I wanted to make a film
that would give the people who took LSD at that time
the hallucinations that you get with that drug but without hallucinating.
I did not want LSD to be taken, I wanted to fabricate the drug's effects.
This film was going to change the public's perceptions.
My ambition with Dune was tremendous.
So, what I wanted was to create a prophet.
You needed a touch of madness to do it.
You can't have a masterpiece without madness.
Pink Floyd? Dali or Orson Welles or others!
Maybe Dune had too much madness?
But a movie that doesn't have a bit of madness is not going to conquer the whole world.
I don't think that in the history of cinema there was ever a film that was taken that far,
only to end up not being made.
To become a different film,
since a film was made that had nothing to do with those two-and-a-half years of work.
I was exposed to it in the underground cinema in New York.
And after that we had the courage to attempt to distribute it in France,
and it was an incredible success for this movie that was quite revolutionary,
and a natural friendship was born between Alejandro and me.
Thanks to the success of El Topo I got one million dollars to make The Holy Mountain.
I did whatever I wanted.
I didn't have a producer, no critic, no one to mess with me.
I did what I wanted and it was The Holy Mountain.
I gave the movie to Michel Seydoux in France.
And, oh, surprise, in Europe it attracted a great number of people.
It was playing openly.
In Italy that year, it was the number two movie behind James Bond.
The Holy Mountain was incredible.
So my ambition grew.
I have never made movies or transactions unless there was something more to them.
A relationship between human beings is what makes the difference.
Why?
Because the book was the most beautiful science fiction book.
It was the bible of science fiction for all the big devotees.
Because the book had been a worldwide publishing success
that you could find in every country.
Hollywood sold us the rights for nothing, mockingly on the inside, I believe,
thinking that we would never be able to carry out such a thing.
It was a great undertaking to do the script.
Michel Seydoux brought me to France.
He rented a castle, a huge castle,
and I was in that castle dedicated solely to Dune.
Frank Herbert created a world in Dune
but he never said exactly what it was.
And you have a hundred pages of literature
where you go on to discover, with great difficulty, what the book is about.
It's very... It's like... I compare it to Proust, in French literature.
It's literary, it's great literature.
He had the genius to make a storyboard with Moebius.
The first actor is the father, the Duke Leto.
David Carradine had starred in a very popular television series
in which he was a warrior who was taught by masters from the Orient.
It was influenced by El Topo.
Then when Carradine knew that I wanted him he came he came running.
I waited for him in Los Angeles in a hotel room.
I had bought vitamin E.
It happened during a meeting.
"Pink Floyd?" Gibon said, "Okay, I'll go!"
He called Pink Floyd's agent. He said, "Could I meet with you?"
So one day we went to London.
They were in the middle of finishing the mixing
of Dark Side Of The Moon, at Abbey Road, the famous studio.
And I remember we got there and they were...
very distant, very standoffish pop stars, distant.
All of a sudden, Jodo, we called him Jodo, Jodo said, "No. They're pissing me off. Let's go!"
And after that it went very, very, very well. Very, very, very well, yeah.
Today you are seven years old.
Now you are a man.
Bury your first toy and your mother's picture.
When we started, he was twelve.
There I trained him in karate, karate jujitsu, Japanese style.
That's all the fist-foot techniques, joint locks, floor pins, standing pins,
a combination of karate, judo, aikido and atemi-jitsu.
I trained Brontis six hours a day, seven days a week for two years.
For me science fiction was like a huge theater, like a huge work of art.
Every spaceship was a being like an insect, like a fabulous bird.
They were ships with souls, like beings.
It had to be Chris Foss.
Dali, to us, he seemed to be the only emperor of the world,
with that extraordinary talent, with his speech and his wording.
The first time we went to New York was with Michel Seydoux.
We went to the St. Regis because Michel Seydoux liked the St. Regis Hotel.
And we discovered that Dali was also at the St. Regis Hotel!
The bar had a six meter long painting, pre-Rafaelite, where there was a king
and the nobles had a face like they were hiding something.
Dali told me,
"I like it here because there is a six meter painting dedicated to a fart."
Dali told me, "We are going to see each other in Paris."
"I am going to think about it."
In Paris, on the Champs Elysées, there was a very fancy restaurant
and he was there with his court.
He had twelve--twelve!--persons at the table and him.
It was a game.
Also, Jodorowsky was part of the surrealist movement and Dali liked that.
So it was a game between them.
Who would win the game?
He was going through his first adventure with Amanda Lear,
this sort of extraordinarily sexy person.
Nobody ever knew if it was a man or a woman,
a completely incredible character.
A sort of muse, a poet's muse.
And you had to meet him you had to tame him and he needed to tame you.
So he would make you go through these initiations each time.
She treated me very well, and she became an ally,
because I promised her the role of Princess Irulan.
She said, "Be careful because Dali is destructive."
"If he says 'yes' he is going to do everything to destroy the film."
"Best paid actor in Hollywood."
"I want $100,000 per hour."
I went back and told Alejandro, "We're never going to make it!"
But I couldn't pay him "the most in the world." That would be impossible.
Then step by step,
because we were stubborn and because Alejandro would tell me
that Dali was the only one who could play the emperor,
the totalitarian emperor,
we had the idea of paying him by the minutes used.
I go to see Alejandro and ask, "How many minutes is he going to be filmed?"
"How many minutes will he be in the movie?"
