So I’ll come clean and admit that David Lynch’s Dune is one of my favourite movies. It’s also one of the ones I can quote from the most, but I won’t subject you to that – I think you’d rather endure the Box than that.
As you might expect from such a huge book, it is also a long movie, very long for 1984 when it was released, coming in at 2h11. It could have been even longer, though, but producer Raffaella de Laurentiis had a clear strategy for stopping David Lynch from going too long: “For every day you run over budget, she told Lynch, a page will be ripped from the script. At random.”
Even so, Lynch filmed a lot more Dune than went into his first cut. Much of that extra material then got saved up and restored, complete with additional narration, for an extended Sci-fi channel version – which Lynch asked be credited to someone other than him, as he didn’t approve.
But that still wasn’t all the footage that Lynch filmed. Oh no. There was plenty, plenty more. And for fans of the book, some of those deleted scenes were actually very important moments: everything from Paul marrying Irulan and the death of Thufir Hawat through the funeral of Jamis all the way to the creation of the Water of Life by a baby sand worm.
But life is good. YouTube is kind. And you can watch all 21 additional scenes in the play list below*.
The spice must flow.
* Some of them you can see in the Extended version.
