Denis Villeneuve describes his early love for science fiction
Canadian film director Denis Villeneuve has taken on several science fiction projects in recent years, including 2016’s Arrival for which he won the Academy Award for ‘Best Director’, 2017’s rebooted Blade Runner film 2049 and 2021’s Dune, which has a sequel in the works. Villeneuve has quickly put himself in the running for the most vital sci-fi director in modern times.
Villeneuve admitted to having been “attracted to science fiction since a very early age” in an interview with Little White Lies, which is something he attributes to his father’s inadvertent influence. He said, “My father was obsessed by technology, and all those scientific magazines about new discoveries, like Popular Mechanic or Science et Vie. So there was that presence of how the world could evolve with technology – of what the world of tomorrow could be.”
However, technology magazines were not the only reason that Villeneuve was drawn to science and the kind of fiction that arises from it. He added, “I must not underestimate the presence of a nuclear power plant that I could see from my kitchen. I was raised in the atomic age, where the big fear of the time was not the climate but the atomic bomb.
“And to know that you had that power just a few kilometres from home – I think it’s something that sparked a lot of imagination,” Villeneuve added. “You eat your cereal in the morning, and you look at the nuclear power plant.” Naturally, the threat of atomic extinction would have generated the twin possibilities of fear and of creation.
Of course, it is Villeneuve’s Dune adaptation that has taken the headlines recently when it comes to the director’s relationship with science fiction, and Villeneuve admitted that he took a taking for Frank Herbert’s novels from a very early age, which led him to always dreaming about being able to direct it.
“I read Dune when I was very young, specifically at the moment when I was starting to dream big about cinema, following filmmakers, starting to be very interested by what a director was doing, being drawn to the filmmaking process,” he said. “And I remember starting to do storyboards and early drawings of ‘Dune’ with my best friend at the time, who wanted to be a director as well.”
It was the world of Ariakis that drew Villeneuve to Dune with such intention, and he has certainly captured its full vibrancy in a way that the likes of David Lynch and Alejandro Jodorowsky simply could not. “We were obsessed with this world,” Villeneuve admitted. “I’m not saying that I was dreaming to make a movie about it right away, but definitely I was deeply inspired by it. For me, it was one of my big dreams. If you had said to me, ‘Ultimately, what would you like to do as a filmmaker?’, I would have said, ‘Dune.'”
In fact, that dream stayed with Villeneuve right up until his arrival in Hollywood, when even then, he longed to take the project on. “When I landed in Hollywood, and people were asking me, ‘What would be your dream?’, it’s always those four letters that were coming out of my mouth,” he said. “It’s a book that stayed with me through the years for several reasons, and still today, every time I open it, I get the same kind of deep joy reading it.”
