Peter Berg has offered an update to his vision for what a feature film version of Frank Herbert’s Dune would look like under his watchful eye.
In an interview with MTV he recently spoke about how he intends the film to have a “hard PG-13 rating” and hopes that it will spawn a new film franchise.
Josh Zetumer’s has been brought on to write a script for the film. Berg is confident that the over 200 page script will spark an impressive film and do justice to this “massive epic,” and that it could potentially give life to several other films as well.
“My experience with the book was different than David Lynch’s experience or the people behind the Sci Fi Channel’s experience. I found it to be more of an adventure tale, more of a muscular action/adventure story. I think that’s my approach, not as an R-rated film, but as a pretty hard PG-13 film about a young man dealing with issues of vengeance over the death of his father and wanting some payback and having to come to terms with his destiny along the way.”
I too found Dune to be an epic adventure, and I know this won’t be all that popular to say but I don’t even think that Dune needs to be a Hard PG-13.
The film has some clear adult themes, but there is nothing in the book that would demand an R rating.
Dune has become one of my favourite novels and it has impacted me more than I thought it would. However I get nervous when they say that it has franchise potential. For me there is nothing of Dune that wasn’t written by Herbert’s hands. The followup books written by his son and Kevin J Anderson were just terrible and do not deserve to be associated with this literary masterpiece.
Hopefully if there is more than one film it will die out before covering their contributions.
