HR Giger and the failed “Dune” project

Almost 50 years later, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s aborted version of “Dune” still fascinates the world. His storyboard was recently sold for £2.2 million. Among the “spiritual warriors” collected by the director at that time was the Swiss Hans Rudi Geiger.

This content was published on February 17, 2022 – 09:00
February 17 2022 – 09:00

David Auguster

Helen James

On January 15, 2022, an unknown group of investors called themselves Spice daw He won an extraordinary auction and paid the equivalent of 2.2 million francs for the storyboard (Storyboard) from the legendary version of the movie “Dune”, which was never released. In the 1970s, Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky planned to bring the Frank Herbert monument to the screen, long before David Lynch.

Willing to pay 2.2 million pounds to members Spice daw They mistakenly thought that they also obtained with this acquisition of copyright. His intention was to make a profit by selling parts of the volume as NFTs (non-consumable tokens) or by selling the ideas contained in it to a streaming service, then burning the book, a legendary artifact from the film’s history.

In any case, such a huge price significantly reveals the legendary status of the Jodorowsky project. In 1970, the Chilean made emigrated to Paris the molemetaphysical and unusual western, like movies like Show pictures of rocky horror the pink flamingosAttract loyal viewers to midnight shows.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono were among Jodorowsky’s fans and helped finance his next film, holy mountain (1973), an orgy of blasphemous images, including lizards dressed as Aztec kings exploding in mid-air and birds emerging from an open wound with gunshots.

In the mid-1970s, this completely unclassifiable and underprivileged director set out to adapt the blockbuster work. Dune by Frank Herbert. documentary Jodorovsky Dune (2013) tells how the director traveled the world in search of “spiritual warriors” and “geniuses” for his project.

He called Pink Floyd and Magma for music, and courted Mick Jagger and Salvador Dalí, who he said would be willing to pay $100,000 a minute, and promised to feature a flaming giraffe in the film.

It was in Paris that Dali showed him the drawings of HR Giger. Jodorowksy got excited and called him to tell him he badly needed his “sick art”. Giger will become a kind of engineer of evil and his drawings will be used for decoration. Jodorowksy gave him carte blanche and Giger made some airbrush drawings that were included in the project rendering.

About his vision of Castle Harkonnens, the villains in the story, he said the following: “The Harkonnens head is a gigantic defensive structure that serves to protect the castle from land and air attacks. The front of the head opens mechanically, revealing a skull spitting out death and destruction.”

>> Trailer for the documentary on what Jodorowsky ‘Dune’ could have been (in English)

But despite drawings by Geiger and other great artists such as Jean Giraud, better known as Möbius, the project was never realized. Hollywood couldn’t stand the paranoia like Jodorowsky, who wanted his movie to be “like an experience with LSD, but without LSD” and expected it to run for 12 hours.

The first film adaptation of ‘Dune’ was released in 1984 and made by David Lynch, and the second in 2021 by Denis Villeneuve.

However, the original storyboard has influenced many films. And another success of that failure was making H.R. Giger a movie. In 1979, the latter achieved international fame as the designer of Ridley Scott’s movie creature alien, It was written by Dan O’Bannon, who was also on Jodorowsky’s project.

Translated from the French by Marcela Aguila Rubin

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