TIFF 2021: Superstar Denis Villeneuve on how he came aboard Dune, the most anticipated film of the fest - The Globe and Mail

Denis Villeneuve's Dune, the first part of a planned two-film adaptation of the novel, makes its North American premiere at TIFF on Sept. 11, at the Cinesphere IMAX Theatre, with a satellite screening at Cinéma Banque Scotia Montréal one day later.

Julien Lienard/Contour by Getty Images

With due respect to the significant titles screening at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, the event’s most-anticipated film is unquestionably Dune, a sweeping sci-fi saga of sand and interplanetary political treachery. Based on Frank Herbert’s prescient novel from 1965, Dune stars Timothée Chalamet as a messiah-like heir to the throne that rules Arrakis, a fought-over desert planet that is the sole source of a supernatural spice that is the universe’s most vital natural resource.

Dreams play a key role in narrative of Dune, just as they play a part in the story of how superstar French-Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve landed the sought-after position as the film’s blockbuster director.

In September, 2016, Mary Parent, vice-chair of worldwide production at Legendary Entertainment, read an interview with Villeneuve in Variety magazine. The Quebec auteur‘s first sci-fi epic, Arrival, was poised to make its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, and he was just beginning work on a sequel to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner when he spoke to the Los Angeles-based publication about his favourite all-time book.

“A long-standing dream of mine is to adapt Dune,” Villeneuve said back then. “But it’s a long process to get the rights, and I don’t think I will succeed.”

He was right. Two months later, it was production company Legendary Entertainment, not Villeneuve, who acquired the rights to Dune, a book that had already been made into a feature in film in 1984 by David Lynch. Starring the then-unknown Kyle MacLachlan as young nobleman Paul Atreides, Lynch’s Dune disappointed critics upon its release but has since become a cult classic and a lightning rod for revisionist evaluations.

Parent is a high-powered producer who’s worked with a number a studios stretching back to the 1990s. Her name can be found on the credits to such films as Meet the Fockers, The Bourne Supremacy, The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water and Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim. Seeing the Variety interview with Villeneuve and his wish-list Dune aspirations, Parent contacted the director.

The conversation went very well, and very quickly.

“She wanted to work with me, and I wanted to work with her,” Villeneuve tells The Globe and Mail, speaking via Zoom. “It was the fastest meeting of my life.”

Parent would have been aware of Villeneuve’s impeccable credentials. He’s been on a hot streak since his 2010 drama Incendies scored an Oscar nomination. The director and lifetime sci-fi fanboy went extraterrestrial with 2016′s Arrival and futuristic with 2017′s stellar Blade Runner 2049.

Known for tentpole pictures such as this year’s Godzilla vs. Kong, Legendary wanted Dune to be the next Star Wars. Villeneuve, who says he’s been a “Dune maniac” ever since he read the novel at 13 years of age, had the same blockbuster series ambitions.

Mutual interests came together. Bob Dylan had a line about such things: “I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours.”

Getting the job was the easy part, though. He still had a movie to make. “I had gotten in the boat,” Villeneuve explains. “Now I had to cross the ocean.”

Dune, the first part of Villeneuve’s planned two-film adaptation of Herbert’s novel, had its world premiere at the Venice International Film Festival on Friday. It takes its North American bow at TIFF on Sept. 11 at the Cinesphere IMAX Theatre, with a satellite screening at Cinéma Banque Scotia Montréal one day later. The film, with an ensemble cast that includes Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Stellan Skarsgard, Jason Momoa and the aforementioned Chalamet, gets its wide release on Oct. 22.

A 53-year-old native of Bécancour, Que., Villeneuve is arguably the biggest director in Hollywood right now. He’s an innovative filmmaker who has shown he can deliver on dubious ideas that actually turn out spectacularly well – speaking of Blade Runner 2049.

