David Lynch Despised Dune So Much He Even Disowned It
The director is trying to make everyone forget that he made this movie in the first place.
The first adaptation of Frank Herbert's epic work was directed by the cult director, David Lynch. His bold and sometimes grotesque version of Dune was released in 1984.
Despite poor box office results and harsh reviews, the movie eventually achieved cult status. However, the director himself is trying to delete this page from his filmography so hard, he even requested his name be taken off the final cut.
In the mid-seventies, Dino De Laurentiis and his daughter Raffaella acquired the movie rights to Dune. And these are the people who brought the deserts of Arrakis to the screen.
After several changes, David Lynch was hired as director. The director had to overcome challenges along the way – he had to rewrite the script six or seven times.
Four hours of footage was shot, but after several edits, there were just over two hours left. Moreover, Lynch wasn't able to edit the final cut.
Today one can only guess why such an inventive director did not succeed.
Some believe that the story was not ready for the screen for ideological reasons – the combination of religious messianism and environmental activism described in Herbert's world could be too daring for the cinema of the time.
Another option is that Dune was simply the wrong movie for Lynch.
From his interviews before and after the premiere, one gets the feeling that he did not delve too deeply into the story, which already had four books when the filming began and had grown to five before the premiere.
The simplest example: the director was trying to achieve the effect that humans had left Earth relatively recently. Meanwhile, Herbert's events take place in 21391.
Lynch later admitted that he hated the movie:
"With Dune, I sold out on that early on, because I didn't have final cut, and it was a commercial failure, so I died two times with that."
However, it turned out that the movie succeeded in a rare thing – to complement the universe of Frank Herbert. It was a trifle that became a classic in every sense of the word. It's the little phrase, "spice must flow."
It's not in the original book, but a pure Lynch invention. And these three words exactly convey the atmosphere of Dune. After all, "He who controls the spice controls the universe."
Source: Deadline