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There are many supposedly great films that somehow never got made.
Among them Stanley Kubrick's biographical film on Napoleon Bonaparte,
or Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis set in a futurist New York.
Now comes a documentary which looks at the story
behind the ambitious efforts to adapt a science fiction best seller,
Dune into a movie in the 1970s.
Frank Pavich has put together an account of man with a great ambition.
French-Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky efforts to make a movie based
on the detailed and complicated 1965 sci-fi best seller Dune.
My ambition was tremendous.
I wanted to make something sacred,
When you look through the history of films that fell by the wayside,
films that didn't happen, and, to me, Alejandro Jodorowsky's version of Dune
is the most exciting of all those.
And the most fantastical out of all those.
And his is the one that had Pink Floyd, and Mick Jagger and Salvador Dali
and set to the soundtrack of Pink Floyd, I mean it's incredible.
You know with him behind the camera I mean it's an incredible thing.
To me it's the greatest of all unmade film projects.
For me Dune will be the coming of a God...
We interview mostly the core people of the story,
which is Alejandro Jodorowsky, his producer Michel Seydoux.
The artists that worked on the film; H.R. Giger, Chris Foss.
We've a small number of people in the film, which personally I prefer.
Because I'm not a big fan of documentaries where there is a cast
of 40 people and you don't know who is speaking anymore.
And everyone comes on for a 10 second bite, and I prefer that,
at least for this story anyway, that you get to know the people.
Prior to his work on Dune, Jodorowsky had made El Topo in 1970.
Described as an acid Western, which gained a cult following.
3 years later came the surreal, anti- materialist drama, the Holy Mountain.
Of course those films were completed. His version of Dune was not.
They never rolled camera, they never actually got to the set.
They did the casting, they did the hiring of everybody,
he brought in this team of artists, they worked for years
to draw out everything.
They storyboarded the entire film, beginning to end, 3,000 images.
Maybe that's what's meant to be. That they made this book,
they put all this artwork into this book
they printed up a handful of copies, to deliver to the film studios in Hollywood
and that's when it meet its demise because the film studios didn't believe in it.
But maybe the project was supposed to end there with that book.
And then those ideas kind of came out of that book
and started to infect the world to a certain extent and inspire other films.
Among the other movies that are accredited
with having artist links with Dune are Alien and Blade Runner
Jodorowsky was, perhaps, ahead of his time.
It was in the years before Star Wars had proved to Hollywood
that sci-fi films could become huge blockbusters.
The studios didn't really understand him, or his body of work.
As much as they loved the project, as much as they looked at the book
and said all this would be incredible and fantastic
we don't get your director.
We look at the Holy Mountain, we look at El Topo and we don't understand them
because his films were... they were not studio films.
I wanted to make something free, with new perspective. Open the mind.
Although its a story of a film that failed,
the director sees this documentary as inspiring people not to give up.
He believes that Jodorowsky's experience could have been devastating
but points out that the film maker just picked himself up and continued.
He didn't let Dune get him down.
It could be fantastic, no?