Dune with Eric Roth

Where to begin describing today’s guest and his lengthy list of accomplishments? Eric Roth is the Academy Award-winning writer responsible for films like Forrest Gump,  The Insider, Munich, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and 2018’s A Star Is Born. At 77-years-old, Eric is as potent a storytelling force as ever: last year, he delivered a sci-fi epic so huge, you’d have had to have buried your head pretty deep in the sand of a distant sand planet named Arrakis to have missed it. 

Dune, co-written with director Denis Villeneuve and previous Script Apart guest Jon Spaihts, achieved the impossible. It translated one of the densest, most complex and widely beloved science-fiction novels of all-time into a thrilling blockbuster spectacle that somehow remained true to its source material. Timothée Chalamet starred as Paul Atreides, young prince of the noble House Atreides, as an intergalactic battle erupts over control of the deadly, inhospitable desert planet. 

Author Frank Herbert wrote the book as a warning about society's tendencies to “give over every decision-making capacity” to a charismatic leader. Eric, Jon and Denis did a terrific job threading that insight into a “chosen one” story that challenges and interrogates that narrative template. For many, the film felt like the moment that theatrical cinema felt “back” after the closures of the pandemic. In a captivating conversation recorded earlier this year, Eric told us all about how the film’s towering sense of scale was achieved, how the opening he originally envisioned for the movie would have bankrupted the entire production and what keeps him hungry after all these years. Next on the docket for Eric is a collaboration with Martin Scorsese, penning the upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon. There’s no slowing down for this veritable titan of the screenwriting universe.

This episode contains spoilers for Dune.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram, or email us on [email protected].

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