Cast members of Warner Bros. highly anticipated remake of Dune are weighing in on the original 1984 film and why the two should not be compared.
For Dune star Dave Bautista, who plays Baron Harkonnen’s nephew Glossu Rabban, the first Dune had a special appeal.
“I was a fan,” Bautista says of the David Lynch-directed adaptation. “It’s so odd, because it’s become one of those cult classics and it’s so different from the novel…It’s so different from what we’ve done. The performances are so over the top, so big, but there’s just something… great about the movie.'”
Sharon Duncan-Brewster, who portrays Imperial ecologist Dr. Liet-Kynes, has a different take on the original film, explaining that the 1984 version was hard to watch.
“I remembered watching the original and thinking, ‘This is weird,'” she laughs. “But still, there was something within it that kept pulling me in the saying, ‘Actually, you want to watch this from the beginning. Don’t watch it halfway through.’ [But, when] I found out I was about to play the role of Kynes, I started to then go back and watch it in its entirety.”
Meanwhile, Stellan Skarsgård, who takes on the role of villainous Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, says its best not to compare the two projects.
“When [a film is] made out of a book, it has to be…filtered through the filmmaker’s psyche and his personality,” he explains. “And David Lynch makes one thing out of it. And then Denis Villeneuve does something totally different, because it’s a Denis Villeneuve film. It’s like…20 different kinds of Hamlet performances and they’re all different because they’re filtered through different personalities. So I don’t even compare them.”
Dune, also starring Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya, is now available in theaters and on HBO Max.
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