They tried to
start on Alien as it was the script that was going somewhere, which
meant putting aside Total Recall. And Ron did his best to help Dan get
further with it, but before they could dig deep into the project, they became sidetracked when suddenly Dan received a phonecall from
Alexandro Jodorowsky, a Chilean director.
In Dan's memory, he wondered briefly if that was Paris, France or Paris, Texas, but no,
it was really Paris, France.
By then Alexandro had made a movie called El Topo
which was very well received, and this man over a transatlantic
phoneline claimed that he had the backing and the rights to make a
feature film of Dune which was to be an adaption of the novel by Frank
Herbert by that name and he loved Dan's special effects that he did for
Dark Star, and he knew that he had to do it as a budget with some
creative people, so he hired Dan to work on it, to help him with the
storyline and manage all of the special effects in general.
By then in the memories of a world
according to Ron, the script project had been named Starbeast, it is a
name that has been in a number of titles for sci-fi books, this is fair
enough to know although there is no story of the realisation of this
title at present but while Dan was in the process of leaving for Paris, Ron recalled that he said to Dan before he went “
when you come back, I wanna work with you on these two projects - Star Beast and Total Recall” Within a
few weeks of the call from Jodorowsky, Dan took the plane to Paris, giving up his own car and his
apartment, putting his belongings in
storage and he went over there expecting to be there for several years.
Dan was soon there in the company
of Alexandro Jodorowsky, and he was finding it quite a challenge in a
foreign country and in a foreign language. When they were well under
way, a lot of stuff was designed some months into pre-production.
Jodorowsky soon went to England and had plucked up a young artist who did book
covers for scifi books, named Christopher Foss. For the first time,
Dan saw someone's work that he liked as much as Ron Cobb's work. It
was a time for major discoveries for Dan and he found himself then in contact with some remarkable fantasy artists, Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud and
Robert Venosa, all who were very big names back then, and he was
also to discover their work since they were all
working on the Dune project. At this time he was doing all he could to get Ron Cobb
involved in the movie too
.
 |
| Robert Venosa, Cadaques, 1975 |
Giger Via Dali
The trail of
events for Giger started when Bob Venosa, who was a fellow painter of
Giger’s and used to be entertained by the surrealist Salvador Dali,
since they lived in the same village, Cadaqués, Spain, had taken
Giger’s catalogue to show him and asked Dali what he thought of it, Dali
approved and showed the catalogue to Alexandro Jodorowsky who intended
to film Frank Herbert’s book Dune. Venosa told Giger how keen Jodorowsky
was about his work too, and this seemed like a good reason for Giger to
make a visit to Spain to meet Jodorowsky, who, by the time Giger had
arrived there, had gone off elsewhere.
O'Bannon Meets Giger
And
so there was another artist for Dan O'Bannon to meet, and soon he came to meet H.R. Giger. Jodorowsky went to an exhibition of paintings at an art
museum in Paris, Giger had designed the poster for an exhibition at the Galerie Bijaan Aalam, (
22, passage Vero-Dodat, Paris) titled "Le Diable" which was of course about
the devil, and Jodorowsky was very enthusiastic, so he said to
O’Bannon one Sunday, "
come with me. I have a new artist to meet”.
At the exhibition, Giger was exhibiting the Necronom paintings that would eventually become the Alien. Since O’Bannon considered Jodorowsky to be like a guru to him, he would
go anywhere that Jodorowsky wanted him to go and he was showing Dan the
world at that time.
Giger stayed in a hotel in Paris and so they went to see him at the suite where he was staying, Giger remembers that he met them at the Atelier One. So they went
inside, and there met Hans Rudi Giger who was about Dan’s age, who
looked to Dan more or less like Dracula. He was entirely dressed in costume black leather
clothing, his hair was black, and he had very pale skin as if he had
been avoiding the sun, and Dan likened the expression on his face to
being intense maybe like Edgar Allen Poe.
Giger came up to Dan holding some tin foil and said to him, "
would you like some opium?"
Dan asked "
why do you take that?"
