David Lynch isn’t done dunking on his ’80s take on “Dune.”
The auteur said during NPR’s “Wild Card,” hosted by Rachel Martin, that “Dune” was the “failure” he learned the most from. The 1984 feature starred Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides; Denis Villeneuve later adapted the sci-fi novel with Timothée Chalamet in the lead role. Villeneuve found much greater on-screen success with the story.
“I knew already one should have final cut before signing on to do a film,” Lynch said of waiving that right for “Dune.” “But for some reason, I thought everything would be OK, and I didn’t put final cut in my contract. And as it turned out, ‘Dune’ wasn’t the film I wanted to make, because I didn’t have a final say.”
He continued, “So that’s a lesson I knew even before, but now there’s no way. Why would anyone work for three years on something that wasn’t yours? Why? Why do that? Why? I died a death. And it was all my fault for not knowing to put that in the contract.”
Lynch has never shied away from owning up to the mistakes of “Dune.” During his YouTube series in 2020, Lynch explained why “Dune” is the one film he is not “proud of.”
“I’m proud of everything except ‘Dune,’” Lynch said. “I’ve liked so much working on different movies. It’s not so much about pride but the enjoyment of doing, the enjoyment of the work. I’ve enjoyed working in all these different mediums. I feel really lucky to have been able to enjoy those things and to be able to live.”
“I always say, ‘Dune’ is a huge gigantic sadness in my life,” Lynch further said back in 2019. “I did not have final cut on that film. Total creative control, I didn’t have it. The film is not the film I would’ve made had I had that final control. It’s a bit of a sadness.”
The director even went so far as to say he “sold out” during the “Dune” production.
“With ‘Dune,’ I sold out on that early on, because I didn’t have final cut, and it was a commercial failure, so I died two times with that,” Lynch said. “With ‘Fire Walk With Me,’ it didn’t go over well at the time, but I loved it so I only died once, for the commercial failure and the reviews and things.”
Villeneuve, who took over the franchise iteration at Warner Bros., believes the Lynch version strayed too much from the original novel.
“When I saw David Lynch version [from 1984], when I was young, I did feel that he succeeded in some areas, and other moments of the adaptation I felt he went away from the source material a bit too much,” Villeneuve said. “There was things, some decisions he made that I did not agree with… I was waiting for this adaptation for a long time.”