Alejandro says, "Maximum five, probably three."
So I said, "That's the idea!"
I go back to see Dali and I say, "I will pay you $100,000 per minute!"
He says, "That's brilliant! I will be the $100,000 a minute actor!"
Paris was where
Jodorowsky and Dan O'Bannon saw my work displayed and they wanted me to join them.
Giger had never done movies.
I said, "You have to make movies."
It was completely new to me and incredibly fascinating.
I met Jodorowsky for the first time in Paris.
This was the evening when he attended a Magma concert.
I knew nothing about the project, or the idea, or the book for that matter.
I learned about all of that afterwards.
Alejandro Jodorowsky didn't give us any direction on the music.
I believe he trusted us.
Now I had an idea because he had described the planet, the Harkonnen.
I knew that they were not really the good guys, that they were more like the bad guys.
So it was rather easy to imagine because
Magma made music that was rather violent, typically hard, things like that.
I was just amazed by the quality
and I told them I felt just like Christ when he was on the cross.
I was fulfilled, it was fascinating, the music.
I wanted Mick Jagger to play Feyd-Rautha, a character.
How am I going to contact this person
who is not going to be impressed that I have the great power to make a movie?
He is in the peak of his fame, of his glory.
How?
And I was invited to an event in Paris.
It was a big gathering of the Parisian bourgeoisie and at the other side of the room, a big room,
I don't know, maybe one hundred fifty square meters, was Mick Jagger.
I saw him from a distance and I think he saw me, and I saw him walking, he started walking...
He started walking between the people and then I realized that he was coming to me.
He crossed the room and he stood in front of me.
And I told him, "I want you for my movie."
And he said only one word: "Yes."
I was often invited to Andy Warhol's Factory, Candy Darling and all those people.
There I met Udo Kier, who was Andy Warhol's great actor.
He had played great roles, and he said that he would act for me.
Orson Welles had a bad reputation
because they said that he liked to drink and eat so much that he ate at the movies.
He ate a lot and then he did not finish the movies. He was moody.
But I said: "No, Orson Welles is a genius, he is the one."
And since he liked to eat, they say he goes to the gastronomic restaurants in Paris.
Therefore I sent a secretary to ask in all the gastronomic restaurants in Paris:
"Where does Orson Welles eat?"
I had the artworks from the movie, which I got from Moebius,
who drew the storyboard,
where one can see the Harkonnen Castle.
I was fascinated by the creation of the Harkonnen people
and when I airbrushed five paintings I gave my best to create these designs.
If attacked, then the spears would be set in motion and impale the people
who stood in the way on the pathway up the castle.
And in fact this Harkonnen fortress was never in the novel.
So this was somehow in Alejandro Jodorowsky's translation, his interpretation of the story.
It was such a beautiful object.
So well done and at the time, there were no photocopies.
It was just photos of each drawing. In color, so well done,
with so much detail about the costumes,
about the techniques used.
This approach was chosen precisely because
I was thinking they might have a certain distrust of Jodorowsky.
But since we were showing the camera angles,
since we explained each scene the way we wanted to film it,
they should have been relieved.
But they weren't. It wasn't enough.
In Los Angeles I wasn't optimistic.
The thing is that sometimes the French and the Americans
have difficult relationships, you know.
Well, we have had.
We were almost at the finish line, but we had to find the last five million dollars.
The film cost fifteen million dollars. Well, we estimated it as fifteen million.
We had been invited to Walt Disney studios by the chairman of the board.
He looked through the project and said:
"This is a wonderful project,"
"but it is like the Concorde."
"It's an exceptional plane, but over here, never!"
And there I said to myself that we were going to face a lot of problems.
They always received us in a very friendly way but it was always the same answer.
When we would give them the book, they were very impressed.
They had never seen anything like it.
Each time, they would tell us, "It's superb. It's very well constructed."
"You've solved the technical problems of those special effects."
"It's economically reasonable."
"But we don't get your director."
Hollywood did not visualize science fiction that way.
It was in 2001: A Space Odyssey or in small B movies.
But a huge movie, that would cost millions of dollars with all the effects.
They did not conceive of that.
Maybe it was a bit long as well.
Maybe the film was... a bit too long.
The totally outrageous side of Jodorowsky,
especially after The Holy Mountain and El Topo,
did not give them faith that he could lead this very ambitious project.
Because fifteen million dollars in the middle of the seventies was a lot of money.
And that was their answer even though they found everything else to be perfect.
Everything was great, except the director.
You have to be like a poet.
Your movie must be just as you think of it and just as you want it.
Do not take comments to change this or that from this person or the other. No!
The movie has to be just like I dream it.
Very disappointed. Very disappointed because we all believed in it.
I believed in it.
Now this is my take on it, but I think he didn't feel
like doing something else after such a project,
which was the project of his life, I believe. That's my feeling.
I think that the humiliation that Alejandro Jodorowsky suffered, in not having been chosen,
in having been eliminated for being too original, being too surrealistic,
that is a permanent injury.
I think that Jodorowsky carries that in his heart for life.
I was convinced that it would be something great.
But then Dino De Laurentiis' daughter came along and took the project away from us,
and gave it to David Lynch.
I've never seen the movie and I never will.
I think it was a guide, a guide for some.
In any case, I am convinced that our storyboard made the rounds in the halls of Hollywood.
I can't imagine that isn't the case. It pleases me to imagine that.
You always have to see the positive.