Opinion | Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ‘Dune’ Was Never Made, but With A.I., We Get a Glimpse of His ‘Tron’

By Frank Pavich

Images created by Midjourney, featuring Johnny Darrell

Frank Pavich is the director of Jodorowsky’s Dune, a documentary about Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s attempt to film a version of Dune in the mid-1970s.

I was recently shown some frames from a movie I’d never heard of: Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1976 version of Tron. The sets were incredible. The actors, unknown to me, looked fantastic in their roles. The costumes and lighting worked together perfectly. The images glowed with an extravagant, psychedelic sensibility that felt distinctly Jodorowskian.

However, Mr. Jodorowsky, the visionary Chilean director, never tried to make Tron. I’m not even sure he knows what “Tron” is. And Disney’s original Tron was released in 1982. So which 1970s movie were these awesome photos from? Who were these actors in neon suits? And how did I, the director of the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, not know about it, having spent two and a half years interviewing and working with Alejandro to tell the story of his famous unfinished film?

The truth is, these weren’t stills from a long-lost movie. They weren’t photos at all. These evocative, well-composed and tonally immaculate images were created in seconds with the magic of artificial intelligence.

During the filming of my documentary, Alejandro told me about the Greco-Armenian philosopher and mystic George Gurdjieff. He taught that we are born without a soul and that our duty in life is to help our souls grow and develop: Souls are not born; are earned. Every day, Alejandro creates. He writes, draws, paints. He works on his soul through art. He will be 94 next month and is preparing to make a new film. He is a man in perpetual creative motion.

I first met Alejandro in 2010 when I approached him to film a documentary about his mid-1970s attempt to make a film version of Frank Herbert’s science fiction novel Dune. My interest was not in the story of young noble Paul Atreides, the desert planet of Arrakis, or the mind-altering spice called melange. I wanted to find out why the mysterious, guru-like director chose to follow his 1970 acid-western El Topo (the first midnight movie) and 1973’s scandalous and hallucinogenic Holy Mountain with an attempt to the most colossal. sci-fi movie of all time.

After adapting the novel into a screenplay, he worked for two years with a team of artists—his “spiritual warriors”: British illustrator Chris Foss, who helped him design his striped spaceships; Swiss artist HR Giger, whose dark style would help create the home planet of the film’s villains; American special effects innovator Dan O’Bannon; and, of course, Jean Giraud, France’s greatest comic artist, who would help Alejandro design the costumes as well as draw the more than 3,000 fairy tale sketches needed to visualize this epic tale.

The cast would have included Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, Salvador Dalí and Alejandro’s 12-year-old son Brontis in the title role. The soundtrack would have been composed and recorded by Pink Floyd.

He wanted “Dune” to be more than a movie. It was to be a prophet! It was to change the world! And it didn’t have to be. You never saw the movie because it was never finished.

Alejandro Jodorowsky in 1969, during a visit to the home of actor Dennis Hopper in Taos, NM Lisa Law/Edition One Gallery

The project ended after Alejandro presented his massive collection of artworks in Hollywood studios. They rejected him out of fear or short-sightedness or simply because they couldn’t understand what he was trying to do. Or maybe it’s because he refused to submit to the practical limits of the two-hour film, threatening to make his “Dune” as long as 20 hours.

He was never given the chance to shoot even a single frame of Dune. There is no unused footage that we can look at and dismiss because of rough acting or poor special effects. It will forever be the greatest movie ever made because it only exists in our imaginations.

Just because you can’t watch Alejandro’s Dune doesn’t mean it didn’t change the world. The impact of this unfilmed film on our culture is nothing short of surprising. Specific ideas and images from the art bible “Dune” have escaped into the world. They can be experienced in films such as “Blade Runner”, “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, “Prometheus”, “The Terminator” and even in the original “Star Wars”. His “dune” does not exist, but it is all around us.

It took Alejandro and his team two years of pure analogue warfare to create his Dune – pencil on paper, ink on canvas, inventing the practical effects needed to deliver its spectacle on screen.

It’s different with AI. No war was involved in the creation of these “Jodorowsky’s Throne” images. It didn’t require any special skills or extensive direction from Johnny Darrell, the Canadian filmmaker who made these pictures with an AI program called Midjourney. A simple request is all it took. A few words—in this case, slight variations on “Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1976 production still of Tron”—followed by less than a minute’s wait and a computer deep in the racks of a data center somewhere, sifting through the numbers encoded in it. memory banks associated with the words “Tron” and “Jodorowsky”.

