A series of production delays has left “Dune: Part One” fans eager for the film's sequel, which hits theaters this Friday. But director Denis Villeneuve himself waited more than 40 years for the project to become a reality.
Villeneuve first read Frank Herbert's 1965 novel “Dune” when he was about 13, he said on an episode of NPR's “Fresh Air” late last November. Shortly after finishing, he and his childhood best friend, Nicolas Kadima, began creating a storyboard for an imagined film adaptation.
“Nicolas was very good at drawing and I was very bad, but I was good at telling stories,” Villeneuve said. “Our friendship was born from that dream that one day we could be filmmakers.”
A couple of decades later, Villeneuve made his film debut with “August 32 on Earth,” which premiered at Cannes in 1998 but was never released in U.S. theaters. His second film, “Maelström,” brought him more international recognition, and when he was tapped to direct “Dune” in 2016, he was a critically acclaimed director with a penchant for sci-fi plots and desert shoots. open.
Having been deeply disappointed by David Lynch's “Dune” adaptation as a young fan, Villeneuve always hoped someone would create a film worthy of being tied to his source material, he told NPR. He never imagined it would be him.
“I'm still pinching myself,” he said.
“Dune: Part One” premiered in October 2021 and grossed $41 million in its opening weekend. Less than a week after its release, Legendary Pictures announced a sequel that would finish the story.
“Dune: Part Two,” originally scheduled for release on October 20, 2023, was delayed and moved up several times due to last summer's Hollywood strikes and changes to other studios' release schedules. After two years of anticipation, fans will finally be able to see the film in theaters this Friday.
While “Dune: Part One” was more of a “meditative” film, taking its time building the world and exposing it, the upcoming sequel leans more toward the “action” genre, Villeneuve told NPR.
“The boy (Paul Atreides) is an old teenager in 'Part One,' so he is, let's say, a victim of events. He has no control. He's just trying to survive,” Villeneuve said. “In 'Part Two,' he's the complete opposite. He became active, became a guerrilla and took [sic] control of your own destiny.”
Always considering the original novel as a kind of biblical text, Villeneuve has sought in the sequel to remain as faithful as possible to the original material, just as he did in the first film.
“My goal was really to make sure that hardcore fans found the atmosphere and poetry of the book intact,” he said in a 2021 interview with The Times.
For the sequel, that meant returning to the Wadi Rum desert in Jordan to film.
“I didn't want to make concessions. I wanted to be as real as possible,” Villeneuve said in his NPR interview, adding that the film's cast and crew braved the scorching heat to make the most of the desert's natural light.
They even formed a “worm unit” to execute Villeneueve's favorite scene, in which Atreides rides a gigantic sandworm hiding in the dunes of the planet Arrakis, where most of “Dune: Part Two” takes place.
“This sequence would be shot over many weeks,” Villeneueve said, adding that he struggled to simultaneously direct his main unit and the worm unit.
“That was the most difficult thing for me, because cinema is an act of presence,” he said. “I'm used to working with one camera at a time. I'm very old-fashioned in that sense. AND [having] Splitting myself in two was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life.”
