Action director Pierre Morel talks about action in the non-action Dune

Only a few days ago, we reported that Pierre Morel would be up to 3-Difying his adaptation of DUNE, obviously afraid that if he said no, all the cool filmmakers would laugh and call him names. He also talked a little about how his interpretation would differ from David Lynch’s 1984 film. With Morel on board now, being a director who’s primarily been all about the punchings and the shootings (DISTRICT B13, TAKEN, FROM PARIS WITH LOVE), fans of the novel have naturally come with the legitimate question of whether or not he would turn Frank Herbert’s sci-fi tale into a much more heavily action-oriented affair.

Morel, in talking to Tribeca Films, got a chance to address that very question: “I don’t know. It’s all about—I’m a huge Dune fan, a reader, like for 30 years; I read it when I was a teenager. I’ve read it 10 times maybe, so I want to stay true to the book. Saying that, I also think that there’s a lot of scenes that are not described in the books—it’s just mentioned, like the bad guys attacking something—and it might make sense to include those in the movie, not just by mentioning it but showing them, and that would maybe [call for] some action scenes, yes. It’s not about action. It’s not the point. It’s not about [making] an action movie. It’s just doing Dune. It’s like a huge universe thing, and there’s such a fanbase, like guys who have been reading that forever—you can’t mess with that.”

I’m sure Morel knows that this is the prevailing opinion of him as a director at the moment, and he may very well turn that all around and show us his range with this film. There’s really no way of knowing until we start learning more about the production. And that won’t be for awhile, because as he tells Tribeca Films, “We’re going to start writing in a couple weeks. It’s very early [in the] process.”