The script for Dune Messiah by David Lynch has been found, forty years later

The director of Blue Velvet had written a few pages of the script for the sequel to his unloved Dune.

Next December, the Dune of David Lynch will celebrate its fortieth anniversary. Released in December 1984 in the United States (February 1985 for the French release), the adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel was a real critical and public flop. It’s well known – and above all, Lynch kept such bad memories of the experience that he still refuses to be talked to about anything related to it today. Dune. Asked by The Cinema Notebooks last year on the Dune of Denis Villeneuvehe responded straight away: “I will never watch it, and I don’t even want you to talk to me about it, ever.” And yet, Lynch had started writing the sequel to Dunethe adaptation of Messiah of Dunethe second novel in Herbert’s science fiction saga.

Don’t ask David Lynch if he’s seen Denis Villeneuve’s Dune!

The journalist Max Evry, author of the book A Masterpiece in Disarrayan “oral story” of Lynch’s Dune published last September, found –as he explains in an article on the Wired site– a copy of Lynch’s script as part of his research. In the archives of Frank Herbert, at the University of Fullerton (California), Evry got his hands on a small file adorned with an unmistakable label: “Dune Messiah Script Revisions”. Inside, 56 pages signed Lynch and annotated by Herbert.

A script which begins with a flashback taken from the first film, the death of Duncan Idaho, faithful warrior in the service of House Atreides. His corpse is recovered by a character created by Lynch, Baron Harkonnen’s personal doctor, who is in fact Scytale, a Face Dancer capable of changing appearance at will – and a key character in the novel The Messiah of Dune. Scytale will resurrect Idaho and use him in a plot to kill Paul Atreides, lord of the planet Arrakis and therefore of the galaxy, having conquered the universe thanks to his fierce Fremen warriors. What follows are picturesque scenes of genetic experimentation on the planet Tleilax (described by Lynch as “a world of dark metal, crossed by canals filled with acids and smoking chemicals”), where Scytale grows eighteen heads on her body… According to Evry, Lynch would have brought the Harkonnens back into play in his version of the Messiah, unlike the novel.

Sparing no effort, Evry even contacted Lynch to ask his opinion on this discovery: the director of Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive responded via his assistant that he “roughly remembered writing something but can’t remember if he finished it”. It’s already that !

Dune: Part Two comes out on February 28 in France. Don’t tell Lynch, but Denis Villeneuve intends to turn The Messiah of Dune in the more or less near future, after taking a short break away from Arrakis by shooting another film.

Denis Villeneuve will direct another film before Dune 3, for his “mental health”