Jodorowsky's Dune

It’s one of the great near-misses in movie history. In the mid ’70s, flushed by the unexpected success of his wild midnight movies ‘El Topo’ and ‘The Holy Mountain’, writer-director-mystic Alejandro Jodorowsky embarked on one of the most ambitious film projects of all time: an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic sci-fi masterpiece ‘Dune’. With a cast including Orson Welles, Salvador Dali and Jodorowsky’s own son Brontis, music by Pink Floyd and Karlheinz Stockhausen and visual designs by HR Giger and French comics genius Moebius, the film would’ve had a budget of $9.5 million, and might’ve ended up somewhere in the region of 14 hours long. Needless to say it fell apart, leading to David Lynch’s controversial (but, by some, beloved) vision. This documentary, which explores how Jodorowsky’s film might have looked, received an extremely warm welcome at this summer’s Cannes Film Festival.