Denis Villeneuve is trying not to think too much about the future. After a gargantuan production process followed by pandemic delays, Dune: Part One is hitting theaters next month (and premiering at Venice Film Festival this week). Its visionary director and co-writer is trying to live in the here and now. But he’s not doing a great job of it, because he’s already thinking about what’s next.
“I think that we were able to bring it to life because we all, me and the team, just did that for three and a half years, full time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, we were dreaming about Dune: Part One,” Villeneuve told GameSpot and other journalists during a recent virtual Q&A. “That’s the way I make cinema…I need to be there now and not think too much about the future.”
Yet the director hasn’t been shy about his plans for more Dune. This film covers roughly the first half of Frank Herbert’s first novel, which was released in 1965. Over the course of Herbert’s original six books, the series goes pretty wild, with time jumps thousands of years in the future and an immortal “god-emperor” who’s half human and half sandworm. In contrast, Villeneuve dreams of adapting the first book and its direct sequel, published in 1969, which are concerned mainly with the same set of main characters and take place within a reasonable span of time.
“I envision the adaptation of two books, Dune and Dune: Messiah. I said, ‘OK, as a filmmaker, as a screenwriter, I know how to do this,'” Villeneuve said. “So we decided to split the first novel in two, so now we are at three movies. Those movies are very long to make. So for my mental sanity, I decided to just dream about three movies. After that, because I’m a big fan of all the novels, after that I’ll see where I am, but I will say that I want to focus on the aspect of these three movies right now.”
He added that for now, he’s “focusing on launching Dune: Part One, hoping there will be a Part Two, and that’s enough.”
“Doing the first one was by far the most challenging thing I’ve ever done,” the director explained.
Adaptation can be a messy process. Villeneuve says he’s had a copy of Dune on his nightstand for more than three decades. His career has been building toward this; with Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, he proved he can make big budget sci-fi like no one else right now.
“When you adapt, necessarily, you transform. The idea was to be as close to the spirit of the book as possible–as close to the poetry,” he said. “The goal was to make a movie that would please the hardcore fans, the people who know Dune by heart, and also my mother, who never read Dune. To find that equilibrium was not easy.”
General audiences will judge for themselves whether he succeeded in making a movie that’s equally accessible for fans and the uninitiated. In our review, we noted that it “throws in-universe terms and proper nouns around with abandon, allowing context clues and visual storytelling to do most of the expository heavy lifting.”
“The tough task here was to introduce the audience to this world, to the cultures, to the different families, the different planets,” Villeneuve said. “Once this is done, it becomes an insane playground…For me, Dune: Part One is like an appetizer. Dune: Part Two is the main meal. As much as Dune: Part One was by far my most exciting project ever, Dune: Part Two is already getting me even more excited.”
So when will we get to see it? Granted, Warner Bros. has not actually greenlit the sequel yet, so it depends at least partially on the success of this movie. But the director is ready to go.
“When you make a movie a movie in two parts, necessarily, when you do the first part, you have to know what you’re going to do in the second part,” he hinted. “I will be fairly ready to go quite quickly…to go quickly on a movie of that size, you still need to make sets, costumes–so we are talking about months. But if there’s enthusiasm and the movie is greenlit sooner than later, I will say that I will be ready to shoot in 2022 for sure. I am ready to go and I will say that I would love to bring it to the screen as soon as possible.”
Dune: Part One hits theaters October 22.