Challenges don’t come much bigger than Dune. Herbert’s politically relevant fantasy about colonialism, environmentalism, prophecies and giant sand worms has sold millions of copies and is probably the finest novel of its genre.

It’s a sophisticated book, though, one that has frustrated film adaptations in the past. Now the new film’s producer (Legendary) and distributor (Warner Bros.) want an accessible saga that will be the popcorn-selling foundation of an international film franchise. The idea is an intergalactic Lawrence of Arabia that will appeal to young viewers and make sense to those who haven’t read the heavy source-material.

Villeneuve is onboard with all of it.

“I want to reach the kid I was when I first read the book,” says the director, whose films are often R-rated. “You’re 13 years old, struggling with your identity and you’re discovering a world that is new and frightening. Making this movie, I was in a relationship with that part of myself.”

Villeneuve adds that Dune is a “pop movie” meant for a wide audience. “That’s the nature of the beast.”

Villeneuve and Timothée Chalamet on the set of Dune.

Chiabella James/Warner Bros.

Villeneuve and Javier Bardem.

Chiabella James/Warner Bros.

Others have tried the ride the giant sand worm that is Dune and failed. In 1974, Alejandro Jodorowsky envisioned a 10-hour feature starring his son in the lead role alongside everyone from Salvador Dali to Orson Welles to Gloria Swanson to Hervé Villechaize to Mick Jagger. The project never got off the ground.

Continuing in the been-there-Dune-that file, director Lynch, hot off The Elephant Man, signed on for a Dune feature in the early 1980s. The resulting film was commercially and critically a disappointment. Tastemaker Roger Ebert called it the “worst movie of the year,” while is At the Movies partner Gene Siskel added his own downturned thumb by saying Lynch’s Dune was “physically ugly” and “confusing beyond belief.”

A young Villeneuve saw the film and came away only half-impressed. “I’m not here to to compare myself to a master, someone who is a legend,” he says, referring to Lynch. “I have massive respect for him, and when I saw his movie I wanted to love it so much. In many ways I feel he succeeded, and lots of elements I thought were beautiful.”

But?

“There are things in it that disappointed me,” Villeneuve admits. “[Lynch] went away from the book. When I finished the movie, I said to myself, ‘It’s not done yet.’”

It still isn’t. Villeneuve is already working on a script for what he calls Dune: Part Two. He doesn’t view it as a sequel, but as the second half of the story. “It was always going to be two parts,” he says. “The story is too rich and too complex for one movie.”

As for the rumour floated by Dune actor Momoa that a five-hour version of Dune’s first part exists, Villeneuve shot that down. “I could have made a longer version,” he says, “but the director’s cut will be what you see on the screen.

Or what you see on television – something Villeneuve isn’t happy about. After Warner announced that Dune would launch simultaneously in theatres and on the subscription streaming service HBO Max, the director penned an op-ed in Variety this past December blasting the decision.

“Dune is by far the best movie I’ve ever made,” he wrote. “My team and I devoted more than three years of our lives to make it a unique big screen experience. Our movie’s image and sound were meticulously designed to be seen in theatres.”

Despite his frustration, Villeneuve hopes to make part two of Dune and then adapt Dune Messiah, the second in Herbert’s series of six Dune novels. For that to happen, Villeneuve’s first Dune instalment will need to be a money-maker.

But where George Lucas’s Star Wars franchise had a scantily clad Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia, a charismatic swashbuckler played by hunky Harrison Ford, all sorts of nifty space-aged weaponry and an adorable robot-and-android duo, Dune is higher brow.

“It’s not about sci-fi gadgets, it’s a human story,” Villeneuve says. “I was the biggest fan of the first two Star Wars movies, and the thing I loved about them was the drama. And there’s something about the intensity and the poetry of Dune that will satisfy audiences in that same way.”

A man can dream.

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TIFF 2021: Superstar Denis Villeneuve on how he came aboard Dune, the most anticipated film of the fest - The Globe and Mail
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