Jodorowsky's Dune

What is the goal of the life?

It's to create yourself a soul.

For me, movies are an art...

more than an industry.

And it's the search of the human soul...

as painting, as literature, as poetry.

Movies are that for me.

I wanted to make a film...

that would give the people who took LSD at that time...

the hallucinations that you get with that drug, but without hallucinating.

I did not want LSD to be taken, I wanted to fabricate the drug's effects.

This film was going to change the public's perceptions.

My ambition with Dune was tremendous.

So, what I wanted was to create a prophet.

I want to create a prophet...

to change the young minds of all the world.

For me, Dune will be the coming of a god.

Artistical, cinematographical god.

For me, it was not to make a picture.

It was something deeper.

I wanted to make something sacred...

free, with new perspective.

Open the mind!

Because I feel, in that time, myself, inside a prison.

My ego, my intellect, I want to open!

And I start the fight to make Dune.

You needed a touch of madness to do it.

You can't have a masterpiece without madness.

Pink Floyd? Dali...

or Orson Welles or others!

Maybe Dune had too much madness?

But a movie that doesn't have a bit of madness...

is not going to conquer the whole world.

I don't think that in the history of cinema...

there was ever a film that was taken that far, only to end up not being made.

To become a different film, since a film was made...

that had nothing to do with those two and a half years of work.

In the beginning, I was making theater.

In Mexico, I make 100 theater plays.

In 10 years, I make the avant garde theater.

Ionesco, Beckett, Strindberg.

Modern adaptations of Shakespeare, I do.

One day I will make a picture.

When I came to pictures...

I came like a virgin.

Without to know technical movement.

I didn't know lens, the number. I didn't know.

We shoot Fando Y Lis, hiding of unions.

In Mexico, a young director cannot make picture...

without the permission of the old director unions.

I say, "What I need to take the permission to make art?"

Artists need to be free! I do my picture!

Then was a great scandal later, eh?

Because I broke all the unions, I did it!

I was opening the mind of the industry.

I was exposed to it in the underground cinema in New York.

And after that, we had the courage to attempt to distribute it in France...

and it was an incredible success for this movie that was quite revolutionary...

and a natural friendship was born between Alejandro and me.

Thanks to the success of El Topo ...

I got one million dollars to make The Holy Mountain.

I did whatever I wanted.

I didn't have a producer...

no critic, no one to mess with me.

I did what I wanted and it was The How Mountain.

I gave the movie to Michel Seydoux in France.

And, oh, surprise, in Europe it attracted a great number of people...

it was playing openly.

In Italy that year, it was the number two movie behind James Bond.

The Holy Mountain was incredible.

So my ambition grew.

Michel Seydoux called me from Paris and say to me:

"Holy Mountain is a success. I want to make a new picture with you.

Do whatever you want!"

I have never made movies or transactions...

unless there was something more to them.

A relationship between human beings is what makes the difference.

He said, "I want to produce you anything.

What do you want to do?"

I say, "Dune!"

And he say, "Yes."

Why?

Because the book was the most beautiful science-fiction book.

It was the bible of science fiction for all the big devotees.

Because the book had been a worldwide publishing success...

that you could find in every country.

I didn't read Dune. But I have a friend who say me it was fantastic.

I don't know why I say Dune. I can say Don Quixote...

or I can said Hamlet. I don't know anything.

I say Dune.

Hollywood sold us the rights for nothing...

mockingly on the inside, I believe...

thinking that we would never be able to carry out such a thing.

It was a great undertaking to do the script.

Michel Seydoux brought me to France.

He rented a castle, a huge castle...

and I was in that castle dedicated solely to Dune.

Frank Herbert created a world in Dune...

but he never said exactly what it was.

And you have a hundred pages of literature...

where you go on to discover, with great difficulty...

what the book is about.

It's very... It's like... I compare it to Proust in French literature.

It's literary, it's great literature.

The first 100 pages...

you understand almost nothing.

It's insinuations.

To bring literature to image is completely difficult.

You need to create another world, the optical world.

It's not the literary, auditive world.

All the time, even in the... In the little details...

I was trying to find the spiritual meaning of that picture.

Now I have my script.

I need to find the warriors.

The warriors to do it.

Every person who will work in this picture will be a spiritual warrior.

The best I will find.

He had the genius to make...

a storyboard with Moebius.

I find a comic book. The comic book was...

Blueberry.

Cowboy book, drawing by Giraud.

I start to see, but that guy is my camera!

Who is this?

This is the person I need.

Where I will find this person? Where?

In that time was not Internet to find any person.

I need to find this person.

I went to see my agent, publicity agent...

and there he was. By chance.

He was there.

He say, "I am Moebius."

"When I drawing science fiction, I am not Giraud, I am Moebius."

And I say to him, "You are the person! Come with me!"

Drawing by drawing, I shoot the picture.

I need 3000 drawings.

Point of view. Movement of the camera.

Dialogue. The relation between the actors.

I use Moebius like a camera.

I take Moebius, I say, "Now you advance." "Now you travel."

"Now you make a close-up."

I have Moebius, who was a genius. Moebius was a genius.

Because he was not only an artist with an incredible capacity...

but he was very quick.

Was superhuman. He was...

quickly, rapido, incredible.

And then I could shoot.

Every day, we start to shoot...

At 8:00, we come, we prepare everything. I think at 9:30 we start to shoot.

I made the picture with drawings.

And then in the costume, I say to him... I describe what I wanted.

He immediately:

Quick, more than a computer. He was incredible.

Everything became magic when we was doing this picture.

Everything, everything.

Dune, my Dune, start with a long shot.

I admire the long shot of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil.

The camera go, go, go, traverse the street, go.

It's a fantastic big, long shot.

And then I wanted to start Dune with a long shot...

better than the long shot of Orson Welles.

I wanted to go farthest.

And then all the shot is traversing the whole universe.

You go there and you traverse all the galaxy, all the galaxy...

and in traversal of the galaxy, you see a pirate...

robbing a convoy of spice, by example. Battles. And you go, you go...

ls a long shot.

We need to find the person who will make the special effects.

"I say, " Moebius, we fly to California, to Los Angeles...

to the appointment of Douglas Trumbull."

He was a very honored, very important person.

He receive me. He was interesting.

Was a business.

We went to see Trumbull...

but he gives himself so big importance.

We was speaking, he answered...

4O times the telephone. Forty times.

He was speaking with so big vanity of himself.

He was a big technician. But for me, was not a spiritual person.

He have nothing to do in the creation of a film who was a prophet.

He will make a technical film, no?

And then I say, "I cannot work with you."

And we went out.

Moebius was astonished, say, "How you can say no to the biggest...

technician of Hollywood?"

I say, "it is like that."

I cannot use him. He is not my spiritual warrior.

And then we was walking in the street, Hollywood...

there was a little cinema, a little theater. And there was a science-fiction picture...

Dark Star.

And when I see the picture, "That is the guy!"

O'Bannon.

We will search for this person. This person will be the person.

For me, the art was before, later the technique.

And that was O'Bannon.

And then he came to Paris.

And that was... I have two warriors: Moebius and O'Bannon.

I need to find the others.

The first actor is the father, the Duke Leto.

David Carradine had starred in a very popular television series...