Denis Villeneuve explains why he doesn’t like post-credit scenes
He may have only emerged onto the scene in the past decade or so, but make no mistake, the Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve is one of the best directors of contemporary cinema, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Christopher Nolan, Paul Thomas Anderson and Ruben Östlund. An innovative storyteller with ambitious cinematic scope, Villeneuve is responsible for some of the most dazzling movies of the modern industry.
First making a name for himself back in 2010 with the release of the Oscar-nominated drama Incendies, Hollywood quickly sat up and took notice, giving him the money to make Prisoners with Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal in 2013, followed by the peculiar mystery Enemy released in the very same year. After this point, Villeneuve started to be recognised as a genuine talent worthy of serious financial backing.
This led to the release of the multi-million movie venture Sicario in 2015 and the epic sci-fi tale Arrival in 2016, mere years before he would begin to be considered a revolutionary genre filmmaker. The critical and commercial success of Blade Runner 2049 impressed in 2017 before Dune took pop culture by storm in 2021, taking lead stars Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya to new heights of success.
Still, despite his commercial success with multiple sci-fi classics, Villeneuve is still well against post-credit scenes, a feature of filmmaking that has risen to popularity thanks to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“I don’t like post-credits scenes,” Villeneuve told NME, refusing to tack on a final post-credits teaser scene to his 2021 sci-fi epic, Dune. Continuing, he added, “There is a very specific final emotion that I was looking for with the final frame [of Dune] and I don’t want to mess with that,” whilst explaining why he didn’t stick a post-credits scene at the end of Dune, he also slams the door on using such scenes in the future: “I don’t use post-credits scenes. I’ve never done that and I would never”.
His rejection of this contemporary trend is yet another example of Villeneuve being a different, more traditional filmmaker whose movies better reflect the quality of the likes of Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg and Andrei Tarkovsky. Where modern sci-fi falters, focusing on action set pieces over a solid emotional through-line, Villeneuve is trying to repair the genre one movie at a time.
As a modern pioneer of the genre, Villeneuve takes inspiration from a number of different films and directors, praising Kubrick’s 1968 classic 2001: A Space Odyssey, Spielberg’s 1977 alien flick Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner as three of his favourite sci-fi movies of all time.
Joining the three 20th-century classics, Villeneuve also expressed his love for Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film Children of Men, Christopher Nolan’s 2010 gamechanger Inception and Jonathan Glazer’s extraordinary 2013 art film Under the Skin starring Scarlett Johansson.
