Directed by: Frank Pavich.
Featuring: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Michel Seydoux, H.R. Giger, Chris Foss, Brontis Jodorowsky, Richard Stanley, Devin Faraci, Drew McWeeny, Gary Kurtz, Nicolas Winding Refn, Diane O'Bannon, Christian Vander, Jean-Pierre Vignau, Amanda Lear.
Mexican
director Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of those mad geniuses of cinema that the
world needs more of. Like Werner Herzog or David Lynch, his films are not quite
like anyone else’s. In the early 1970s, he had a huge cult hit with El Topo – a
strange, violent Western where he casts himself in the title role – and utters
the line “I am God!” That film was extremely strange – it takes more than one
twist throughout its runtime, and ends up with a strange, underground cult. He
followed that film up with The Holy Mountain in 1973, which if anything, made
El Topo look normal. His emergence came at perhaps the only time in cinema
history where you could make films like he did, and still find a rather sizable
audience. After The Holy Mountain, he set his sights on adapting Frank
Herbert’s Dune. He envisioned a film that would replicate the effects on LSD –
and would alter the minds of the entire world that saw it. He assembled a
strange cast – including David Carradine, Orson Welles and Salvador Dali – some
great artists and together they created a huge book – essentially a detailed
storyboard – which showed exactly what he wanted to do. All he needed was the
money to make his epic vision come to life. He never got it.
Jodorowsky’s
Dune is a documentary where Jodorowsky, and his surviving collaborators,
essentially explain what they wanted to do – and ultimately why they didn’t
succeed in getting the film made. The film is partisan in the extreme to
Jodorowsky’s version of events – it doesn’t really challenge him on anything,
although I suspect that I’m not the only audience member who has his doubts
about just how truthful his version of events are – I suspect at the very least
Jodorowsky is exaggerating some things (if you believe his version of events
for example, you have to believe that he just happened to run into most of his collaborators
at random – even after he had already decided he needed to track him down).
There are a lot of grand claims made throughout Jodorowsky’s Dune – about how
the unmade influenced everything from Star Wars to Indiana Jones to Contact to
The Terminator to Alien – some of which seems to be genuine (several people who
worked with Jodorowsky on Dune ended up working with Ridley Scott on Alien –
and seem to have taken some of the visuals for his film to Scott’s), some of
them are a little bit of a stretch (showing a story board of a Dune sword
fight, compared to a still of a Star Wars light saber battle, which I’m sorry,
looks like it could have come from anywhere). Strangely, the grandest claims
come not from Jodorowsky himself, but from director Nicholas Winding Refn, a
friend and fan, who claims that if Dune had gotten made before Star Wars, the
whole blockbuster ethos may have been changed forever (not likely) and that he
believes that the studios didn’t make the film because they were afraid of what
it would do to their minds (again not likely – they were scared all right, but
scared they would wind up with a costly bomb). The one voice of reason may come
from an executive, who (reasonably) suggests that perhaps Jodorowsky and his collaborators
should have had a better answer ready for the studios when they asked him to
make the movie 90 minutes long other than Jodorowsky – who suggested that he
was making a work of art, and it would go on for 12 or 20 hours if he needed it
to. Realistically speaking, what studio would have financed this film?
Yet,
these problems aside, I couldn’t help by admire Jodorowsky and his commitment
to his art throughout this film. His Dune was a grand dream – an epic vision
unlike anything that has ever been put on screen. Realistically speaking, he
should have known it was never really going to get made, but if Jodorowsky
lived realistically, than none of his films would exist. He’s a man who goes
for broke, and is just crazy and just charismatic enough that he inspires the
confidence in everyone around him to go on this crazy ride with him. What we
see of the “film” – from the sketches, the art, the music and Jodorowsky’s
description if nothing else makes me wish he had of made the film – no matter
if it was 12 or 20 hours, it is something I know damn well I would have loved
to see.
The
film was directed by Frank Pavich, making his feature debut. Given that he has
such a crazy subject matter, I wish he had found a more interesting way to tell
the story. As it stands, it is a very typical talking heads documentary,
interspersed with film clips and shots of the original storyboard. I wish he
had taken a page out of Jodorowsky’s book and not played it so safe – make
something more ambitious visually – something that would do more justice to
Jodorowsky and his forever unseen film. It’s a minor quibble – the film is
never less than fascinating but I think if he had taken more chances, it could
have been so much more.
In
the end, we’ll never know what Jodorowsky’s Dune would have been had it gotten
it made. It could have been a hit like Star Wars, a few years before Lucas made
his space epic, and spawned countless imitators. It could have been an epic
bomb – not unlike Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate – that forever destroyed his
career. It could have been a complete and utter failure that inspired the
director to move in a different direction – like David Lynch’s Dune, made the
following decade, ultimately proved to be. It’s easy to for everyone in the
film to claim that Jodorowsky’s Dune would have been a masterpiece – easy
because they don’t have the burden of actually having to back up that claim as
the film will never exist. But I think they believe it. They believe in
Jodorowsky’s vision for the project, and that he had the skill and the crazy
genius to pull it off. No matter what it would have turned out to be, I’m sorry
the world never got to see it – and has gotten to see so little from Jodorowsky
on the screen over his career. The film world needs more crazy, brilliant
dreamers like Jodorowsky.
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