Jodorowsky For One Week Only (Jonathan Ross, BBC)

Jodorowsky For One Week Only (Jonathan Ross, BBC)
Alejandro Jodorowsky or Alexandro Jodorowsky (born February 7, 1929, in Iquique, Chile) is a philosopher, scholar in comparative religion, playwright, director, producer, composer, actor, mime, comic book writer, tarot card reader and historian, and psychotherapist.
He started his film career in Mexico with Fando y Lis (1968). The feature-length film debuted in Acapulco at the Film Festival and is famous for having incited a full scale riot there, requiring that Jodorowsky be smuggled out in a limousine.

Alejandro Jodorowsky speaking in Sitges festival of cinema 2006El Topo (1970), a mystical western, was his second film and is now considered a cult classic. John Lennon and Yoko Ono helped to arrange the film's release and distribution in the United States through Beatles manager Allen Klein.

Jodorowsky's third film, La Montaña Sagrada (The Holy Mountain) (1973), was entirely financed by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. At a projected budget of $1,500,000 (in USA dollars), it was the most expensive Mexican film production to date. It has been suggested that the Holy Mountain may be inspired by Rene Daumal novel Mount Analogue.

Jodorowsky began working in 1975 on an adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune. The project was intended to involve his son Brontis (Paul), Orson Welles as the Baron, Salvador Dalí as the Emperor, Mick Jagger as Feyd Rautha, Alain Delon as Duncan Idaho, Geraldine Chaplin as Lady Jessica, Dan O'Bannon for the script, Chris Foss, Pink Floyd, H.R. Giger and Jean Giraud (Mœbius). Ultimately, its funding evaporated, but Jodorowsky claimed it was sabotaged by the major studios in Hollywood because it was too French, a strange claim considering that Jodorowsky, while a naturalized citizen of France, has never identified with any particular country or culture (although the funding and his producer, Jerome Seydoux, were French). Many close to the project claim that the set designs later turned up in Star Wars. Several of the people working on Jodorowsky's version of Dune later worked on Alien with elements (specifically those designed by Giger) similar to that of the failed Dune project. In the early 1980s, David Lynch would later make the first film adaptation of Dune.

In 1989 Jodorowsky completed the Mexican-Italian production Santa Sangre. The film received limited theatrical distribution, putting Jodorowsky back on the cultural map despite its mixed critical reviews. The film delved into psychodrama territory with its protagonist becoming the amputated arms and hands of his mother and committing a string of murders in the process. Several of Jodorowsky's sons were recruited as actors.

He followed in 1990 with a very different film, The Rainbow Thief. Though it gave Jodorowsky a chance to work with actual "movie stars" Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif, the producer effectively curtailed most of Jodorowsky's artistic inclinations, threatening to fire him on the spot if anything in the script was changed.