Despite nearly 40 years having passed since director David Lynch suffered a frustrating experience attempting to bring Frank Herbert’s Dune to life, the filmmaker is still quite touchy about the experience, to the point that not only will he never see Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the story, but he doesn’t even want to hear anything about it. With Lynch’s original film suffering a number of behind-the-scenes struggles and challenges, marking his first and only foray into the world of big-budget filmmaking for a major studio, the successes of Villeneuve’s adaptation likely only compound Lynch’s disappointments from his own experiences.
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While speaking with French outlet Cahiers du Cinéma, per Far Out, on the topic of Villeneuve’s Dune, Lynch replied, “I will never watch it, and I don’t even want you to tell me about it, ever.”
Lynch previously recalled how he has at least somewhat considered what it would be like to get the chance to restore his original vision of the film, while also admitting how unlikely that scenario is.
“Dune –– people have said, ‘Don’t you want to go back and fiddle with Dune?’ And I was so depressed and sickened by it, you know?” Lynch shared with The A.V. Club in 2022. “I want to say, I loved everybody that I worked with; they were so fantastic. I loved all the actors; I loved the crew; I loved working in Mexico; I loved everything except that I didn’t have final cut. And I even loved Dino [De Laurentiis], who wouldn’t give me what I wanted. And Raffaella, the producer, who was his daughter — I loved her. But the thing was a horrible sadness and failure to me, and if I could go back in I’ve thought, well, maybe I would on that one go back in.”
He added, “But I mean, nobody’s…it’s not going to happen.”
Star of Lynch’s Dune, Kyle MacLachlan, has a much more positive outlook on Villeneuve’s adaptation, as he’s been a fan of the source material for so long.
“I watched his film, it was great, I enjoyed it,” MacLachlan shared with ComicBook.com about the film. “Had a tremendous sense of nostalgia, to be honest, watching some of the sequences and remembering stuff that I did with our cast in 1983. So it was a trip down memory lane for me, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.”
Dune: Part Two currently has a November 3rd release date.
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