19/05/2013 - Frank Pavich’s documentary reveals the creative process behind the adaptation of science fiction book Dune by Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky

The Croisette was given a double dose of Alejandro Jodorowsky this weekend. After being treated to his imaginary autobiography, La danza de la realidad (read the news), Directors’ Fortnight audiences were able to watch documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by American Frank Pavich, an American and French coproduction in competition for the Caméra d'or at the Cannes Film Festival.

All literary pieces of work are difficult to adapt, but some are more so than others. Dune, a sci-fi novel by Frank Herbert, was to Jodorowsky what Cervantes’ Don Quixote was to Terry Gilliam: an opportunity to become a true master of the seventh art. Both projects were aborted: Don Quixote during shooting and Dune in the run-up period. The fertile preparation period (during which time Jodorowsky “raped, with love” Herbert’s composition) is revealed in this Pavich documentary, which tone is one of ironic celebration of an influential piece of work (despite its inexistence) and an author who refused to compromise his artistic vision.

A visionary Jodorowsky wanted to make a film that would have been larger than life, technically ambitious and with a cast to match (David Carradine, Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí). The film was set to be over ten hours long. When Jodorowsky’s project failed, Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis ended up financing another version of the novel, directed by David Lynch: “a terrible piece of work,” Jodorowsky confessed in front of Pavich’s camera.

Through interviews with Jodorowsky himself, with producer Michel Seydoux, with members of the never made film’s artistic crew, as well as contributions from contemporaries such as Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn (Only God Forgives), the documentary tells the story of a project’s genesis, which is today widely recognised as having gone on to influence major sci-fi films from the 1970s and 1980s (Star Wars, Blade Runner, Alien).

How could a film that was never shot have become such an object of cult? In part thanks to the talent of French artist Jean “Moebius” Giraud, whose storyboard for Dune circulated around the biggest Hollywood enterprises in search of financing – financing which never materialised. This failure ground the project as well as the creative Jodorowky-Seydoux collaboration to a halt. The couple’s collaboration was only revived recently after 35 years, when Seydoux accepted to coproduce La danza de la realidad as well as the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune.

This weekend, the two films brought the 84-year-old back into the limelight in Cannes, revealing a man who, despite being a cult filmmaker (or maybe precisely because of this), is unknown to a large part of the public, including ardent film lovers.  

(Translated from Spanish)