One of the most formidable tasks in Hollywood has been attempting to successfully adapt sci-fi master Frank Herbert's seminal classic from 1965, "Dune."
Many brave creative souls have attempted to perform this grueling endeavor with mixed results, including Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Lynch, and Denis Villeneuve, but none had ever tried to bring the far future epic to the small screen until filmmaker John Harrison and the Sci-Fi Channel (now SyFy) tackled it in a highly-regarded miniseries airing its first segment during the holiday season on Dec. 3, 2000.
"George's partner at the time was a fellow named Richard Rubenstein, and Richard produced a lot of George’s work during that time, including the 'Tales From The Darkside' TV show, which I wrote and directed for four seasons, and then did the movie for Paramount," Harrison tells Space.com.
“By that time, George and Richard had gone their separate ways after 12 years of partnership, but I always stayed in touch with Richard. One day, he called me up and said, 'I think I’m going to get the rights to this sci-fi novel, and I'd like to hear your take. I was looking through my bookshelves for something to do next, and I saw a novel I really loved. Have you ever read the book 'Dune?' I said, 'Yeah, Richard, I've read that book!'"
Fortified with an International cast and filmed at Barrandov Studios in the Czech Republic on a generous $21 million budget, "Frank Herbert's Dune" is considered by many purists as the most honest and faithful to Herbert’s iconic work, fitting somewhere between Lynch's boisterous psychedelic extravaganza from 1984 and Villeneuve’s cold-but-beautiful blockbuster renderings of 2021 and 2024.
Written and directed by Harrison and blessed with the talents of Academy Award-winning Italian cinematographer Vittorio Storaro ("Apocalypse Now"), production designer Miljen Kljaković, and distinguished composer Graeme Revell ("The Crow") to craft the rousing score, "Frank Herbert’s Dune" is an impressive achievement in television entertainment that still holds up well today.
It stars William Hurt, Alec Newman, Ian McNeice, Giancarlo Giannini, Saskia Reeves, James Watson, P.H. Moriarty, Julie Cox, Uwe Ochsenknecht, Jan Vlasák, and Barbora Kodetová.
Rubenstein had already developed quite a career doing miniseries adaptations of major novels, which he liked to call "novelistic television," some of which included Stephen King's "The Stand" and "The Langoliers," as well as the King-based feature films "Pet Sematary" and "Thinner."
"He'd found a hiccup to acquire the TV rights from Dino De Laurentiis, who wasn’t doing anything with it," he adds. "After Lynch’s movie, there was a feeling that the book was really unadaptable to television or film. It was too complicated, too dense, too big. There were miniseries through the '80s and '90s, but nobody ever thought of doing it that way. So I flew out to LA, and we met at Art's Deli, and basically I pitched it to him as Shakespeare. There are three sections within "Dune." There is Dune, Muad’Dib, and The Prophet. What I wanted to do is make each chapter one night of television. It's a world of Empire, with ruling houses, and various competing interests like the Landsraad and the Bene Gesserit, and the Spacing Guild.
"I wanted to elevate it. I didn't want to do it like the original "Battlestar Galactica" or "Babylon 5." This is a human drama, not space opera. Then Sci-Fi signed on and gave Richard the impetus. It took me about six months to write the three nights, and we had our marching orders. Now it was a matter of can we put this together with a team that's going to really elevate it?"
Apparently, Rubenstein had read that William Hurt really loved "Dune," so he called him and asked if he'd be interested in this miniseries. Harrison and Hurt soon went out to lunch in New York and established a rapport right away. With one acting anchor signed, Harrison told his assistant director, who’d been working in Mexico on a film, to keep fall free because they're doing Dune!
"Vittorio Storaro was shooting that film, and so I said to him, 'Hey, just for shits and giggles, mention it to Vittorio and see if he wants to come over to Prague and do a TV miniseries.' He'd been attached to 'Dune' for a period of time when Jodorowsky was trying to put it together, and had conversations with Ridley Scott all those years before David Lynch came on and did it. Vittorio talked to me about a certain style he wanted to do, and we pulled him into it, and we were off and running. So I moved to Prague in August 1999 and came home the following summer."