Giger replied "
I am afraid of my visions"
Dan replied "
It's only your mind"
Giger replied "
That is what I am afraid of"
When
they went inside, Jodorowsky talked with Giger about the Dune project,
spending an afternoon, trying to decide if he wanted to get Giger
involved in it and then going ahead to contract with Giger to do some
designs. As they were talking, O’Bannon was looking at a book full of
Giger’s pictures that had been printed up to accompany the exhibition of
his work in Paris. O’Bannon found it to be very powerful and then asked
to borrow the book, Giger said yes, and Dan took it back to his own
hotel room that night and he spent the night carefully looking through
the works in the books. He realised that he had been struck by an
experience of a particular artistic depths and originality that he had
never seen before. The paintings were disturbing but in the context of
great beauty, so O’Bannon told himself “
if you could get this guy to
design a monster movie, you would have something absolutely original and
unique."
The way it was working out with Dan’s mind,
since he wanted all the people that he could from the creative team from
Dune to get involved in his his space monster movie, this would have
meant that it would have an extraordinary look for it possibly as strange as Jodorowsky’s
Dune.
Jodorowsky hires Giger
Later in
December 1975, so Giger wrote in the Giger’s Necronomicon, that out of
curiosity he went to see Jodorowsky in his office in Paris, and Jodorowsky thought he could
still use Giger for Dune designs and here they discussed the whole project, and
also in the diary entries featured in Giger’s Alien book, that as soon as he got back
to Zurich, he wrote some of his ideas down on paper, and went back to
Paris to hand them to Jodorowsky, he in turn flew to the US in search of
a producer taking Giger’s work and the work of the others. Nothing
happened after this, and Giger was left with the address of Dan who was
in a state of disappointment.
Source quotes
- Alexandro Jodorowsky:Then, suddenly, in a bookshop in the pages of an English magazine I
found splashed III a thousand colours what I had believed impossible to
-depict. These spaceships that pleased and moved me were Chris Foss'. I
covered the studio walls where I was preparing the film with his works.
All masterpieces. I hired various sleuths to track him down. You see, in
those heady days I had power! I had a multi-million dollar commitment
behind me: a commitment that remained unfulfilled. I had it in my power
to call upon the best brains of our generation to collaborate on a
project that was to give a messiah to the world. Not a human being, but a
film. A film that would be our master. Dune had made me its apostle;
but I needed others, and one of these was Chris Foss. (20th Century Foss)
- Alexandro Jodorowksy:What the hell would this mutant be like? Because he had to be a mutant
to draw like that! These were not drawings. They were visions! Would he
be some neurotic old man? A maniac drug addict? Would one be able to
talk to him? Then Chris Foss turned up, completely English with his
tap-dancer's shoes, his tight suit as worn by Casanovas in sophisticated
dives, with a tooth of quick-gold (I thought it was a diamond), with a
yellow shirt of imperial silk, the blinding tie of an aesthetic hit-man,
with a child's smile so penetrating he could turn into a hyena. Yes:
Chris Foss was a true angel, a being as real and as unreal as his
spaceships. A mediaeval goldsmith of future eons; a being who carried
his drawings with the same ultra-maternal care as the Kaitanese
Kangarooboos carry the children born of their self-insemination. (20th Century Foss)
- Alexandro Jodorowsky:"Chris arrived very nervous and mistrustful. He was afraid that we would
impose a style on him, that we would limit him. But when he realized
that he had total freedom he fell into ecstasy. He bought himself a
special glass drawing-board which made his paper transparent, so that
the lines seemed to float in space. And he plunged into his work for
hours, millennia. He would go for long walks in the small hours to a
little plaza where lepidopterous creatures with human skin and
prehistoric perfumes would entwine their pink tongues with long,
transparent hairs around his British member. I also saw him slake his
physicoemoto- intellectuometaphysical thirst with alcohols seeping like
tears from eyes slashed open in the aggressive air of a hotel corridor." (20th Century Foss)
- Alexandro Jodorowsky:"And thus were born the mimetic spaceships, the leather and
