Denis Villeneuve Never Stopped Believing in His ‘Dune’ Movies. He’s Just as Optimistic About Cinema Itself

On December 5, the IndieWire Honors Winter 2024 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for crafting some of the year’s best films. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the filmmakers, artisans, and performers behind films well worth toasting. We’re showcasing their work with new interviews leading up to the Los Angeles event.

Denis Villeneuve can still remember his first encounters with Frank Herbert’s “Dune” novels.

As a sci-fi obsessed teenager who couldn’t have predicted the Hollywood greatness that awaited him, Herbert’s immersive desert world of Arrakis was the perfect intersection of his many interests. In the book’s detailed descriptions of winged helicopters and spice-mining machinery, he found fuel for his lifelong love of design. He was mesmerized by Herbert’s detailed descriptions of intergalactic ecology, which he likened to reading an “encyclopedia.” And the novels’ warnings about the dangers of mixing politics and religion struck him as both a prescient statement and an example of the genre’s unique ability to serve as a vessel for social commentary.

Villeneuve dreamed of adapting the first “Dune” novel into a definitive film that did justice to Herbert’s epic vision. But he knew that the potentially career-defining project deserved his very best.

Rather than rush to pursue the opportunity, Villeneuve spent years establishing himself as one of Hollywood’s most reliable blockbuster auteurs. From acclaimed thrillers like “Prisoners” and “Sicario” to sci-fi stunners “Arrival” and “Blade Runner 2049,” he built a resume so impressive that it would have been foolish to bet against the “Dune” adaptation that eventually materialized. Villeneuve, who will receive the Visionary Award at the 2024 IndieWire Honors for his work on the “Dune” films, explained that the long wait was all part of the plan.

“I waited many years before accepting the challenge,” Villeneuve said. “I agreed to do it when I felt I was ready to bring it to the screen. And I did it with people who absolutely believed in the novel.”

‘Dune: Part Two’©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

With his two-part adaptation, Villeneuve achieved modern Hollywood’s Holy Grail: a genuine blockbuster that brought in huge box office receipts while earning critical acclaim on the way to becoming a major player in the awards race. “Dune: Part One” and “Dune: Part Two” combined to gross over $1.1 billion worldwide despite the first film being released day-and-date on HBO Max amid the COVID-19 pandemic. “Part One” also received ten Oscar nominations including Best Picture and Best Director, ultimately winning in the Cinematography, Original Score, Sound, Editing, Production Design, and Visual Effects categories. For “Part Two,” the sky appears to be the limit.

The success of “Part One” made a follow-up film inevitable, but Villeneuve received no such guarantees when he embarked on the project. While he and his partners at Legendary Entertainment were always convinced that Herbert’s novel required two films to properly adapt, the second film’s existence was contingent on the success of its predecessor. Villeneuve was always confident that his film was a winner, but the period between wrapping and releasing “Part One” forced him to face the daunting possibility that his lifelong passion project would be left half-finished.

“Of course I was rolling the dice. I didn’t know a hundred percent for sure,” Villeneuve said of his initial chances of getting a second film greenlit. “If the movie had been a catastrophe with the critics or the box office, maybe we would not be talking here. So that’s the beauty of this job. It’s art. You cannot predict the outcomes, you know?”

Director Denis Villeneuve and Timothée Chalamet on the set of ‘Dune: Part Two’Niko Tavernise

Things worked out in Villeneuve’s favor, and he’s now able to bask in the knowledge that he did justice to the novel that he spent so much of his life appreciating. (While he is currently writing a third film, “Dune Messiah,” that will see him return to the director’s chair, he emphasizes that it will serve as an epilogue to a diptych that is already completed.) Villeneuve described the fulfillment of his goal as both an emotional catharsis and yet another step in a lifelong artistic evolution.

“For the first time I was really able to bring images that I had, dreams that I had back in the years to the screen, which is very moving for me,” he said. “But of course, through the process of adaptation, the books are the books and my movies are my movies. The adaptation says more things about me than about the book.”

With a seemingly endless string of hits behind him, the world is now Villeneuve’s oyster. He has access to studio resources that most filmmakers only dream of, with A-list actors and crew members lining up to work on whatever he chooses to tackle next. While he prefers not to discuss future projects — he says unmade movies are “fragile” things that can easily be damaged when the world learns too much too soon — he isn’t shy about the value that he continues to see in making sci-fi films.

“There’s something about being able to talk about difficult or abrasive subject matter with total freedom because you are talking about a world that doesn’t exist,” he said when asked what keeps drawing him to the genre. “You are free to talk about politics, about religion, about difficult things that it would not be possible to talk about otherwise.”

Producer Tanya Lapointe and director Denis Villeneuve on the set of ‘Dune: Part One’©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

He added that he sees the genre as an opportunity to say something inherently positive about humanity in a time when looking towards the future often feels much more appealing than taking in the present. “There’s an idea of hope to project images that are coming from the future,” he said. “There’s something hopeful about that that I love.”

That sense of hope extends to one of Villeneuve’s favorite topics: the future of his art form. In recent years he has emerged as one of Hollywood’s most public evangelists for the big screen moviegoing experience, hailing large scale movies as a vital form of expression that he believes can still thrive in a changing media ecosystem. When the topic turned to the state of cinema, Villeneuve revealed a glimmer of the same optimism that propels him to spend so much time making films about the future.

“I’m very optimistic. I believe that the big screen experience and theater experience will prevail. I know it has been challenged in the past years with streaming and the pandemic, but I think that we’ll find a balance and equilibrium,” he said, stressing that while he’s concerned about independent filmmakers receiving access to theater screens, he remains convinced that the human need for moviegoing is alive and well. “I think that we need, in society, spaces where we can be all together, live emotions together. It can be a rock concert, it can be a play in a theater, or an opera or whatever. It’s very healthy for humans to be together to share emotions and ideas together.”