Jodorowsky’s Dune - ''Greatest film that was never made''

The documentary follows failed attempt of Jodorowsky to make his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune in 1974.
The interesting and mad thing to begin with is that Jodorowsky hadn't read Frank Herbert's sci-fi novel before he decided to make the film, he had heard from his friends that it was an amazing story of faraway worlds, messiah figures and transcendental head trips, and it clicked with his insanity immediately.
"I wanted to make something sacred…the coming of an artistic, cinematographical god, I wanted to create a prophet" says Jodorowsky.
The book was indeed philosophical and the film would have been head trip, mind-expanding visual experience. "I wanted to make a film that gave the people who took LSD at that time the hallucinations that you get with that drug, but without hallucinating" he explains in the documentary.

After holing himself up in a castle to write the screenplay, he put together an amazing and detailed book of storyboards and designs that he could use to show Hollywood studios exactly what the film would be like.
“The movie has to be just like I dream of it.” says Jodorowsky, but his dream movie remained only a dream. The documentary shows how this mad genius assembled a team of “spiritual warriors,” as he calls them, to bring his dream to life.
And the team was indeed a dream team : H.R. Giger, Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud, Salvador Dali, Pink Floyd, Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, David Carradine… and the list goes on.
Just the stories of how he succeeded to convince these people to be in the film could be documentaries by itself. For example, Salvador Dali agreed to appear in the film, as the Madman of the Galaxy, but with condition that he was paid $100,000 a minute, and that’s about how much he would be appearing in the film.
He even cast his son Brontis in the lead role of Paul Atreides and subjected him to two years of intense physical and martial arts training, so he would be convincing as the hero. You could say that’s extreme and even a bit monstrous to a child, but as Jodorowky puts it-
"If I need to cut my arms in order to make that picture, I will cut my arms. I was even ready to die."



With such insane determination and imagination there’s no reason why Dune shouldn’t have been made, but like so many film projects, it fell apart, largely due to studio concerns about the budget.
Jodorowsky’s producer Michel Seydoux was knocking on the door of every Hollywood studio and getting rejected over and over again, but he did came up $5 million short on the $15 million budget at the end.
As envisioned, the movie would have also been 12 hours long, which is one of the other reasons why no Hollywood studio was willing to take the gamble.
Seydoux declares today that any masterpiece takes some madness but admits, "Dune had, perhaps, too much."

When film director of the documentary, Frank Pavich,approached Seydoux, he and Jodorowsky haven’t been talking since the project fell apart. He said : “In fact, when I met Jodorowsky and Seydoux each separately for the fist time, they both told me that the other person hated them. Jodorowsky thought that Michel Seydoux hated him because “while we were making Dune, I cost Michel Seydoux two million dollars in pre-production. All that money is gone, and there is no film. He must think that I am not a good enough director, not a good enough artist. I let him down. Michel Seydoux must hate me!” Seydoux felt exactly the opposite. Seydoux mistakenly assumed that “Jodorowsky must hate me, because as his producer, I failed him. I didn’t work hard enough for him.” But neither one of them actually felt that way about the other. They both just missed each other. “

Jodorowsky's Dune certainly portrays a tragedy of a project that fell apart,  but Pavich managed to give it a happy ending, demonstrating how the Dune influenced many other cult films like Star Wars, Alien, The Terminator.
Nicolas Winding Refn, the famous Danish director said in the documentary: “What if the first film of that nature had been Dune and not Star Wars? Would the whole megabucks-blockbuster structure have been altered?”
and Jodorowsky's designer Chris Foss added  ”It would have been bigger than 2001."



But as one critic beautifully puts it ’’these films, limited only by our imagination of how they might have turned out, become more mythic in the unmaking than they ever could have been with real-world budgets, real-life casting decisions and the other shortcomings that actually making a movie entail. ’’