As Dune neared its release last year, one of my brothers found a part of its origin in a drawer in my parents’ home. They were drawings I’d made with my friend, Nicolas Kadima—storyboards for a movie we envisioned after reading Frank Herbert’s novel. I was probably 13 or 14 years old. We were nerds. Other boys were playing football, but we were writing screenplays. Directors were our gods: Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese. It’s fun to think that when we were boys we were already dreaming about this. Back then, dreaming was all we could do.
I grew up in a small village in Quebec in the early ’80s, and we didn’t have the resources to actually make movies, even homemade ones. We did some short Super 8 films, but that came later. In Canada, I was told that only crazy people made movies. It was not considered a real job. It was something very far away from us. Maybe too far. I spent decades imagining Dune, several years actually writing and creating it, and another excruciating year when it couldn’t be released because of the pandemic. The full journey has taken most of my life.
I expected to go into science. I loved biology and mathematics and was a good student. Still, I was fascinated by the art of filmmaking and storytelling. My heart was split in half. My favorite book was one about the human body, which explained things like the science of what happens between the brain and the muscles when you pinch your fingers together. For me, that is sci-fi. I deeply love the science of life, which is probably why Dune resonated with me so deeply. Herbert was a journalist, and his novel was inspired by reporting he did on a coastal community in Oregon where sand dunes were encroaching, driven by intense ocean winds. I grew up by the St. Lawrence River, a very quiet, melancholic place. It wasn’t a desert, but the vast horizon dominated there as well. There were two man-made structures that stood out. One was the church, the other a nuclear power plant about three miles from our home. I fixated on those two towers: science and religion, both linked by faith. The same ideas are woven throughout Dune.
I grew up to have a successful film career in Canada. After the release of my first English-language film, 2013’s Prisoners, people began to ask me what my dream project would be. The only thing that came to my mind was Dune. In 2016, while I was working on Blade Runner 2049, I heard that the rights to Herbert’s novel were available. When I was doing promotion for Arrival at the Venice Film Festival later that year, I said—very loudly and clearly—that I wanted to make Dune. Mary Parent, the production head at Legendary Entertainment, was acquiring the rights, and the ink was still drying on the contract when she read about my dreams in the press. We met for 45 seconds, I think. We just looked at each other and said, “Let’s do this.” Sometimes it takes many years, but then the thing you’ve hoped for happens all at once.
Bringing Dune to life was extremely challenging for everyone involved, but shooting in the desert together created a strong bond between us. It was quite magical, a real adventure. Everybody gave their best. Then we were isolated by the pandemic, finalizing postproduction on a movie that would ultimately be delayed for nearly a year. That part was unavoidable—it was about safety for the audience—but soon after, we encountered a disruption that was made by choice: In December 2020, Warner Bros. announced that its entire upcoming film slate would debut simultaneously on its streaming service, HBO Max.
I heard the news just before it was announced, and I was so destabilized that I didn’t know how to react. Then the anger came. I was asked to stay quiet, but I saw friends like Christopher Nolan speaking publicly, and I felt it was my duty. I spoke out partly for my own sanity, because it’s never good to keep anger to yourself. I wrote an open letter and received feedback from all over the world. There’s a lot of love out there for cinema and for theaters.
At the end of the day, the enemy was the pandemic. Growing up in that remote village, I saw some movies on big screens, but the theaters were far from home. So as a young kid, I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time on TV. The same with the first Planet of the Apes and the original Blade Runner too. Discovering cinema on TV meant that I was watching movies that were terrible copies—washed out, oversaturated, distorted. When I finally saw the masterpieces in a theater, they had a far greater impact.
Dune was a dream designed and shot for the big screen. Streaming is not as bad as a poorly transferred TV broadcast, but it is still a shrinking of something meant to be overwhelming and immersive. There are too many things that you lose launching movies on TV. I understand that for Wall Street, the theaters are a roller coaster—that it’s not a stable business, that it’s a risky business. And I appreciate streaming because it allows us to revisit films that we loved or to go back in film history. It’s fantastic for archives. But movies dreamed and made for the big screen need to be born on the big screen. Cinema is an art form that needs an audience.
It’s still difficult for me to process that Dune was released on TV at the same time that it debuted in theaters. We still did good numbers theatrically, but what saved us was that the word of mouth was strong and that people were tired of being at home. We are not meant to be isolated; we are meant to be together. Dune arrived at just the right moment. I must add that I’ve been comforted by the fact that outside the U.S. the movie was shown exclusively in theaters.
The success means we get to make the second movie, which means we’ll be able to complete the second half of Herbert’s novel. That film will debut exclusively in theaters. It’s part of the deal.
I’m finishing the screenplay now, and we expect to be shooting by summer, which is practically tomorrow morning. With the first half of Dune, the toughest part was introducing the world and laying down the rules. Now just the fun of the story is left. I’m always very cautious discussing movies that are in the making; they’re full of fragile ideas. But the second one will definitely be more visual and less dialogue-driven. And, hopefully, there will be another film after that. Dune Messiah, Herbert’s second novel in this universe, would make total sense as a third movie because it completes Paul Atreides’s arc. I want to make part two as fast as possible, then I will wait a few years—until Timothée Chalamet gets a bit older—to do the final installment.
I’ve lived with Dune for most of my life. Being patient is part of the journey. —AS TOLD TO ANTHONY BREZNICAN
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