Warner Bros.’ official trailer for Dune offered moviegoers their first glimpse at director Denis Villeneuve’s vision for author Frank Herbert’s novel. Director Alejandro Jodorowsky, who attempted to adapt Dune into a feature film before David Lynch eventually took on the project, has now shared his own thoughts on the preview and the filmmaker evidently has concerns about the new version.
Jodorowsky, a French-Chilean avant-garde filmmaker then known for films including El Topo and The Holy Mountain, was attached to a direct an adaptation of Dune after the rights to the novel were acquired by a French consortium under the leadership producer Jean-Paul Gibon in 1974. While Jodorowsky had envisioned a cast that included Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, Mick Jagger, and his son Brontis as Paul Atreides, his adaptation never materialized partly due to the lack of funds as the project expanded into a costly ten-to-fourteen hour epic. Lynch’s adaptation started development in the ’80s after producer Dino De Laurentiis had already acquired the rights to the novel from Gibson’s consortium in 1976 and renewed them again with sequels included as part of the agreement in 1981.
Now, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 director Denis Villeneuve has taken his own shot at adapting the novel after previously expressing his issues with Lynch’s version. However, it appears Jodorowsky has problems of his own with Villeneuve’s adaptation, particularly because it appears to aesthetically resemble every other Hollywood blockbuster being released today. “I wish his Dune would be a great success, because Denis Villeneuve is a nice director, about whom I have been told a lot. I saw the trailer. It’s very well done,” he said during an interview with France’s Le Point. “We see that this is industrial cinema, that there is a lot of money, and that it has cost a lot of money. But if it was very expensive, it must pay off in proportion. And this is the problem: there are no surprises. The form is identical to what is done everywhere, the lighting, the acting, everything is predictable.”
“The industrial cinema is incompatible with auteur cinema. For the first, money comes before work. For the second, it is the reverse. And this, whatever the quality of a director, whether it is my friend Nicolas Winding Refn or Denis Villeneuve. Industrial cinema promotes entertainment, it is a show that is not intended to change humanity or society,” Jodorowsky elaborated. Adapting Dune is considered to be a difficult, if not impossible, task by fans of the novel and Jodorowsky suggested limiting an adaptation to a standard film only hinders such an endeavor, saying, “to make Dune a traditional film is to condemn oneself to offer a fragment of it.”
Fortunately for Villeneuve, the filmmaker isn’t planning on limiting his adaptation to a single feature film. Dune is the first installment of a planned two-part adaptation, possibly meaning Villeneuve will have an easier time exploring the themes and story of Hebert’s novel to a greater extent than Jodorowsky or Lynch.
Now all that remains to be seen is if Villeneuve’s Dune will still make its December 2020 release date. While the film is scheduled to be released during this holiday season, few would be surprised if it moved to avoid competing with fellow Warner Bros. production Wonder Woman 1984.
Dune is scheduled to be released in theaters on December 18, 2020.
Source: Le Point
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