With his measured approach to the material and ability to instinctively absorb the flow and pacing, Harrison and his acclaimed creative team worked their magic.
"We cast most of the speaking roles out of the UK, but the Czech Republic was a great place to shoot this. We'd looked at Budapest and Prague, and I'd scouted North Africa. Vittorio and I talked about shooting it all on a sound stage because it was television and a limited budget. We discussed doing a very stylized, very theatrical 'Dune', and it was kind of a risk, and I think the networks were a little worried about us. They were expecting a 'Star Wars' approach with lots of visual effects, which we couldn't afford at that level of quality.
"Even when we did the sequel three years later, 'Children of Dune,' which I also wrote and produced, the difference in special effects was monumental. We were a little ahead of the game, but I'm still really proud of it. I love the way it looks and the way I was able to maintain the drama of the story without having to descend into a lot of shoot-em-up in space. The book is about power and human struggles.
"William Hurt didn’t arrive until a good six weeks into it until his sets were ready. He came up to me one night after seeing Vittorio's work and Miljen, our production designer’s work, and said, 'Boy, you guys are really serious, aren't you?' William was so great and really stepped up."
Casting the vital lead role of the Messiah, Paul Atreides, proved to be a simple task of discovering a sort of "tabula rasa" performer who wouldn't bring previous associations into the performance. Young up-and-coming British actor Alec Newman fit the writer/director's agenda perfectly.
"I made the argument to Sci-Fi that we could populate the major roles like the Emperor, Duke Leto, Gurney Halleck, and the Baron with well-known actors, but Paul really should be kind of an unknown, a blank slate, so that we're learning who he is through the movie," Harrison explains. "Denis [Villeneuve] has been able to quite effectively turn Timothée Chalamet into Paul Atreides. But by the time they started, he was emerging as a hot young actor, but he wasn’t the star that he is now, so it still worked for him. A London casting agent introduced me to Alec. He was in a play with Kate Blanchett at the West End. He was really sick the night he came to meet me; he almost bailed. We had a meeting, and he read some pieces I wrote, and when we got done, I told Richard that I think I'd found our guy."
For the pivotal role of the nefarious Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, Harrison wanted to steer away from what Lynch had done with the character by making him so over-the-top and perverse.
"I got a tape out of the clear blue, and I didn't know who Ian McNeice was," he admits. "The way I'd written the Baron is he talks in rhymed couplets. I sat down in my office in Prague, and he's doing one of the major speeches on how he's going to get the Atreides. He's this big guy, and he works himself up with this big bush of red hair, because that's what the Baron supposedly had. By the end, he's so enraged that he grabs his hair and rips his red wig off. So I got the guy!"
Harrison hoped to punctuate and retain core elements of "Dune" by stripping it down to its essential themes, and the result is a colorful adaptation that he's proud to include in his stellar resume.
"'Dune' is the story of a young man emerging from being a callow youth to becoming a hero. Part of it is imposed on him. But it's not an easy hero story. It's a very calculated effort by his and his mother's part to influence the Fremen into leading a rebellion against the Empire. Then, if you go further through 'Dune Messiah' into 'Children of Dune,' you realize he's unleashed something he can't control anymore, and he knows it. Frank Herbert has a phrase throughout his book about not trusting the heroes. I wanted to make sure that arc of human drama was conveyed."
"Frank Herbert's Dune" aired consecutive nights on the Sci-Fi Channel from Dec. 3-5, 2000, and was a ratings triumph for the network. Though hampered by its TV budget and lower-tier special effects, it was actually awarded two Primetime Emmys for Outstanding Cinematography and Outstanding Special Visual Effects. Whether you have melange running through your veins or don't know a Harkonnen from a Mentat, it's well worth seeking out for its big silver anniversary party.
Frank Herbert's Dune isn't available on any streaming services in the US, but you can find it on Amazon Prime Video in the UK.
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