Dune, Interrupted: One Artist’s Journey to the Desert Planet

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune, released in 2013, is a documentary about the singularly strange and visionary director’s decades long attempt to tackle Frank Herbert’s socio-politico-religious sci-fi epic.

Even if you aren’t a Fedaykin at heart, this documentary’s bittersweet view into Jodorowsky’s monumental dream is gripping. Involving some characters as odd as Jodorowsky himself – he managed to sign on Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, David Carradine, Mick Jagger and Salvador Dali himself, and great visual artists and musicians of the time, this is a guaranteed good watch, just for that. Much of the film’s narrative is told by Jodo himself and it is telling to see his gleeful, quixotic expressions as he explains how he has chased this windmill for so long. You hear many truths from his actors, his family, some who are both, and others who worked with him or for him and fell into his obsessions one by one, shaped and changed by it, as if by the Arrakeen winds. By Dune.

If you don’t know the story, it doesn’t matter. It’s beautifully enormous, romantic and basically another ‘simple’ tale of good and evil, general boy loses girl, boy meets girl, boy meets worm, boy marries his sister, boy becomes God story, but with some really excellent new themes for the time it was published, as well as powerful over and undertones that would come to attract directors like Mr. Jodorowsky and David Lynch.

Born in Chile, in a dysfunctional and violent environment, Jodorowsky found his escape in art. As a young man, he strayed from school and threw himself into trying everything from poetry to circus clown to theatrical director and every shade of work in the field – even mime. This all directly led to him becoming the filmmaker, playwright, actor, author, musician, comics writer and spiritual guru he still is.

In December of 1974, a French consortium led by Jean-Paul Gibon purchased the film rights to Frank Herbert’s book and asked Jodorowsky to direct. The rest is history – or could it be the very near future?

There is talk of an animated Dune film based on the massive illustrated script that Jodorowsky has created. To say fans are frothing would not be exaggeration.

Of course Jodorowsky made his own unique changes to Herbert’s canon, so the hardcore Dune fans will be miffed, but it’s NEVER going to be good enough for those people, and no matter what, it’s a (possibly even animated) Space Opera by Alejandro Fucking Jodorowsky.

This documentary about Jodorowsky’s journey and that of those he’s pulled madly along with him on his quest seems as much like a film as el Topo or Holy Mountain in its way. Every person in it, even the cameraman, is a character Each as deep and rich and almost cartoonish as Jodo’s own creations. Lovingly pieced together, honest in its truthful balance of passion and creativity versus obsession and insanity, and like the work it is derived from, it is a beautiful window to the minds of these extraordinary creators.

Both Gilliam and Jodorowsky speak of these films they long to finish before they die like old friends at first and now almost enemies, against time, against money, against their time with their families and their sleep. They both started as extremist performers, illustrators and animators, so a natural progression to animation or extreme art direction and effects is not only acceptable, but trademarked. Bakshi too. These film-makers, despite budget, hit films and super star power, still remain outsider artists. There is certainly no director in the world like Alejandro Jodorowsky. He knows it, and it shines in this film.

The other true star of the film, Jodo’s leading lady, as it were, is The Book.

The Book is his storyboard. Bound, and only a handful of copies in the world It’s his script, each frame hand-drawn, and if made as is, would result in a 14-hour movie . Jodorowsky took creative liberties with the source material, but Herbert said that he and Jodorowsky had an amicable relationship. The production for the film collapsed when no film studio could be found willing to fund the movie to Jodorowsky’s terms.The script, the book, we glimpse it in the film, see pages and animatics – *drool*…

“It was the size of a phonebook”, Herbert later recalled.

Like I said, fans are frothing. I’d sure like to own – or at least SEE – a copy.
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The teasing of us with this incredibly illustrated and partially filmed document is unreal. After watching Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune with friends, we couldn’t help but wonder if it was perhaps also a really fancy teaser for a publishing of the script – and we were utterly ok with that, if it was. So to find out that there might be an animated version, and from this book and version of the script, well, it feels nigh Wagnerian, but on a universal, time-bending, mind-bending, scale, just like the core story and other attempts to produce Frank Herbert’s vision.

Director Frank Pavich weaves together footage of great interviews, shot in ways that fit with the dream that is Jodo’s world, images from the book, including sketches and paintings by contributors like Moebius, Chris Foss and H.R. Giger, tales and sounds of the score being made by Pink Floyd, Henry Cow and Magma, and the hard cold facts about Hollywood and money all together, like the Empire itself, into a great film about a great man and his great goal.

Everything to do with Alejandro Jodorowsky is entertaining, but I think this documentary might be one of the most so because as much as being about his epic production and attempt to keep it going, about the work itself, the script, and all the huge characters involved, it is a film about Alejandro himself, the hands and mind behind all these surreal and powerful works. His bold opinions on other artists’ attempts at Dune make for cheerful watching, and at moments, you might be almost moved to tears, not from sadness, but the power of his inspiration.