DUNE: PRODUCTION
 

 “I think David Lynch is a genius.  There aren’t too many of them left.”
                                -Dino De Laurentiis

     The Dune project, at the time, was one of the largest film productions in cinematic history.  With a budget of almost $50 million dollars, it was clearly the most ambitious project ever undertaken by Universal Pictures.  The epic proportions of making a movie like Dune, with rare exception, dwarfed the production requirements of most movies that ever came before it, or immediately after it.   
    More than 1700 people were employed in Dune’s production.  The film’s voracious production requirements demanded the construction of more than 80 sets to be built on 16 different sound stages.   There were fifty-three speaking roles to be cast for Dune and the film required almost 20,000 studio extras.  
     Finding a studio, near a desert, to accommodate the Dune project proved to be almost as difficult as bringing the movie to the big screen.  Sights in North Africa, Tunisia, India, Australia, Italy, Spain and Yugolavia were considered before Mexico was finally chosen. Raffaella said, “It was a very tough choice.  We flew all over the world looking at different locations and studios…still; it was a very hard decision for me.  Nobody believed that the movie could be made in Mexico…had we filmed Dune anywhere else in the world, our budget would have been between $75 million and $100 million dollars.” 1.   

While the enormous complexity of outlandish film projects scared away most Hollywood producers and financiers, the eccentric Dino De Laurentiis seem to gravitate towards them.  De Laurentiis had made a name for himself in Hollywood with epic films like, La Strada and The Bible.
Dino De Laurentiis would later say, “Nobody is as crazy as I am.  You have to be crazy to make a movie like Dune.” 1.
   Ed Naha noted, in The Making of Dune:   “For… De Laurentis, Dune seemed a naturally audacious project.  The outspoken Italian filmmaker had fashioned a career out of defying the motion picture establishment, jumping headfirst into projects that were termed unfeasible for one reason or another.  He was known as a risk-taker.  Sometimes his cinematic high-rolling failed but, much more often than not, he managed to tickle the public’s fancy with his eclectic film fare." 1.

Dino and producer/daughter Raffaella De Laurentiis

     The dramatic story of the 1984 Dune movie is almost as complicated and densely plotted as Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel.  The film rights to the movie would pass through the hands of many producers, writers, and directors, around the world, before it would ever see the light of the silver screen:  Directors: David Lean (Lawrence of Arabia) in 1972, Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo) in 1974, Ridley Scott (Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator) in 1979, and finally David Lynch (The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive) in 1981.  
     Dino De Laurentiis had tremendous confidence in David Lynch’s ability.  Arguably, Laurentiis’ confidence was justified.  Following the success of The Elephant Man, David Lynch was the hottest director in Hollywood.  Lynch’s cinematic style was otherworldly, eccentric, and above all, expressionistic.  The Lynch cinematic style also possessed unconventional elements of sound, visual flair, and tonality, which translated very well on film.
     Besides Lynch’s talent for stylized imagery, he also possessed a gift for writing.  Lynch’s collaborative writing talents on The Elephant Man had garnered him an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.  Writing had been the biggest problem that plagued the Dune scripts from the project’s inception. 
    Frank Herbert’s Dune was an alien universe of many diverse worlds- replete with surreal trappings, science-fictional oddities, and political intrigues.  American directors, hemmed in by traditional Hollywood conventions, may not have possessed the talent or auteur cinematic sensibilities to make the Dune movie a reality as Frank Herbert had envisioned it.  In contrast, Lynch’s unique cinematic talents appeared to energize Herbert’s masterful vision of his own work.  In some cases, even Herbert admitted, Lynch had extended and redefined the range, scope and depth of some of his Dune characters. 
     Of the last three Oscar-winning Best Directors that were in Hollywood at the time of Dune’s filming; two were actors (Warren Beatty and Robert Redford).  One (Robert Redford) had never directed a feature film prior to his directing debut.  Further, with English born director, Ridley Scott, off the project, the choice of Lynch seemed painfully obvious.