Jodorowsky's Dune
"But in that time, I say, if I needed to cut my arms in order to make that picture. I will cut my arms. I will do it."
The story of Jodorowsky trying to make Dune is the story of a man trying to make a movie about a book he only had a friend tell him the plot of and convincing a bunch of people who barely worked in movies and definitely probably didn’t read Dune as well to join him. Jodorowsky's first successes were with El Topo and The Holy Mountain, which were essentially films that could send the average man into existential overdrive or start a riot which is what his first film Fando y Lis did. He was then approached by Michel Seydoux, a French businessman and film producer who gave him carte blanche on whatever film he wanted to do next.
Dune is what the Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky said.
In the novel Dune by Frank Herbert, the planet Dune is a major source of melange, a spice that can extend life and enhance mental capacities. Jodorowsky saw the potential analogy for LSD and he wanted to make a film that mimicked the effects of taking LSD without actually taking LSD. It’s amazing, inspiring, and crazy how Jodorowsky created this grand vision of making the most important film ever and got so many disparate elements of the art world to buy into it.
If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be unhappy for the rest of your life.
Abraham Maslow
If you are going to have dreams, you may as well shoot for the moon. No, I meant that literally like when JFK told the American people in 1962 that’s where we are going to go. Read his lips America, M-O-O-N. At a time when everyone thought that was impossible because that’s what the smart people said. Or Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memorial, who told us that he had a dream—today—and although white and black children hanging out together was his future vision he was burning body and soul to manifest that vision in the now.
Jodorowsky knew he would need spiritual warriors if he wanted to make the film so he recruited those he felt an intuitive link with. He hired the French comic book artist Jean Giraud1, flashed Dan O’ Bannon with the cosmic consciousness the same way that Krishna flashed Arjuna, yelled at Pink Floyd for being a bunch of fucking posers eatin’ fuckin’ Big Macs instead of trying to raise the planet’s spiritual levels, seduced Dali with burning giraffes and $100,00 per minute to act in the movie (a plastic lookalike would speak the rest of his lines), wined & dined Orson Welles by hiring his favorite chef to serve him meals during the shooting, condemned his son to years of a daily martial arts practice and had Mick Jagger part the sea of party people to ask him to be in his film.
But there is one behemoth that even this David could not defeat. That Goliath was Hollywood, an industry hellbent on rigorously maintaining the status quo. Pitching to them involves well this film is like Jurassic Park but….This would be impossible with a Jodorowsky-led film. Their idea was to create a 3,000-drawing storyboard composed by Jodorowsky and Giraud and send it to all the major film companies. The response of the major film companies was—love everything about it, hate the director—so never. Tough blow to the quasi cult leader Jodorowsky who made so many people move to France just to work on the film.
But Hollywood going to Hollywood and the Jodorowsky assembled team of O’ Bannon, Foss, Giger, and Giraud would go on to make Alien, and Jodorowsky's inspiration can be found in Star Wars, Flash Gordon, Terminator, and the Fifth Element. Jodorowsky was nervous when David Lynch was tapped to make Dune but was relieved when it was shit, he blamed the producers.
The end of Jodorowsky’s Dune featured the death of Paul as his consciousness blended into the universal consciousness and the planet itself turned into a voyeuristic Messiah who will journey into the stars to find other planets to enlighten. Jodrowsky’s Dune may have died but it sure did live on in its special way, the ideas dispersing themselves into Hollywood’s consciousness and later his comics with Giraud.
Jean Giraud created most of his fantasy/science-fiction art under the pseudonym Mœbius. He was a phenomenal artist and worked with Jodorowsky to create the successors of their Dune work in the comic book series, the Jodoverse. If you are interested in learning more, check out
’s excellent article on Mœbius.
Ah, dune surfing on worms and spice. What a life.
I feel like the story of Jodorowsky’s Dune: the best movie never made, is in the end better than the movie we would have. But I am the kind of person who likes Lynch’s Dune.