Did You Know?

Ridley Scott worked on bringing the film to the screen, but was unsuccessful. H.R. Giger (who worked with Scott on Alien) was hired as a production designer.

Two hundred workers spent two months hand-clearing three square miles of Mexican desert for location shooting.

The tendons visible when Paul hooks the worm were made from condoms.

Some scenes were filmed in the same location and at the same time as scenes from Conan the Destroyer.

Director David Lynch and producer Raffaella De Laurentiis arranged a screen test in New York with Sean Young for the role of Chani. Young's agent never told Young about the meeting, and she was in fact booked on a flight that evening to Los Angeles. Lynch and De Laurentiis missed their flight back to Los Angeles, and ended up catching the same plane as Young. During the flight, De Laurentiis noticed Young and told Lynch, "I bet that girl's an actress." A stewardess told the pair that her name was "Sean Young", and De Laurentiis confronted Young about standing him and Lynch up. The misunderstanding sorted out, the three ended up drinking champagne and reading the script together upon returning to Los Angeles.

David Lynch disowned the extended television cut. The name "Judas Booth" that appears as the screenwriter in this cut, is a combination of Judas, the apostle that betrayed Jesus Christ, and John Wilkes Booth, Abraham Lincoln's killer. With this in-joke, David Lynch meant that the studio betrayed him and killed the film. The director's credit is the usual in these cases Alan Smithee.

It took two weeks to film Max von Sydow's role.

The first movie to feature a computer-generated human form, for the bodyshields.

Feyd-Rautha and The Beast Rabban are men of very few words: as the latter, Paul L. Smith speaks only 34 of them during the entire movie; as the former, Sting says a mere 90. And that's in the three-hour version of the film.

David Lynch was originally signed to do two sequels to this film, based on Frank Herbert's novels Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. The box office failure ensured that the plans never came to fruition.

David Lynch has said he considers this film the only real failure of his career. To this day, he refuses to talk about the production in great detail, and has refused numerous offers to work on a special edition DVD. Lynch claims revisiting the film would be too painful an experience to endure.

Alejandro Jodorowsky had originally planned on filming Dune in the early-'70s, and had enlisted the help of Jean Giraud and H.R. Giger to create the movie's visual style. Salvador Dalí was enlisted to play the part of the Emperor, and Jodorowsky also intended to cast his own son Brontis Jodorowsky as Paul, David Carradine as Duke Leto, Orson Welles as the Baron, and Gloria Swanson as the Benne Geserit Reverend Mother. The soundtrack was to be done by Pink Floyd. According to Jodorowsky, "The project was sabotaged in Hollywood. It was French and not American. Their message was 'not Hollywood enough'. There was intrigue, plunder. The storyboard was circulated among all the big studios. Later, the visual aspect of Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope strangely resembled our style. To make Alien, they called Moebius [Giraud], Foss, Giger, O'Bannon, etc. The project signaled to Americans the possibility of making a big show of science-fiction films, outside of the scientific rigor of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The project of Dune changed our lives." Jodorowsky also planned on making numerous changes to the source material, including making Duke Leto a eunuch and the spice a blue sponge. Author Frank Herbert openly despised these concepts.

While shooting on location in Mexico, filming came to a near-halt when most of the cast and crew came down with "Montezuma's Revenge." The studio had to build a full cafeteria large enough to accommodate the entire cast and crew for every meal, as well as import all the food from the United States to keep the film on schedule.

According to the biography 'Five Easy Decades', Jack Nicholson at one point in the late 1970s considered directing Dune, but decided that it would be too much of an undertaking. He also turned down the role of Gurney Halleck.

Patrick Stewart played Claudius in Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, a role that Kyle MacLachlan played in Hamlet. Francesca Annis played Hamlet's mother Gertrude in a theatrical production. Appropriately, she was cast as Jessica in this film when the role was declined by Glenn Close, who played Gertrude in Hamlet.

The movie alludes strongly to Bible stories; such as, most strongly, the story of Moses.

Dexter Fletcher was very seriously considered for Paul. Christopher Reeve also auditioned.

Patrick Stewart has said in interviews that every cast member lost two scenes to cut made in editing.

Despite being considered a financial flop, it is the David Lynch movie to make the most money in its initial box office run, and the only one to break into the top 5 in it's opening weekend (it was #2).

Aldo Ray was originally cast in a supporting role but was let go because of his alcoholism before shooting any scenes. David Lynch later worked instead with Aldo Ray's wife, casting agent Johanna Ray, who cast most of Lynch's projects from Blue Velvet on, and their son Eric DaRe, who played the role of Leo Johnson in Twin Peaks.

Feyd-Rautha was originally to have stepped out of the "steam bath" nude. Sting had agreed to shoot the scene nude, but the studio panicked and told the costume designers that they had to put something on him. The skimpy winged g-string he wore was made almost at the very last minute before the scene was set to film.

The suits worn by the Guild members were body bags that were found in a disused fire station dating back to the early 1920's. The bags had actually been used several times, something that was kept from the cast members until after shooting was completed.

David Lynch:  A radio operator on the mining ship that Paul and Duke Leto Atreides rescue from a sandworm.

A scene where Thufir Hawat dies was cut from the film.