I never even heard of the book
and Dino called me and said do you know about this book and I said no
I never heard of and I thought he said "June" instead of "Dune"
and so I read it
and I had a meeting with Dino and
I liked him right away I didn't know if I would like Dino, and I loved the book
and so we
you know
started working together
but his daughter Raffaela was the producer
and she was fantastic and she
did have fantastic job putting together a giant machine we had
at one point one thousand seven hundred people on the crew building and doing all sorts
of things. It's been very strange for me because these jumps from Easerhead to Elephant
Man to Dune are huge leaps
but Dune
was a picture that took this much money
and so
I'd never saw this money
and I'd just treated it as a normal picture
and it took three-and-a-half years to do it
working six days a week but still the process of making the film is the same, tuning
into this material and getting it somehow onto the screen
I didn't read science fiction
and Dune is a strange science fiction because it has other things, you know, woven
into it, its not
what you'd call like a space hardware
science fiction picture
When you sort of try to tune into the material you sort of feel what this essence is
and in Dune some things could fall away and I still felt that it was still saying Dune
and other things had to stay because if they went away it wouldn't say Dune
and so I'd just tried to tune in to the material and be true the book and
uh
and get it down to a realistic length, it took a long time that it was year-and-a-half
on working on the script
and in many many rewrites in the middle of shooting
to make things the more understandable and
I was always finding these little pieces
of this puzzle
suddenly I'd realize some part was missing and have to fix something
we went everywhere trying to find these people that would
be these characters and
it didn't matter if they were, had names or if they were totally unknown we kind
of were able to find them here and there
and find unknowns or people with names
It's hard to find
someone who has certain qualities in one person and those qualities are
a quality of innocents
a quality of
strength that could go into the leadership
a quality of intelligence in the eyes, and a sort of a spiritual
quality on top of that
and
it sounds like to be many people that, you know, maybe could do this, but we'd we never
found it all in one person, that way
everybody in the film that working him
said that Kyle is a natural and he's a very good actor
and they respected him a lot because of his attitude and
his seriousness about the the whole thing
He'd never been seen a camera before, and we did a screen test, was the first time he'd
ever been in front of a camera
I didn't want Sting because he was a rock star
and then I saw him in a film called Brimstone and Treacle which I don't think has
come to France
but it's a British picture and I saw him and I saw
this, I said, he's got to be perfect for this character
and now in the many places in the world people think Sting is almost the star of Dune because
during the time of Dune he became a
superstar
and now everyone put pictures out with him but then they become crazy because he's
the only got a small part in in the picture
but he does a great job and he was super to work with but he's not the star of
Dune
I felt that in Mexico city that I was in a strange world and I was in a foreign,
you know, place and
when I've finished shooting at night I'd come home but, I was still, never in a normal
world and it was a dream city it was a romantic city, it had strange architecture
it had this mood to it
and
it helped me a lot always staying in this mood of Dune
David Paich of Toto came down to Mexico and I talked with him, and when you're sitting
with someone talking to them
you start
seeing things
and in David Paich I saw
lots and lots of music that he wanted to make that wasn't like Toto's
music
and he's really a genius, he's got tremendous
talent, musical talent, that is never used, and many musicians I know are like this
they get into one sort of things but inside them, there are other things that that wants to
come out
and so
he got a chance to do, you know, lots of different things and then Brian Eno
wrote a beautiful piece
So many of the scenes involves special effects, optical effects
and those sequences were story boarded
but I hate story boards because once you draw them
they want you to be locked into them
and you take them all apart and
you now start you know directing pieces of a picture
and then the at the very end all these pieces are supposed to fit together, but it's
very frustrating because maybe somewhere in the middle you wanna change some of these
pieces
and I was lucky really because
a lot of, you know, experts, you know, were with me, and they would say yes you can
do this, we'll make it work and you can change this we'll make it work
but if they hadn't been there I might have been locked into these things
and there's no room for change, and I like
to plan things but when you're working suddenly you get a new idea, it's good to be
able to do it or you become crazy.