The House of Gucci filmmaker was set to direct a 1980s adaptation of the space epic, eventually picked up by David Lynch
Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci and Denis Villeneuve’s epic take on Dune are, in case you hadn’t noticed, two of the biggest film releases of the year, with both generating a fair amount of award show speculation. However, Oscars buzz — and the directors’ shared dislike for Marvel films — aren’t all that links the two movies, since Scott was once also attached to an 80s adaptation of Dune, only to drop out mid-production.
“It’s always been filmable,” the filmmaker suggests in a new interview with Total Film, despite the many disastrous attempts over the years, by filmmakers such as Alejandro Jodorowsky and, most famously, David Lynch.
“I had a writer called Rudy Wurlitzer, of the Wurlitzer family,” he goes on. “We did a very good take on Dune, because early days, I’d work very, very closely with the writer. I was always glomming the look of the film onto what he or she was writing.”
Scott and Wurlitzer developed the script following the former’s success with Alien, and prior to the release of 1982’s Blade Runner. Scott had been approached to adapt Dune by Dino De Laurentiis (the producer who brought Lynch into the mix after Scott dropped out). “Dino had got me into it and we said, ‘We did a script, and the script is pretty fucking good,’” Scott says.
He eventually dropped out, however, due to Dino’s insistence that shooting took place in Mexico to keep costs down. “Dino said, ‘It’s expensive, we’re going to have to make it in Mexico,’” Scott recalls. “I said, ‘What!’ He said, ‘Mexico.’ I said, ‘Really?’ So he sent me to Mexico City. And with the greatest respect to Mexico City, in those days (it was) pretty pongy. I didn’t love it.”
“I went to the studio in Mexico City where the floors were earth floors in the studio. I said, ‘Nah, Dino, I don’t want to make this a hardship.’ And so I actually backed out.”
Of course, David Lynch didn’t have a much easier time working on Dune. “It was a failure and I didn’t have a final cut,” the Eraserhead director said, looking back on the film last year. “It’s not the film I wanted to make. I like certain parts of it very much – but it was a total failure for me.”
Elsewhere in the new interview with Total Film, Ridley Scott also discusses the reception of House of Gucci, most notably touching on the “insulting” response of the real Gucci family. “I tried to be as respectful as possible by being as factual as possible, and as factual as we can possibly imagine,” he says of the recently-released film. “But the people that were writing from the family to us at the onset were alarmingly insulting, saying that Al Pacino did not represent physically Aldo Gucci in any shape or form.”
“And yet, frankly, how could they be better represented than by Al Pacino? Excuse me! You probably have the best actors in the world, you should be so fucking lucky.”
Read Ridley Scott’s interview on Dune and House of Gucci in full via Total Film, and revisit Dazed’s interview with House of Gucci costume designer Janty Yates here.