dagger-studded machines of the fascist Sardaukers;- the pachydermatous
geometry of Emperor Padishah's golden planet; the delicate butterfly
plane and so many other incredible machines, which I am sure will one
day populate interstellar space. Chris Foss knows that today's technical
reality is tomorrow's falsehood. Chris also knows that today's pure art
is tomorrow's reality. Man will conquer space mounted on Foss'
spaceships, never in NASA's concentration camps of the spirit. I was
grateful for the existence of my friend. He brought the colours of the
apocalypse to the sad machines of a future without imagination." (20th Century Foss)
- Dan O'Bannon: A Chilean film member name named
Alejandro Jodorowksy, telephoned me from Paris, "Paris, France" "Paris,
Texas?" "no Paris France" He had made an art film named El Topo which
was very well received, and this man over this transatlantic phoneline
claimed that he had the backing at the rights to make a feature film of
Dune (5:39, The Beast Within : Starbeast: Developing the story)
- Ron Shusett: I addressed myself to that, and Dan suddenly got a job in Europe to
co-write and direct DUNE – but it was not the version that was made ten
years later by David Lynch. It was [Alejandro] Jodorowsky, a Polish
director. Dan went off for six months, just as we were starting to work
on his project.(source: cinefantastiqueonline.com, September 2008)
- Ron Shusett:And he loved Dan's work
that he did on designing the special effects for dark Star, and he knew
he had to do it at a budget with some creative people so he hired Dan to
work on it, help him with his storyline and also with his special
effects, and Dan went off within a few weeks. He went off to Paris and
France and places and was working on the Dune project, There for six
months.
(6:10, The Beast Within : Starbeast: Developing the story)
- Dan O'Bannon: And
I wasn't the only there, he had gone to England and he had plucked up
a, and artist who did covers for science fiction books named Christopher
Foss, and for the first time I saw somebody whose stuff I liked as much
as Ron Cobb's stuff. (6:31, The Beast Within : Starbeast: Developing the story)
- Ron Cobb: Alexandro
Jodorowsky. He was the strange fellow who made El Topo and The Holy
Mountain... El Topo is mainly the one seen here. Holy Mountain wasn't
seen very widely; it's a slightly more elaborate version of El Topo,
surreal violence and all. He decided that he wanted to make Frank
Herbert's Dune. He loved Dark Star so he contacted Dan and made Dan
director of special effects for Dune and whisked him off to Paris (Fantastic Film, July 1979, p27)
- Ron Cobb: This was the first big break for Dan after Dark Star. While Dan was over there, he did his first big schpeil on me, saying, "You should use Cobb, he's done this and this, he designed the ship in Dark Star, and he would be ideal for this." They contacted me and sent me a contract and I signed it. It was all very crazy. (Fantastic Film, July 1979, p27)
- Dan O'Bannon:And I was brought in to manage all of the
special effects in general, it was was, quite a challenge in a foreign
country and a foreign language, and oh, when we were well under way,
when a lot of stuff was designed, some some months into pre-production,
Jodorowsky when to, um, an exhibit of Giger's paintings as some art
museum, and he was very enthusiastic and, erm, then he contracted with Giger
to do some designs, and I was, I was moved, I was impressed at his
originality, and er, i found the paintings disquieting, disturbing in
the extreme. That was how I, I first encountered Giger's work.(3:43, Alien Legacy, Starbeast DVD)
- Dan O'Bannon:"Giger was hired onto Dune just before the project collapsed. We just met once in a hotel room in Paris where I spent an afternoon with him and Jodorowski. I took a couple of his books home and studied them and I remember thinking this guy could just be do one unbelievable job on a horror movie." (Cinefex 1, p36)
- Dan O'Bannon:And
I wasn't the only there, he had gone to England and he had plucked up
a, and artist who did covers for science fiction books named Christopher
Foss, and for the first time I saw somebody whose stuff I liked as much
as Ron Cobb's stuff. He had another artist he wanted me to meet. He had another artist he wanted me to meet. He had
seen this guy's work in a, a show that was in Paris at the time. Took
me over to, to really one of the fancy hotels in Paris, not the one I
was staying at, where this artist named Hans Rudi Giger was staying
