January 29, 2010 03:30PM EST

From Paris with Love Director Pierre Morel Dishes on Dune

John Travolta and Pierre Morel on the set of From Paris with Love

Cinematographer turned director Pierre Morel is known for slick, high-speed action/thrillers: Banlieue 13 (which has been remade as District 13: Ultimatum), Liam Neeson-starrer Taken, and now From Paris with Love, which will come out February 5. (Stay tuned for more on From Paris with Love with John Travolta, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, and writer Luc Besson.)

Now Morel is in the beginning stages of a most daunting project, one at which a few have tried their hands with mixed results (i.e. David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky)—adapting Frank Herbert's novel Dune for the big screen. (Joshua Zetumer is writing the screenplay; Morel's usual partner Besson is not involved.) While Morel is sticking to the first novel, it's still an enormous task to establish the Dune universe and compress the original 1965 novel—544 pages in the paperback version available on Amazon—into one movie. I cornered the director after the press conference for From Paris with Love for a moment to talk about this buzzed-about project.

Can you talk a bit about your upcoming adaptation of Dune?

I'm preparing for a long trek in the dunes... We're going to start writing in a couple weeks. It's very early [in the] process.

Do you plan to infuse it with some action?

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.

So you're coming at it as a sci-fan fan?

Oh, yeah. Definitely. I'm a big Dune fan.