Bunuel on Under The Volcano

Personally, I've always thought that either Luis Bunuel or Orson Welles would have been the best directors to have made a film version of Malc's great novel. I have already posted that Welles apparently didn't like the novel - see Chartres in Orson Welles's F for Fake

Below is what Bunuel's thoughts were on making a movie version of Under The Volcano from his book My Last Breath 1987

I was only reminded of Bunuel's thoughts of making the film when I read an interesting post on his film Death in the Garden on Bright Lights Film Journal:

Luis Buñuel at one time expressed an interest in adapting Malcolm Lowry's novel Under the Volcano but dropped the idea not believing he could do it justice –– to my mind, a lost opportunity of epic proportions. Instead, in the early eighties, an aging John Huston turned Lowry's feverish, interior narrative into a suffocatingly literal tale of the last day of a cuckolded alcoholic sweating out his marital problems under the hot sun of Mexico.4 Whereas Huston was generally more in tune with kind of material offered by an adventure tale like Death in the Garden, you can imagine Buñuel in sync with Lowry's overloaded prose, using the Mexican landscape in much the same way the author did, to mirror the Consul's drunken but weirdly mystical, personal hell. Read more



Read a review of Death in the Garden on Flickhead