The classic sci-fi that changed Denis Villeneuve’s life: “The movie I was dreaming of”
Whether by accident or design, Denis Villeneuve has become increasingly synonymous with sci-fi, which nobody really seems to mind when he’s proven himself to be so damned good at it.
None of the director’s first seven features unfolded in the genre, although there was plenty of versatility on display after he debuted with the intimate drama of August 32nd on Earth before expanding his horizons to the absurdity of Maelström, the gripping Incendies, the obtusely bizarre Enemy, and the riveting Sicario.
Since then, he’s made four sci-fi flicks in a row, and there’s at least a couple more to come. After making a splash with his Hollywood debut Prisoners, Villeneuve scored his biggest critical and commercial hit yet with Arrival, which hauled in over $200million at the box office and secured eight Academy Award nominations, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’.
Blade Runner 2049 may have been a catastrophic flop, but it did at least follow in the footsteps of its illustrious predecessor by underperforming in cinemas. It was a near-impossible task to try and craft a worthy follow-up to Ridley Scott’s seminal rain-soaked and neon-lit masterpiece, but Villeneuve came a lot closer than anyone could have predicted.
The two-part Dune allowed him to indulge the dream he’d held since childhood to bring Frank Herbert’s dense novel to the screen and actually do it justice this time after David Lynch had failed so miserably four decades previously, and he’s planning at least one more trip to Arrakis to go along with the in-development adaptation of Rendezvous with Rama.
He’s a sci-fi guy, and it shows. Of course, no filmmaker wants to spend too long playing in the same sandbox lest they – and audiences – start to get bored of seeing the same guy doing the same thing in perpetuity, but Villeneuve’s recent obsession with focusing his energy and attention on intergalactic escapades sounds like it was born from a combination of two things he’d been struck by since childhood: Dune and Star Wars.
“Something I loved about that movie as a kid was the gravitas of it, the darkness of it, and how there was something more grounded and serious about it,” he explained to The Hollywood Reporter of The Empire Strikes Back, which raised the bar for not only George Lucas’ spacefaring franchise but laid down a marker that almost every high-profile sequel until the end of time was obligated to go bigger and darker.
“After that, it became more comedy,” he sighed with resignation. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but it’s like I was saying to myself that I wanted to make the movie I was dreaming of seeing The Empire Strikes Back.” History is littered with sequels that proclaimed themselves to be The Empire Strikes Back of their respective sagas, only to fall flat when it mattered.
Villeneuve took a different approach, and it worked wonders: he used the Dune duology as his chance to tell a story he’d always wanted to tell and ticked off his opportunity to make his own ode to the second Star Wars flick at the same time.