while his show was on display in Paris. Giger brings up this little tin
foil, he said "would you like some opium?", I said "why do you take
that?", he said "I am afraid of my visions", I said "It's only your
mind", he said "that is what I'm afraid of" He brings out a book, an art
book, with his paintings in it, I started looking at this, and he and
Alejandro go into a big discussion about Dune, I started looking at
these paintings and it took a minute for it to register what I was
seeing, but, ah, what I seemed to be seeing was very disturbing (6:31, The Beast Within : Starbeast: Developing the story)
- Dan O'Bannon: I LOVE GENIUSES, and have been privileged to work with several. On was H.R.Giger, I met him in Paris and he gave me a book of his artwork. I pored over it through one long night in my room on the left bank. His visionary paintings and sculptures stunned me with their originality, deep feelings of terror. They started an idea turning over in my head. Nobody had ever seen anything like this on the screen. Giger's work , I thought, could become centrepiece of an idea I'd been playing around with for some time, essentially a scary version of Dark Star. (Something perfectly disgusting by Dan O'Bannon, 2003, Alien Quadrilogy DVD set)
- Ron Cobb: They
had Chris Foss, the English SF pocketbook cover-artist who does the
junkyard spaceships in Paris working on Dune with H.R.Giger, the guy
who's on the Omni with the weird face, he's very well known in Europe. (Fantastic Film, July 1979, p27)
- On Dune. Starburst: You were working on the preproduction of Dune in France. Why did the project collapse? Dan O'Bannon: I was never privy to the discussions, but basically what happened was that the financiers got cold feet and backed out. It was going to be a good film and they would have made a lot of money out of it, but that's the way it goes sometimes. (Starburst , Alien Interview Pt 2, p23 )
- On Dune. Starburst: How far had the production got? Dan O'Bannon:Oh, completed all the pre-production and the whole film was designed and a million dollars had been spent. We had Giger on it, Moebius, Chris Foss and Ron Cobb was to come onto the project as designer and general creative thinker.(Starburst , Alien Interview Pt 2, p23 )
- On Dune. Starburst: Well, they have all contributed to Alien now in some capacity. It's interesting to see some of Giger's paintings and Foss' Dune. Dan O'Bannon: If you look at the Foss' paintings you can still see what the film would have looked like overall. It was really going to be that colourful and fabulous.(Starburst , Alien Interview Pt 2, p23 )
- H.R. Giger: So many
people have wondered:'How do you get into films?' I was lucky; Bob Venosa a fellow painter, who often used to be entertained by the
surrealist Salvador Dali - they lived in the same village. Cadaqués in
Spain - had taken my catalogue to show him. He asked Dali what he
thought of my work. Dali evidently approved of it, for he showed the
catalogue to the producer Alexandro Jodorowsky, who intended to film the
Dune trilogy, a science fiction novel by Frank Herbert. Venosa told me
on the telephone how keen Jodorowksy was on my work. What he told me
seemed to be a good reason for making a journey to Spain. Unfortunately,
by the time I got there, Jodorowksy had already left.(Giger's Alien, p6)
- Giger:"The whole thing really started in Salvador Dali's house," Giger says, delighted to have surprised his listener with the revelation. "I have a friend in Spain who is often in Dali's house, and he brought some of my work to him. Dali always had a lot of people around - sometimes 30 or 40 persons. And he showed my books and catalogs all the time because he likes my things " (STARLOG/ September 1979, p29)
- Giger:"Once Alexandro Jodorowsky came to Spain to ask Dali to play the Emperor in his film Dune. So Dali showed him my work and Jodorowsky was impressed and thought that I could do something for the film. So they called me and i came to Spain. But too later, Jodorowsky wasn't there. So I met Dali." (STARLOG/ September 1979, p29)
- Giger:"I always need a reason to go somewhere, Jodorowsky was the reason, but I was able to meet Salvador Dali. He was very nice. Two months later, I went to Paris to visit a friend and I went to see Jodorowsky, who said "Could you do some designs for me? " (STARLOG/ September 1979, p29)
- H.R. Giger: But later, when I
was visiting Paris, I went purely out of curiosity to see him in his
office. He clearly still thought he could use me for the Dune designs.
