Out on the publicity trail for the home release of his sci-fi curio The Congress, Waltz With Bashir director Ari Folman has revealed he's got his sights on a bigger space opera. Namely, he wants a crack at Frank Herbert's epochal Dune. But specifically, he'd like to make an animated adaptation of Alejandro Jodorowsky's abandoned version.
"I wish I could do that film," Folman tells Den Of Geek. "The Dune [Jodorowsky] wanted to do. At the end of the movie, he says that he didn't want to do it animated, but he had a 300-page storyboard illustrated for that film. He said, 'The time will come when a great animation director will take this book and make an animated movie out of it'."
If you're unfamiliar with the story, Jodorowsky (El Topo, The Holy Mountain) claims the universe told him to make a film of Dune in 1977, despite not actually having read it. He started putting together a band of “warriors” to bring his extraordinary vision to fruition: HR Giger, Moebius, Dan O’Bannon and Chris Foss among them, plus his son Brontis Jodorowsky, who underwent two years of physical training to prepare him for the role of the messianic Paul Atreides.
Salvador Dali would have played Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV, with Orson Welles as Baron Harkonnen, but sadly the project fell apart, eventually ending up with Raffaella di Laurentiis and David Lynch, while many of the behind-the-scenes artists decamped to Ridley Scott's Alien. You can read the whole story in the October 2009 edition of Empire. Or, of course, there's Frank Pavich's excellent (if slightly over-credulous) documentary (see trailer above).
Is Folman's belated remount likely to happen? "Well, you never know," says the director. "I'm up for the challenge. I just recently got [Jodorowsky's] email and I want to go and meet the guy. I'm busy now with a big project, but I'll give it a shot. I want to see that story. I'd love to see that story."
That other project is a stop-motion animated version of The Diary Of Anne Frank, which Folman is making in cahoots with DP Tristan Oliver (Fantastic Mr Fox). Work is currently underway at London's Passion Films.
The Congress, adapted from Stanislaw Lem's The Futurological Congress, is out on DVD and Blu-ray on December 8.