I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it all. There seems to be a correlation between how Alejandro’s work was absorbed and referenced by later filmmakers and how his work was ingested and metabolized by computer programming. But these two things are not the same. I mean influence is not the same as algorithm. But looking at these images, how can I be sure?

It’s hard to find many flaws in the software. Cannot provide text. And like many painters and sculptors throughout history, she has trouble getting the right hands. I’m the odd one out here. The model contains many. It has scanned the collected works of thousands and thousands of photographers, painters and filmmakers. She has a deep library of styles and a facility with all kinds of image-making techniques at her digital fingertips. Technology is fascinating. And that worries me a lot.

How artificial intelligence programs create images

Image-generating AI programs like Midjourney are trained on datasets of billions of images with descriptive text captions. They look at each image’s relationship to its caption, as well as image-to-image and description-to-description similarities, building a compact model that is able to link from words to pictures.

AI processes text into concepts it can recognize from its training.

AI starts with random pixels.

Using the text prompt for guidance, it removes the noise from the image—trying to find the face in the cloud, so to speak.

It runs this process dozens to hundreds of times, refining the image with each iteration.

In the end, a distinct image remains, no matter how many times the same prompt is used.

Image-generating AI programs like Midjourney are trained on datasets of billions of images with descriptive text captions. They look at each image’s relationship to its caption, as well as image-to-image and description-to-description similarities, building a compact model that is able to link from words to pictures.

AI processes text into concepts it can recognize from its training.

AI starts with random pixels.

Using the text prompt for guidance, it removes the noise from the image—trying to find the face in the cloud, so to speak.

It runs this process dozens to hundreds of times, refining the image with each iteration.

In the end, a distinct image remains, no matter how many times the same prompt is used.

Source: David Holz, Midjourney By Taylor Maggiacomo

To what extent do these rapidly created images contain creativity? And from what source is that creativity coming out? Has Alejandro been robbed? Is training this AI model the biggest art theft in history? How much art is theft anyway?

On the one hand, the software gives you a kind of turbocharged pastiche. But there’s still a fresh glow to that imitation. It succeeds in one of the main jobs of the film: to transport you to another time, to another world. If AIs were eligible for Academy Awards, I’d vote Jodorowsky’s Tron for Best AI Costume Design just to dream up such outrageous retro-sci-fi hats and helmets.

If, as Mr. Gurdjieff taught, creation leads to the development of one’s soul, whose soul is being developed here?

Nothing in this software feels controllable the way artists use digital tools like Photoshop. When Mr. Darrell created these images, he didn’t choose the colors, the frame, or what the characters would do. It also didn’t specify some of the other choices the AI ​​program adopted from 1970s science fiction: the seemingly all-white cast and vintage gender roles. Whatever he might have had in his eye was not what he would get. He had to express his request clearly and clearly. But creativity came out of the car.

In exploring more of Mr. Darrell’s experiments with artificial intelligence, I came across some still images he made for an occult motorcycle movie called “Snakes are the Devil.” They were incredible. So full of mystery and depth. I wanted to see this movie.

A still from the fictional 1969 biker film Snakes Are the Devil. Midjourney, with Johnny Darrell

I immediately went to IMDb to look it up. But there is no such luck. Hmmmmm. I turned to his images, one of which was a lobby card. I noted the name of the lead actor, Jay Clennan, and turned to IMDb. There is no such actor.

I found nothing because there was no film. There was no actor. There was nothing. These images were another AI creation. And I knew that from the beginning. And yet, I hoped it was somehow true. I’m still upset with mr. Darrell making me want what I can’t have.

That’s how powerful it is to let AI generate pictures of movies or other art objects you want to exist. It’s like watching a magic show. Going in, you know it will all be illusions and deceptions. But during the show, your suspension of disbelief begins. Life is more fun this way.

What does it mean when filmmakers, conceptual artists, and film students can see with their imaginations, when they can paint using all the digitally archived visual material of human civilization? When does our culture begin to be influenced by scenes, scenes and images from old movies that never existed or have yet to be imagined?

I have a feeling we’ll all find out.