I LOVE Jodorowsky's work...but this version (which almost got made with the help of Pink Floyd, Giger, and Dali) would have been sooo out of synch with the books that they might have made a new movie without the Dune connection.
THE MOVIE YOU WILL NEVER SEE
by Alexandro Jodorowsky
"To show the process of illumination of a hero, then a people, then an entire planet (which in turn is the Messiah of the Universe since in abandonning its orbit, the holy planet leaves to spread its light through all the galaxies)...
I didn't want to respect the novel, I wanted to recreate it. For me, Dune didn't belong to Herbert just as Don Quixote didn't belong to Cervantes.
There is an artist, one alone among millions of others artists, who one time in his life, by a piece of divine grace, receives an immortal theme, a MYTH...I say "receive" and not "create" because works of art are received in a state of mediumness directly from the collective unconcious. The work overtakes the artist and in some way it kills him, because humanity, in receiving the impact of Myth, has a profound need to erase the individual who receives it and transmits it: his individual personality hampers, stains the purity of the message which, at the root, asks to be anonymous... We don't know who created the Notre-Dame cathedral, nor the Aztec solar calendar, nor the tarot of Marseille, nor the myth of Don Juan, etc.
One feels that Cervantes gave HIS version of Quixote--of course incomplete--and that we carry in our soul our total character... Christ didn't belong to Mark, Luke, Matthew or John... There are many more gospels called apocryphal and there are as much lives of Christ as there are believers. Everyone of us has their story of Dune, their Jessica, their Paul... I feel fervent admiration towards Herbert and at the same time conflict (I think the same thing happened to him)... He hampered me... I didn't want him as an advisor of technique... I did everything to keep him away from the project... I had received a version of Dune and I wanted to transit it: the myth had to abandon the literary form and become image...
In the film, Duke Leto (father of Paul) would be a man castrated in a ritual combat in the arenas during a bullfight. (The emblem of the Atreide house being a sacred bull...) Jessica--Bene Gesserit nun--, sent like a concubine to the duke to create a daughter who would be the mother of a Messiah, falls so much in love with Leto that she decides to blow a link in the chain and create a son, the Kwizatz Haderach, the saviour. In using her powers of Bene Gesserit--as soon as the duke, madly in love with her, confides his sad secret--Jessica lets herself be inseminated by a drop of blood of this sterile man... The camera followed (in the script) the red drop through the ovaries of the woman and accompanied its meeting with the ovule where, by an miraculous explosion, it inseminates the egg.
Paul was born of a virgin, and not by the sperm of his father but by his blood... In my version of Dune, the Emperor of the Galaxy is mad. He lives on an artificial planet of gold, in a palace of gold constructed according to the non-laws of anti-logic. He lives in symbiosis with a robot identical to him. The resemblance is so perfect that the citizens never know if they are facing the man or the machine... In my version, the spice is a blue drug of a spongy consistency filled with a vegtable-animal life endowed with consciousness, the highest level of consciousness. It doesn't stop taking all sorts of forms, shifting without cease. The spice continually reproduces the creation of innumerable universes.
MORE.............
http://www.hotweird.com/jodorowsky/dunestory.html