When he landed in Hollywood in 2011 thanks to an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film for ‘Fires’, filmed in French in his native Canada, no one imagined that Denis Villeneuve would become a specialist in bringing fantastic worlds to the big screen. And yet, thanks to a series of successes started with ‘Sicario’ in 2015, the big studios have opted for him, giving him increasingly larger budgets. Starting with ‘Arrival’ he showed that he was particularly effective with science fiction, something that later allowed him to recover the world of ‘Blade Runner’ and dare to capture ‘Dune’, the epic created by Frank Herbert using all the tools it provides. technology today. After working intensely on a second part promised when that first film was released, Villeneuve returns to the billboards this week with another example of how well he knows how to do things.
The second part of ‘Dune’ tries to be an unforgettable cinematic experience, which cannot be appreciated in the same way when seen at home. Was that one of his objectives when designing it?
Of course. Those are the films that sparked interest in me to become a director, those that knew how to take advantage of the power of the big screen so that you could get into that world in the privacy of a room. I am in love with the cinematographic experience, and I have always tried to make films that make the most of all the possibilities that only a theater gives you. This film has been written, designed, filmed and edited with the big screen in mind. Perhaps in the future television will improve with the help of virtual reality, and there will come a time when you can watch a movie on a screen that takes up your entire vision, but it will never have the definition and sound that you will be able to enjoy on a cinema. One needs space and oxygen around to generate that impact.
But at the same time it is important that although the film has epic dimensions it can establish an emotional connection with the viewer…
Of course. The difficult part is not creating spectacular action scenes, that is the easiest part. The complex thing is to make sure you don’t lose sight of the personal relationships, more precisely the one between Paul and Chani, because that is the axis of the story. The relationship between the two of them is what sustains the drama in the film. Through the eyes of Chani and Paul we feel the political and cultural pressure, and also the oppression. I constructed the film focusing on the tension between the two. I kept telling my team that if the audience didn’t believe in this relationship, the movie wasn’t going to work. That for me was the most important thing, and that’s why I was very attentive to my actors and tried to be as close to them as possible.
How do you work with them when you have to pay so much attention to the technical elements in a film like this?
My job is to create a work environment where actors feel safe when working in front of the camera. Many of the actors who have worked with me have told me that, beyond the size of the sets, they feel as if they were in an independent film, where there is a family of artists who collaborate on a shoot. The thing is that I always try to create intimacy so that they can work at their leisure. I make sure that the actors do not feel the pressure of the big machinery of these blockbusters. That part is my turn, I have very broad shoulders and I know how to deal with it. I always try to allow them to act with the necessary space to connect with the emotions that I need to capture with the camera. One of the reasons we build all these sets, and try to film in real locations where we are surrounded by nature, is to create a reality that they can work in. Actors can feel that what is there is real, and they can focus on the relationship they live for the camera and the feelings their characters experience.
What was it like reuniting with the entire team that made the first part of ‘Dune’ in this sequel?
For me it was essential to be able to add as many of those who participated in the first film as I could, because they knew everything about the world we created. We were simply revisiting a universe, something I had never done before. Working with the same colleagues meant that everyone knew exactly what my objective was, both aesthetically and cinematically. Patrice Vermette, the art director, had already started designing the second part of ‘Dune’ while we were shooting the first film. Obviously the challenge here was being able to meet the deadlines, because after releasing the first ‘Dune’ we had to deal with awards season, and we didn’t have the time we had on the previous film to research and plan. But, while filming the first part, we did our job well planting seeds for what would come next. When we started the second film, we had a huge toolbox on the computer and we knew how to use them because we had developed them for the first film. That allowed us to work a little faster.
What was it like filming the scenes in which Timothée rides a worm?
It was wonderful to be able to see that scene become a reality because it turned out just as I imagined it. It was one of the most complex scenes I have done in my career. It took a lot of work because I wanted it to feel real. My intention was for my mother to believe that it is possible to ride a worm, she wanted it to be tense, elegant, dangerous and stimulating, and that is why she required enormous team work to be able to capture it on the screen. Fortunately the studio trusted me and gave me all the means and tools I needed to make it a reality.
How complex was it to create a new language for this film?
In the first part we already had some of this language, which Javier Bardem’s character spoke. To create it we hired a linguist, David Petersen, who had previously worked on ‘Game of Thrones’ and other series. He is a lover of languages ??and was inspired by what was in Frank Herbert’s books, which used some of this language and we just expanded on it. David took what was in the books and what I put in the script for the first film I co-wrote with Jon Spaiths. 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 dedicated himself to teaching the actors how to speak it, what the correct pronunciation of the words was and their meaning, so that they could understand what they were saying. Then we had a dialect coach on set who corrected them and made sure that everyone spoke with the same accent, so that the language sounded uniform. It was a very interesting experience because it was like creating a school in which everyone learned the language until they spoke it fluently. Everyone took it very seriously. When I hear them speak it in the movie it sounds like a real language because it really is.
What was the conversation you had with your cinematography director, Grieg Fraser, about expanding the visual style you had already used in the first part?
Technically we both knew that the film had to be much more ambitious. In the first part we followed a boy who discovers his culture, finds a new planet and must survive a series of events. And in this second part, the boy must become a man, and a warrior. It is a very long film and I knew that it was going to have a different rhythm, that it was going to be much more powerful. I initially chose Greg, who I adore, because I love how he uses natural light, and that’s what we used for the film. It wasn’t easy, because in order to shoot all the scenes in the desert we sometimes had to use different locations to obtain the effect we were looking for. We used 12 or 14 different locations to shoot a scene, which created a very complex filming plan that often drove my assistant crazy. It was a challenge for everyone. We did some tricks, like using software to predict where the light was going to be. That’s how we knew that we were going to have the sun where we needed it at a certain time and that’s how we organized the filming. It was very fun but quite intense. Grieg is a true film scientist. He loves technology and really enjoys using new tools.
How do you feel ‘Dune 2’ explores the theme of good versus evil?
I hope that it can be seen that in our history this theme is presented in a more subtle way than the way cinema has traditionally done. Pure evil exists, but it is rare. Most of the time everything happens through 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 he did it out of evil. He is 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 a little disappointed with the way it was understood by readers, who thought it was a celebration of Paul, when he wanted him to be an antihero. To correct that impression, he wrote a second book, ‘The Messiah of Dune’, which is like an epilogue, which he tried to correct that view. I tried to make this adaptation closer to Herbert’s initial intentions, and that is why this film is a warning and not a celebration of Paul.
