After the avant garde Eraserhead and the Oscar-nominated drama The Elephant Man, the next logical step for David Lynch was obviously… a space opera?

Lynch was offered the reins of The Return of the Jedi but instead opted to adapt Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune, a famously dense book that previous directors David Lean, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Ridley Scott had failed to get off the ground.

Lynch initially conceived of a story spanning two films but eventually delivered a rough cut of a single film running more than four hours. He planned to pare it down to three, but producer Dino De Laurentiis insisted on a final cut closer to two.

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