The hilarious reason Charlotte Rampling departed Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘Dune’
Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel Dune possesses an iconic status so strong that it has been brought (or at least attempted to be brought) to the screen on many occasions. David Lynch famously made a widely-panned version of the novel for the big screen, which would eventually be completely overshadowed by Denis Villeneuve’s modern masterpieces.
However, Lynch and Villeneuve are not the only directors to have handled Herbert’s legendary sci-fi tale because the Chilean-French avant-garde director Alejandro Jodorowsky, known for his films El Topo and The Holy Mountain, also made an effort to bring the world of Arrakis into cinematic glory.
Where Lynch’s Dune ultimately failed in terms of its reception, Jodorowsky’s Dune, which was set to boast a marvellous cast including Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, David Carradine, Alain Delon, Udo Kier and Mick Jagger, with a soundtrack by Pink Floyd and Alien’s Dan O’Bannon on special effects, never actually saw the light of day.
Perhaps such names showed the sheer ambition of the project, set to be 14 hours in length, and the fact that it was, therefore, doomed to fail. In 2013, Frank Pavich released a documentary detailing Jodorowsky’s failed attempt at adapting Dune and in an interview with IndieWire, he also gave some fascinating insights into its background.
One story told of the actor Charlotte Rampling, who would later star in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune as Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohaim and was also asked to play Jessica for Jodorowsky. Jodorowsky had previously seen Rampling play in a film and “wanted a strong, beautiful woman, not a weak dainty woman. Someone with a real spiritual strength”.
When Jodorowsky met with Rampling to talk through the script, they discussed a scene in which “a character named Rabban the Beast, part of the Harkonnen army, gets his army [played by the Algerian army themselves], to pull down their pants in front of the palace and shit, in order to insult Duke Leto.”
However, the scene was not best received by Rampling, who did not want to take part in such a vulgar moment on screen. Pavich explained, “So here’s Charlotte Rampling, she agrees to meet with Jodo, she gets the script, she reads the script, and she says, ‘I can’t be in a movie where there’s 2,000 extras defecating on screen! I need to be in a movie that people are actually going to see! Who the hell is going to see this movie?’”
Rampling had the foresight perhaps to suggest that Jodorowsky’s film was too ambitious, most notably for a scene in which thousands of people would be shitting on screen. Rampling eventually pulled out of the project with Jodorowsky then noting, “It was a great disappointment for me. A great disappointment.”
Whether Rampling had this in mind when she was later offered a part in Villeneuve’s Dune may well be true. Though she was likely excited by the prospect of taking on Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel, she was unprepared to drag her name through the muck by featuring in a film of such vulgarity.
Jodorowsky’s film undoubtedly failed, marred by ambition and budget, but it still serves as an iconic piece of film history, a moment when a director felt that there were no limits to the power of cinema, although it was an idea that was ultimately proven to be too good to be true.
