As the American exhibition industry stays dormant, audiences are having to look to other countries for their festival fix. For example, this weekend marks the final two days of the 23rd Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF), with films competing from around the world in one of the first high-profile festivals post-COVID-19. And while North American audiences may not be able to participate in the festival, we can still enjoy some of the incredible virtual sessions the festival has planned.
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In a new video uploaded by YouTube channel Secrets of Dune, Denis Villeneuve sat down for an hour-long (!) conversation about his career and “Dune.” The video was recorded as part of the festival’s virtual “Master Class” series alongside artists like Naomi Kawase and Hirokazu Koreeda.
In the interview, Villeneuve talks about the feeling of reading Frank Herbert’s book for the first time – he claims to still own his original paperback copy of ‘Dune’ – and the combination of elegance and simplicity that helped spark his love of science fiction. Eventually, Villeneuve admits that his work in Hollywood has always been building towards an adaptation of ‘Dune.’
“I was making movies in Canada with smaller budgets – science fiction was out of reach,” Villeneuve notes. “But when I landed in Hollywood, and I started to make movies with bigger budgets, people keep asking me, ‘What [would] be your top dream project? What would you love to do?’ And I kept saying, I would love to do science fiction, and my goal would be to make ‘Dune.’”
Villeneuve also discusses how ‘Dune’ shaped some of his other projects, noting that the book “increased a desire to be in contact with the infinity of the desert.” Desert scenes are often present in the director’s other projects – in this interview, he talks specifically of “Incendies,” his 2010 adaptation of a play by Wajdi Mouawad – and much of that is rooted in the way Villeneuve perceived the “emptiness in the landscape, the impact of silence” in Herbert’s original book.
Over the course of the interview, Villeneuve also opens up about his personal relationship to filmmaking, admitting that he came to direction by way of childhood anxiety. “I was very afraid of the world,” the director admits, “and as I was going to sleep, the only way I could sleep was to start to design stories in my mind.” This was actually where “Dune” began for Villeneuve, as a series of storyboards he would work on to help calm his anxiety. According to the director, he and a childhood friend would collaborate on them together. “When we were 12 or 13 years old, or something like that, we started to do storyboards for ‘Dune.’”
READ MORE: Hans Zimmer Says He’s Trying “Something Different” For The “Dune” Score
So turn off your phone and block out an hour to spend with Villeneuve’s interview. After all, there are “Dune” secrets to be learned.