Jodorowsky’s Dune: The Greatest Sci-Fi Never Made

By Harry Brown Originally Published in Issue 17.4 on 29 October 2021

Image Courtesy of Alamy

In 1984, fans of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune were excited to finally see a live-action adaptation of the acclaimed work. However, many would leave the cinema after watching David Lynch’s adaptation feeling disappointed. The film was a commercial and critical failure with critic Roger Ebert branding the film ‘a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time’. Yet, one cinemagoer was excited to see the mess of the film, and that was avant-garde filmmaker, Alejandro Jodorowsky (The Holy Mountain).

Jodorowsky had been in development hell with his vision of Dune just under a decade earlier and was disappointed that he had never been able to complete it. He had big plans - the film was to be ten hours long, although early screenplays reached 14 hours. The cast would include his 12-year-old son as the lead, painter Salvador Dali, director and actor Orson Welles, and Rolling Stones’ frontman Mick Jagger. At one point in development, the music was to be done by prog-rock band, Pink Floyd. Commissioned to draw up the storyboards and concept art of the ever-growing script was Jean Giraud, H.R. Giger, and Chris Foss. They had the task of bringing the director’s ideas to life, which according to Jodorowsky himself included ‘whore-ships driven by the semen of our passionate ejaculations’. He also veered from Dune’s original ending by wanting the young protagonist Peter to turn into a sentient planet and travel around the universe.

The grand ideas of Jodorowsky can still be seen online, as concept art and storyboards were all completed before the finance had dried up due to the sheer ambition of the project. The film had a $9.2 million budget, 2 million of which had been used before filming even began. Dali, who dreamed of being Hollywood’s highest-paid actor, wanted to be paid $100,000 per hour for his scenes.

The point of most contention between Jodorowsky and producer Jean-Paul Gibbon, however, was the run time. When hearing that David Lynch would adapt Dune, a project he had worked so hard on, Jodorowsky was pained since he knew how talented Lynch was and expected him to succeed. He was dragged to a Paris screening of the film by his sons and gradually became happier and happier whilst fans were becoming more disappointed as he realised how awful the film was.

Jodorowsky’s Dune would not leave an empty mark on sci-fi filmmaking as many who had worked on his pre-production team would go on to be a part of the filmmaking team for Alien, bringing with them the ideas conjured up for Dune. The extensive script, storyboards and concept art were sent to many studios and would end up influencing many sci-fi films to come like Star Wars, Terminator, and The Fifth Element.