When Peter Berg left the long-gestating “Dune” project to helm the board game adaptation “Battleship,” the film fell into the hands of Luc Besson-protege Pierre Morel. Speaking recently with IGN, the director revealed that they are essentially bringing the entire film back to the drawing board as they’ve binned Berg’s script and will be starting everything again from scratch. He will be working with a new writing partner that will be officially announced next week. With Berg having introduced alien water bugs into his “Battleship” script, we can only imagine what kind of liberties he took with “Dune” so perhaps its a good thing Morel tossed it.
“We’re starting from scratch. Peter had an approach which was not mine at all, and we’re starting over again. I don’t think we’re going to keep any elements of the Peter Berg script. It was good, actually. It was interesting. It was just not our vision. I can’t tell you right now [who’s writing it with me], it’s going to be official next week. The deals are not done!” said Morel.
With his latest effort, “From Paris With Love,” hitting theaters tomorrow, Morel will spend the next couple of months focused on “Dune,” but he still hesitates in confirming that it will indeed be his next film. “Dune is such a huge, huge project. It’s big, it’s challenging, it’s long-term — we’re only starting. We have to rewrite the script, we have to develop a whole universe. It’s going to be a long thing, so who knows. But I’m passionate about Dune so I’d love to do it next.”
As we previously reported, Morel has fully embraced the idea of shooting this in 3D so don’t be surprised if you see a very lame poster that says “3Dune” in the near future.