Alejandro Jodorowsky: “The Only Exile I Know Is the Exile from Myself”
The thing is, I grew up as a foreigner. Look, my father was a Jew who tried to pass for a Russian. My mother was half-Russian, because a Cossack raped her mother, and she tried to pass for a Jew. So, I was Chilean and not Chilean, because I was the son of immigrants. I was trying to pass for a Chilean, but never completely. I was never anything. Therefore, the only exile I know is the exile from myself. Because I was never myself. The nostalgia I would have to get back to myself, what am I? But not what am I as nationality. What am I as a spirit without limits. I have limits. So, each day I try more and more to go toward the anonymous which is precisely the impersonal. To try to be an impersonal person. I don’t think in terms of cities now. I think of the planet. I don’t think in terms of nationality. I think of human beings.
From a 1995 interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky by Jason Weiss (who was kind enough to forward a link to me).
Alejandro Jodorowsky on David Lynch’s Dune (and Other Matters)
The AV Club’s Noel Murray interviews Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, he of Holy Mountain and apocalypse-Western El Topo fame. Jodorowsky famously almost adapted Frank Herbert’s Dune before David Lynch picked up that gauntlet. Here’s Jodorowsky on Lynch’s adaptation–
AVC: For a long time, you were involved with developing Dune into a feature film, before the project fell through. Did you ever see David Lynch’s Dune?
AJ: Yes, I’ve seen it. I was very scared when I saw it, because Dune was for me very important in my life. I was very sad I could not do it. When I saw that David Lynch would do it, I was very scared, because I admire him as a moviemaker, and I thought he would do well. But when I see the picture, I realize he never understood this picture. It’s not a David Lynch picture. It’s the producer who made that picture, no? Who made this horror. For David Lynch, it was a job. A commercial job. It never was that for me.
Jodorowsky’s version of Dune had entered pre-production, including early art from Jean Giraud (French comics artist Moebius). You can see some of Giraud’s character designs and storyboards here.
Jodorowsky famously wanted Salvador Dali to play the Emperor and Mick Jagger to play Feyd Rautha (a role that went to Sting in Lynch’s version).
Said