"What I wanted was to create a prophet"

May 16, 2011 10:49 PM

"I wanted to do a movie that would give the people that 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 effect." - Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune (previously) is to be the subject of a new documentary.
posted by Artw (32 comments total)

I want to see this so very badly.

...I'll revise that.

I want to magically see a completed version of Jodorowsky's Dune so very badly, but I'm willing to accept this as the next best thing.
posted by lumensimus at 10:56 PM on May 16, 2011 [4 favorites]

Jodorowsky's Dune is my favorite thing. A close second is Jack Kirby's Lord of Light.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 10:58 PM on May 16, 2011

I want to magically see a completed version of Jodorowsky's Dune so very badly, but I'm willing to accept this as the next best thing.

I'd accept a big budget adaptation of The Incal or Metabarons as a substitute...

OK, maybe not too big a budget, as then it ends up getting toned down and being The Fifth Element.
posted by Artw at 10:59 PM on May 16, 2011

Or The Technopriests. Loved that.
posted by lumensimus at 11:30 PM on May 16, 2011

I want whore-ships driven
By the sperm of passionate ejaculations
In an engine of flesh
I want rockets complex and secret,
Humming-bird ornithopters,
Sipping the thousand-year-old nectar of dwarf stars...

Ok, so ... should we try round nacelles then? I like round.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 11:30 PM on May 16, 2011 [4 favorites]

Just hearing him talk about it is so incredibly inspiring. He talks about wanting the movie to be a PROPHET to change the young minds of all the world, an artistic, cinematographic GOD, and I'm just thinking, why don't the rest of us have enormous ambitions like this? Why can't there be thousands of Jodorowskys out there?
posted by naju at 11:44 PM on May 16, 2011 [8 favorites]

To be fair, he is pretty much insane.
posted by Artw at 11:52 PM on May 16, 2011 [2 favorites]

To be fair, he is pretty much insane.

Which in art is synonymous with awesome.
posted by solarion at 12:20 AM on May 17, 2011 [10 favorites]

Why can't there be thousands of Jodorowskys out there?

There are. Remember this guy? Be careful what you wish for; you just may get it. Remember kids, a little crazy goes a long way.
posted by KingEdRa at 12:22 AM on May 17, 2011

Just hearing him talk about it is so incredibly inspiring. He talks about wanting the movie to be a PROPHET to change the young minds of all the world, an artistic, cinematographic GOD, and I'm just thinking, why don't the rest of us have enormous ambitions like this? Why can't there be thousands of Jodorowskys out there?

Because people have abandoned GLORY and SIGNIFICANCE in the pursuit of irony jokes? I dunno.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 12:23 AM on May 17, 2011 [2 favorites]

I don't think Gene Ray is a fair comparison. Jodorowsky might be using similarly effusive, hallucinogenic imagery, but there's a difference between getting flowery when you talk about art as being transformative and SIMULTANEOUS FOUR CORNERED DAY.
posted by kagredon at 12:31 AM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

He'd be all FIVE CORNERS, motherfucker! And one of the corners would be boobs.
posted by Artw at 12:33 AM on May 17, 2011 [5 favorites]

For Dali, no less than 1,000 CORNERS will suffice! With EXCREMENT!
posted by Meatbomb at 12:59 AM on May 17, 2011 [5 favorites]

I think part of the power of Dune is that it grounded all the hallucinogenic flights of fancy in a really closely absorbed world, so it felt like Paul's visions were also accurate or that Herbert was trying to transcribe, as best he could, someone with that much clairvoyance.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn at 1:07 AM on May 17, 2011

I wanted to do a movie that would give the people that 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 effect.

That sounds like a great way to make a dull, incoherent movie, frankly.
posted by delmoi at 1:50 AM on May 17, 2011

And pointless. LSD is not about changing the scenery and seeing ”things”. LSD changes you.
posted by CautionToTheWind at 2:56 AM on May 17, 2011 [5 favorites]

Does anyone doubt that this movie would have been a big incoherent but good-looking mess?
posted by octothorpe at 5:02 AM on May 17, 2011

I hope to see the day when CGI has advanced to the point where they can make this film exactly as it would have been if Jodorowsky was making it in 1975. Including CGI Dali as the insane emperor living on an artificial golden planet in a gold palace built according to not-laws of antilogical.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 5:37 AM on May 17, 2011 [1 favorite]

Anyone who thinks it's possible to convey an LSD trip via film/music/multimedia is fundamentally wrong.

Sure, it might be possible to recreate YOUR trip onto film, but that's about as interesting as listening to someone else's dream.

Granted, the guy was probably just trying to pitch his movie with some evocative wordplay, but the text of the FPP definitely struck an "Oh no he didn't!" chord with me.

