You worked on “Dune: Prophecy” initially.
I was fiddling with that for a moment, but yeah, I’m not involved in that at all. At least, I think—I might still be an executive producer on it, but I’m not involved in it now.
It sounds like there were many things happening behind the scenes, a lot of changes in showrunners, and that kind of drama. Did that change your opinion of working in television at all?
No, I mean, no. I mean, this is what kind of happens sometimes. I’ve been through similar things before. Like I said before, I’m not tremendously interested in episodic television as a director. Anyway, it’s been many years since I was involved in that [show] in any shape or form. For example. I did a pilot, which is like ten years ago now, for a show on Netflix called “
Bloodline,” which was like you’re part of setting something up. You’re part of it, but at the same time, the whole episodic TV thing is much more of a committee because you have a showrunner, you have the writers, you have the director, you have various producers, you have the network, and all the actors involved that are trying to find their putting in footing that may or may not go on for years, you know?
So, it’s a very different kind of apparatus than a film. And again, a limited series makes sense to me because there’s one director, I’m the director of it, the writer is the writer, and I do the A to Z in it. I understand that, but when it comes to that type of episodic television…
The reason I got involved to some extent with “
Dune” was that I’m a massive fan of the
David Lynch “Dune” movie, the original one from the eighties. I love that movie. It’s so absurd, bizarre, weird, dark, and twisted. So, for me, it was like, ‘Yeah, okay, if they’re doing a TV series, that would be interesting to see if they because what they said earlier on was like, “This doesn’t have to have anything to do with the movies, the [Denis] Villeneuve movies, this is its own animal, and we can do whatever we want with it,” so that’s where it started.
But as you said, there was a lot of stuff that was going on, but no one can be held responsible, or showrunners that got exchanged, and the original idea of the story completely changed course also because it used to be called, “
Dune: Sisterhood,” and then it changed names and became a completely different thing. Again, that’s something that can happen in episodic TV, and it’s just like, either you are okay being in and functioning in that environment of that kind, but it never has been or will it be something for me.
Like, the Kessler brothers are friends of mine, and we had a good time making “Bloodline,” but at the same time, [TV] doesn’t fulfill me as much as I need it to because I don’t like doing something and then walking away from it and then some other people are going to start turning it into what they want to turn it into. And you have to be okay with that if you’re working in TV.