Alejandro Jodorowsky is still hurt that he didn’t get to make Dune. The project fizzled out around 1976, but Jordorowsky, 84 years old and an energetic ball of fire in this 2013 documentary, talks about the debacle like it just happened. He remembers well the years of work that went into the script, the thousands of storyboard drawings, and the recruitment of mavericks such as Moebius and H.R. Giger to realize what would have been the strangest and most sprawling spectacle in cinema history. While most directors merely hire like-minded collaborators, Jodorowsky’s approach is more akin to assembling a cult. Jodorowsky is the priest and the film is the temple that they build.
It was going to be science fiction of the heaviest sort, more Dangerous Visions than Star Wars. Jodorowsky saw Dune as a sacred film. It would be a psychedelic meditation on universal consciousness and Enlightenment (with a capital “E”) as told through the prism of Frank Herbert’s novel. Jodorowsky wrote it with no regard for budget—he’s a 100% artist with hardly a wisp of business sense—and the result was something insanely expensive, if not unfilmable, for the time. Then there’s its length, which some texts say would be fourteen hours.
For all of the mindbending surrealism in his El Topo and The Holy Mountain, the oddest thing in Jodoworsky’s career might be when he and producer Michel Seydoux earnestly shopped this unwieldy thing around Hollywood. They were ready to start shooting. They even had a cast, Jodorowsky claims (it included Salvador Dali, Orson Welles, Mick Jagger and Udo Keir). All they lacked was financing—and they’d never get it.
Director Frank Pavich tells that rarely told story here—it’s the making of a film that was never made—and argues a half-convincing case for Dune‘s secret influence on the next several decades of special effects movies. Set-pieces, visual conceits and design elements laid out in storyboards that circulated through every major studio in the 1970s later turned up in films such as Star Wars, Alien and The Terminator, this movie posits. It’s also a life-affirming portrait of artistic ambition, an essay on the edifying power of failure and a display of Jodorowsky’s luminous charm. The old Chilean surrealist is an engaging speaker, even through rough English, and a rare soul who can convincingly say that he thinks his art could change the world. If he sounds a little like a fool, he’s the very best of kind of fool. He’s the kind of fool whom you’d like to see be right.