LSD is definitely a "you had to be there, and you had to be me" experience.
posted by ShutterBun at 6:42 AM on May 17, 2011 [2 favorites]

That sounds like Enter the Void*

*Do not see Enter the Void
posted by notionoriety at 7:00 AM on May 17, 2011

Just hearing him talk about it is so incredibly inspiring. He talks about wanting the movie to be a PROPHET to change the young minds of all the world, an artistic, cinematographic GOD, and I'm just thinking, why don't the rest of us have enormous ambitions like this? Why can't there be thousands of Jodorowskys out there?

I would create the god-movie, but I'm a bit busy at work right now, so you'll just have to wait.
posted by thsmchnekllsfascists at 7:24 AM on May 17, 2011

Does anyone doubt that this movie would have been a big incoherent but good-looking mess?

I'd like to see it, but I don't think it would be good.
posted by adamdschneider at 7:37 AM on May 17, 2011

That sounds like Enter the Void*

*Do not see Enter the Void

Best advice ever.

Does anyone doubt that this movie would have been a big incoherent but good-looking mess?

Having read the translated "Unseen Dune" article - which makes it clear that Jodorowsky wasn't really going to make Dune so much as a Dune-flavoured burst of the kind of self-indulgent psychedelic bullshit that looks great through 35 years of hindsight but would have ended up just plain boring to watch despite its excesses - it's pretty hard to doubt this.

For one thing it would have been the antithesis of the most interesting of Herbert's achievements in Dune, which was to create a universe so rigid and harsh that he could throw in crazy, quasi-nonsense stuff like ancestral memory, awareness spectrum narcotics and drug-induced psychic orgies (or were they real orgies? I never could tell) without it all collapsing under the weight of its own ponderous inanity - the fate of so many other cultural artefacts of the '60s and '70s.

Of course, Lynch tried to play it straight and look where that got him.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 7:48 AM on May 17, 2011 [2 favorites]

Jodorowsky = The Holy Mountain. that is all.
posted by exlotuseater at 8:01 AM on May 17, 2011

My executive plan for fixing the American economy is to randomly select oddball filmmakers and give them a billion dollars each to make their own Dune. I want grandiose, wild, rambling Dune. I want a Dune made using a handheld in someone's sandy beach backyard and five kilos of tumeric for melange. I want a indie Garden State coming-of-age Dune full of angst. I want the Pixar Dune with giant CGI rabbits, for kids! I want a Dune musical made by someone who genuinely thinks it could work, even if they have no clue. I want a Michael Bay Dune, just because I want everyone else to know what not to do.

And it isn't just because I want to give Toto something to do, either.
posted by adipocere at 8:17 AM on May 17, 2011 [10 favorites]

Jodorowsky is infinity thousand kinds of awesome, and although he's full of weird, mystical ideas and ambitions, he's by no means "insane" in the conventional, treatable sense of the term that you could apply to someone like Gene Ray. Remember, while most English-speaking North Americans know him only as that crazy director that put out a couple of trippy cult movies (if they know of him at all), he's also a successful comic book writer, novelist, lecturer and academic who's pretty widely known in the Spanish and French-speaking world.
posted by infinitywaltz at 10:32 AM on May 17, 2011 [2 favorites]

Jodorowsky is still alive, right? Why can't we make this movie happen now?
posted by Galaxor Nebulon at 11:18 AM on May 17, 2011

I mean, not that movie, obviously. But what if Jodorowsky took a second crack at Dune and got it made this time? I have no doubt that it would also blow my mind.
posted by Galaxor Nebulon at 11:23 AM on May 17, 2011

Just seems appropriate to mention Jodorovsky's Metabarons now. (The Metabaron, since he drives a Metacraft and resides in a Metabunker, probably reads Metafilter.) Also this askme is pure gold.
posted by yoHighness at 2:09 PM on May 17, 2011 [2 favorites]

Jodorowsky is fucking awesome, and while his influence on contemporary art may be small, it manifests in amazing ways. Like, most of comics right now is dudes trying to be David Mamet or Aaron Sorkin or some shit and grafting that onto superhero stories: lame. But when a comics dude tries to follow in Jodorowsky's footsteps? You get this.

For whatever reason, despite that I'm a comics dude myself, I have read little of Jodorowsky's comic book work. I love his movies, though, and the Santa Sangre that (finally!) just came out on ...official US DVD is so full of extra stuff I still haven't seen it all. So, so, so highly recommended.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 3:31 PM on May 17, 2011

Glad it wasn't made. From hearing him talk about it, it had nothing to do with Dune. And that pandering to Dali... bad.
posted by coust at 7:36 PM on May 17, 2011

For whatever reason, despite that I'm a comics dude myself, I have read little of Jodorowsky's comic book work.

if you think the Dune project sounds interesting you really need to correct that - it's where it all ended up.

From hearing him talk about it, it had nothing to do with Dune.

Well, he likes the galactic empire bits - weirdly he seems almost completly disinterested in all the desert planet stuff.
posted by Artw at 8:24 AM on May 18, 2011