A SPICE ODYSSEY
Denis Villeneuve was barely a teenager when he first dreamed of a scorching desert planet in a galaxy far, far away, but probably not the one you’re thinking of. He dreamed of Arrakis. Of colossal sandworms, roaming a parched landscape loaded with mystery. Of miraculous stillsuits and psychotropic spice. Of powerful families locked in a life or death struggle, and the indigenous, blue-eyed freedom fighters whose lands they exploit. He dreamed of Paul Atreides, a young man not much older than himself who was destined to lead armies. He dreamed of Dune.
“I’m still deeply moved to have had the chance to tackle this dream, to play with this dream, to go back to this dream,” an impassioned Villeneuve tells Total Film over Zoom in late June, roughly three months after finishing work on ‘Part One’ of a proposed two-part adaptation. Reading Dune as a 14-year-old while growing up in Quebec proved a foundational experience for a filmmaker who is fast proving himself without equal. He considered Herbert’s philosophical, spiritual, ecologically conscious novel about a young man coming of age in the most testing circumstances “almost a guide to life”. With his closest friend, he would draw his hero Paul riding sandworms – illustrations he’s kept safe to this day. Dune wasn’t just formative for Villeneuve, it’s his Rosetta Stone.
“Denis said to me [Paul Atreides] was the character he saw his sort of tortured adolescence through, and a figure for him to escape through,” says Timothée Chalamet, who has just wrapped Bones & All, his reunion with Call Me By Your Name’s Luca Guadagnino, when he hops on Zoom with TF. The pressure of literally embodying Villeneuve’s dreams was not lost on the 25-year-old actor – the filmmaker’s first and only choice for the role – but no one felt that pressure more than Villeneuve himself.
“It was,” the director stresses, “by far, the toughest thing I’ve done. There are deep pleasures when there are images that you’re able to achieve that are close to what you had in mind as a teenager; then it’s orgasmic. But the failures are very difficult, because you disappoint the teenager in yourself. As Hans Zimmer pointed out, it’s very dangerous to try to reach one of your oldest dreams.”
SPICE WORLD
The very idea of adapting was an “inaccessible, out-of-reach dream”, was shot in the deserts of Wadi Rum, Jordan, the very same alien landscapes he would return to almost a decade later for . “I remember taking mental notes at the time: ‘If ever I do the movie, I’m coming back here and there. where Paul sits...’” he recalls. “But it was a massive fantasy.”
