When he landed in Hollywood in 2011 thanks to an Oscar nomination for the best foreign film for Incendies, shot in French in his native Canada, no one imagined that Denis Villeneuve would become a specialist in bringing fantastic worlds on the big screen. And, despite this, thanks to a series of successes starting with Sicari or in 2015, the big studios have bet on him, giving him bigger and bigger budgets. From The Inheritance he showed that he was particularly effective with science fiction, something that allowed him to recover the world of Blade Runner and dare to shape Dune, the epic created by Frank Herbert. Now offers the second part.
How do you work with the actors when you have to pay so much attention to the technical elements in a film like this?
My job is to be able to create an environment in which the actors feel safe. Many have told me that, beyond the size of the sets, they feel like they are in an independent film, in which there is a family of artists collaborating on a shoot. I always make sure that the actors do not establish the pressure of the great machinery of these blockbusters. This part is for me, I have very broad shoulders and I know how to fight with it. One of the reasons we build all these sets, and try to shoot in real locations where we’re surrounded by nature, is to create a reality that they can work in. Actors can feel that what is there is real.
What was it like shooting the scenes where Timothée rides a worm?
It was wonderful to be able to see that scene become reality because it was just as I had imagined it. It was one of the most complex scenes I’ve done in my career. It took a lot of work because I wanted it to feel like the real thing. My intention was for my mother to believe that it is possible to ride a worm, I wanted it to be tense, elegant, dangerous and exhilarating, so it required a huge amount of work from the team to bring that to the screen.
How complex was it to create a new language for this film?
In the first part we already had something of this language, spoken by the character of Javier Bardem. To create it we hired a linguist, David Petersen, who had previously worked on Game of Thrones and other series. He was inspired by what was in Frank Herbert’s books, which used some of that language and we just expanded on it. What impressed me is that he created a complete language, with its vocabulary and grammatical structure and syntax that follow a very strict logic. David took it upon himself to teach the actors how to speak it, the correct pronunciation of the words and their meaning, so that they could understand what they were saying. Then we had a dialect coach on set to correct them and make sure they all spoke with the same accent, so that the language sounded uniform. When I hear it spoken in the movie it sounds like a real language because it really is.
How do you feel Dune 2 explores the theme of good versus evil?
Pure evil exists, but it is unusual. Most of the time it’s all about perspective. And while no one can dispute that Baron Harkonnen is evil, the Emperor is someone who has made bad decisions for political reasons, but I’m not sure it was out of evil. He’s more of a coward, and that’s why I don’t like to show things in black and white, but in shades of gray. When Frank Herbert wrote the first book, he had very precise intentions, he wanted it to be a fable and a warning against messianic figures. When the book was published, Herbert was somewhat disillusioned with the way readers understood it, who thought it was a celebration of Paul, when he wanted him to be an anti-hero. To correct this impression, he wrote a second book, The Messiah of Dune, which is like an epilogue, which tried to correct that view. That is why this film is a warning and not a celebration of Paul.
