchbook in your hands while watching The Terminator series, or even Blade Runner, the parallels would be obvious. Dune itself became a castle in the sky, passed from one director to the other. David Lynch’s camp interpretation gained a cult following, but only decades after it flopped. No one could fully realise Frank Herbert’s world, until Denis Villeneuve entered the picture. His approach was pragmatic, grounded: Jodorowsky envisioned a 14-hour-long titan, whereas Villeneuve spliced the novel into parts. As of the writing of this article, Villeneuve’s Dune is as finished as Jodorowsky’s. While the release of Dune: Part Two was met with critical and commercial acclaim, the final film in the trilogy, Dune: Messiah is still far away from reaching cinema screens. We’re still waiting for the story to be completed.
Maybe the best way to look back at Jodorowsky’s Dune is through a quote from the opening scene of Villeneuve’s adaptation. Cinema speakers boom a larynx-tearing growl in an alien language as we read the caption, “Dreams are messages from the deep.” No one can quite remember it, put a finger on it, but Jodorowsky’s Dune lingers in the cultural memory, rippling its way from the deep to influence all of cinema.
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