Though Warner Bros. has been quick to move “Tenet” release dates over the past couple of months, the December 18 arrival of Denis Villeneuve’s big-budget, sci-fi epic, “Dune,” has remained intact. But that doesn’t mean the filmmaker is cruising to the finish line. In fact, as he explained in a recent interview with the Shanghai International Film Festival, finishing his latest feature has been anything but easy.
COVID-19 has affected just about everyone on the planet in one way or another. And the same can be said about Villeneuve, who has been trying to put the finishing touches on his long-awaited adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic novel, “Dune.” Principal photography has long since finished, but the fact that the director isn’t able to work closely with the rest of his crew during post-production is making things incredibly difficult as the release date for the film looms closer and closer.
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“The impact was that it crushed my schedule right now,” he explained. “It will be a sprint to finish the movie on time right now. We were allowed to go back to shoot – we’re going back to shoot those elements in a few weeks, [the ones] we were supposed to shoot earlier. It meant that I also had to finish some elements of the movie like VFX and the editing being in Montreal as my crew stayed in Los Angeles.”
And Villeneuve continued by discussing the issue that working remotely plays in finishing a film. While you may assume that technology makes teleconferencing fairly simple and effective, the director feels like there is something missing by not sharing the same room with his editor during the final stages of post-production.
“I will say as a director there are things that can be done remotely to deal with technology, all the supervision of VFX with some equipment is kind of easy to do from afar…,” he said. “For me, the big lesson of this is I thought that it would be possible to edit at a distance having my editor sharing with computers, being far from one another, but I realize how much editing is like playing music with someone and you need to be in the same room. I mean there’s something about the interaction, human interaction, spontaneity, the energy in the room. I really miss not being in the same room with my editor.”
Villeneuve added, “I’m saying, as an artist, to edit my movie not being in the same room as my editor is very, very painful. Also maybe one of the reasons is the editor is also a psychiatrist – I mean he’s the one who’s dealing with my anxiety and my panic attacks and my fears and receiving my joys. I think that in the future, if ever something like that happened again, definitely I will make sure that my editor is close to me. Editing is a very important part of the filmmaking process for me, maybe the most important. It’s the time where you rewrite the movie in some ways.”
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Obviously, it’s far too early to say whether or not “Dune” suffered due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, it’s clear from the filmmaker’s own words that this situation is far from ideal and is definitely having a major impact on his workflow. Villeneuve isn’t alone either. As Hollywood begins to restart production on films and TV series, as well as finishing up things remotely, we’ll likely hear more stories of frustration from filmmakers trying to do seemingly simple things they previously took for granted.
“Dune” is scheduled (for now, at least) to arrive in theaters on December 18.