When I got back to Zurich I got some of my ideas down on paper and went
to Paris to hand my suggestions over to him in person. Jodorowsky flew
to the United States in search of a producer, taking my work and that of
some other people. Presumably he had not luck for I never saw him
again. All I had left was the address of another disappointed man, ( he
was to have done the special effects in Dune); his name was Dan
O'Bannon, the author of Alien. )(Giger's Alien, p6)
- H.R. Giger: I first heard about Dune through Bob Venosa, an American painter of fantastic realism who lives in Cadaqués
with his family and was a frequent visitor at Salvador Dali's house. It
was a project for a three hour 70mm science fiction film, in which Dali
was to play a leading role for a fee of $100,000 an hour (he was later
invited to leave the film because of his pro-Franco statements). Bob
Venosa telephoned to say that the director Alexandro Jodorowsky, to whom
Dali had shown my catalogue, was interested in my work. So I went to
Spain, but unfortunately Jodorowsky had already left. Dali however,
showed a polite interest in my work and introduced his wife Gala,
describing her as a specialist in monsters and nightmares whose external
appearance completely belied her inner world. Gala then expressed the
opinion that I would only need to wear a mask in order to completely
match the world of my pictures, and this led her into an hour long
diatribe against the evils of the world, of which she had years of
experience. She was really one of the most impressive ladies I have ever
met. I returned to Switzerland, stupidly leaving my current girlfriend
in Cadaqués, where Dali used her as a
model and tried to couple her with a young hippie. Dali wanted to
celebrate the ceremony himself and supervise the accompanying rituals,
in his own special way. I was secretly amused by the whole affair, as I
had just read John Fowles' "The Magus' and quite understood what the old
fox was up to. (Giger's Necronomicon, p66)
- H.R. Giger: In December 1975 I went to Paris
for a private view of an exhibition about the devil, for which I had
designed a colour poster. While I was there, I went to Jodorowsky's
studio and left my Paris address. Jodorowsky called me over and showed
me the preliminary studies for 'Dune'. Four science-fiction artists were
busy designing space-ships, satellites and whole planets. As a gesture to me, a couple of photocopies of vaguely suitable pictures from my catalogue had been left lying around. Jodorowsky said that he would like me to try some designs - I could create a whole planet, and would have a completely free hand. Three dimensional models would be made from my sketches and the actors superimposed on them. I could also design costumes and masks, etc, according to my own ideas. My planet was ruled by evil, a place where black magic was practiced, aggressions were let loose, and intemperance and perversion were the order of the day. Just the place for me, in fact. Only sex couldn't be shown, and I had to work as if the film was being made for children. Jodorowsky was fed up with having his films censored. A team of thirty specialist would transform my ideas into film,, I was thrilled by the idea. When we came to talking about money, he said, "You may be a genius, but we can't pay you as a genius". When I asked him what the other contributors were getting , he said "Foss gets 4000 Francs a month" - a modest salary indeed for a creative designer for a project costing twenty million.. He explained to me at length what good publicity it would be for me, etc. We parted after we agreed that he would telephone me about the salary and he gave me the script so that I could start work right away. On returning to Switzerland I was astonished to receive a telephone call from one of Jodorowsky's assistants saying that I should produce a view of the castle on the planet which we had spoken about, 55 x 65cm and bring it to Paris, where they could look at it and see if it was suitable for the film. Such are the penalties of being a 'Petit Suisse'. (Giger's Necronomicon, p66)
- Giger:" I did designs for Dune - of Harkonnen Castle - and made slides of them, Jodorowsky went to the states, but at this time there was no money for science fiction films - in 1975. I think the film was to have cost about $20 million. That was a lot of money." (STARLOG/ September 1979, p29)
- Giger:" Dan O'Bannon was also working for Jodorowksy. After this disaster, he went back to Los Angeles. And that's when he wrote the story of Alien"(STARLOG/ September 1979, p29)
Dan had a great knowledge of Science Fiction books and movies. We see some of this in the many different themes and ideas that he added to his Alien script, we see themes and ideas recognisable by fans of writers Clifford D. Simak, Van Vogh, Philip José Farmer, H. P. Lovecraft and movies such as Planet of the Vampires, The Thing from Outer Space and numerous others. 
