After being delayed over a year from its original October 2020 release date, Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Dune,’ the highly anticipated Sci-Fi experience, premiered in the United States at Lincoln Center’s 59th Annual New York Film Festival on Thursday.
The film was met with multiple well-deserved standing ovations, and the excitement of finally being able to see the masterpiece on screen was an incredible experience had by all.
Staring Timothée Chalamet and based on Frank Herbert’s critically acclaimed novel of the same name, Dune centers around the desert planet Arrakis, where a spice called melange, the most valuable substance known in the universe, is created. A royal decree awards Arrakis to Duke Leto Atreides and ousts his bitter enemies, the Harkonnens. However, when the Harkonnens violently seize back their fiefdom, it is up to Leto’s son Paul, played by Chalamet, to lead the Fremen, the natives of Arrakis, in a battle for control over the planet and its spice.
It takes a village to create a film such as this one, and there is no one better to lead than Villeneuve. NYFF Director Eugene Hernandez sat down with Denis and composer Hans Zimmer to talk all about the process that led to this smash hit. Check out the conversation below!
Eugene Hernandez: When I watch the movie and you get to the end and one of the last lines is “this is just the beginning” I think, okay what’s next?
Denis Villeneuve: I was strongly feeling that to give justice to the book, two parts were necessary. But the deal I wanted was to shoot two parts at the same time, but that felt too expensive to do. I will tell you the truth, I remember my last movie was not a big success here, so you’ll always have that burden. You know, you have to realize that I was waiting for decades to make this movie so to have the chance to just make the first part was already a massive privilege to me.
Eugene Hernandez: So let’s talk about the adaptation process. Tackling this book, I understand that you read it as a teen for the first time, there’s certainly been a number of films influenced or inspired by or adapted from this this legendary book, tell us what drew you to this story.
Denis Villeneuve: The thing is that the book itself is a multi-layered portrait of the 20th century that became more relevant as time goes by. The challenge of the adaptation was that, for the people who know the book, it’s a book that follows the thought process of several characters. It’s a very paranoid book where everybody is trying to find strategies to survive and the idea of Han’s power is the idea that I didn’t want to have voice overs. I didn’t want to hear their thoughts so I relied on acting and on Hans.
Hans Zimmer: Honestly, I mean, Denis asked me very quietly one day, had I heard of a book called Dune, and I think my reaction scared him. I became very enthusiastic and I said when I read it as a teenager 40-some-odd years ago, I made my own movie in my head and I never saw the David Lynch movie and I never heard the title soundtrack and I never saw the television series or any of this, because I wanted to keep this in my head. But when Denis very quietly asked me, there was something in the way he said had I ever read the book, that I knew he had made the same movie in his head that I was making in my head. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I think part of our process was that whenever we discussed things somehow, it was a full on conclusion that we felt the same way about certain things. For instance, one of the things that was incredibly important for us was that the foundation of this movie was the female characters and the fear of the female voice. In fact she’s here tonight, Laura Cutler, who’s amazing — one of the extraordinary things that she did was she was fearless. There’s commitment in every note she sang and those are the things that Denis and I were hunting down right from the beginning, the spirituality and the female. I think part of what we had was just that. We wanted to make this movie all our lives, and all we had to do was sort of stand there and look out and people would come and join us in this quest and they were enormously amazing and excellent and here we are. And you are the last part of this excellent journey. Yes, we made it for you
Denis Villeneuve: We were talking about it with the one of the producers backstage, Daniela Point, and she was saying when we hear Laura’s performance, which is out of this world, it’s so poetic, and it brings so much of a sacred quality to the movie. You have to remember that this was done during Covid time. So Laura was actually singing in her closet, that is a testimony of how great an artist can be. I have the most beautiful photo of her, sitting in her closet with her clothes hanging down on her head, basically singing these amazing parts because yes, I mean, it sounds like an opera but it’s the closet. Only a true artist could do that.
Eugene Hernandez: Well let me ask you, so you both read the book as a teenager, and I wonder, what struck you about it then and then when you went back to it so many years later for this, what struck you the same or what struck you differently? What did you see then and then what did you see now?
Hans Zimmer: When I read it I was, I don’t know,16, 17, 18, something like that. And it served me well throughout life to know, for instance, that fear is the mind killer. I have stage fright, every time I do a score, every time I play something to somebody it’s sheer panic and anxiety, and somehow that book was what got me through some really terrible moments. And here comes the interesting thing, so when Denis said, have you ever heard of a book called Dune, it took me back to that place I was in when I first read it, and I realized that I had not aged somehow. You know, the story gave me a moment of timelessness. And I think that it’s pretty provocative, let’s be honest, it’s a pretty provocative score. Thank you Denis for letting me do this.
Denis Villeneuve: I will say that when I read it, I read it at 13 years old, so I identify with Paul, and the idea that he was like this boy struggling with a massive burden on his shoulder, of familiarity, genetic heritage, religious heritage, and then him finding solace, finding comfort in another culture in a foreign land, that there was something very beautiful about those ideas that really grabbed me when I was young. Also I was kind of into biology and science at the time and the way Herbert was inspired by ecosystems and the way he created all those relationships between the living things, I thought that was very poetic and very powerful at the time. Later on I think I was more drawn by the idea that you can actually channel past voices and make something good out of it. At the time maybe I was starting to struggle with neurosis or struggling with the problem of the past of your your genetic heritage, there’s something pretty powerful about this idea that I deeply loved. So it’s a book that when you read it, you’re all getting older. I heard recently that there’s a study that says that we are attached to the songs of our teenage years because at this very precise moment, our brains absorb things more. The later on you get, your brain becomes more lazy and that’s why you’re always nostalgic to those songs. I’m wondering if it’s the same thing with books, Hans.
Hans Zimmer: Well probably, but you know I love that you use the word nostalgic because one of the really strange things about science fiction or anything, name a science fiction movie that isn’t inherently nostalgic. You know they all are. They’re supposed to be about the future but in our hearts, every time we watch them we feel some timelessness that we are drawn back to, you know? I suppose that our youth is that moment in time, just when you first discovered Dune.
Eugene Hernandez: You talked about making a movie for the big screen, for the cinematic experience, so let’s talk about some of the choices you made. Where you shot, how you shot, the decisions you made about the way you would shoot and the environment you would shoot, with or without green screens, these kinds of things help us understand some of the creative decisions you made.
Denis Villeneuve: I wish I was able to shoot in virtual environments. My life would be so much easier. I’m very, very old school. I need real environments, I need real sets, I need to go in the deep desert, I need to inspire myself to inspire the actors and cinematographer. A movie like this would have never been possible to be shot in a backlot. The way we share it, it’s this idea that a boy will, as he progressively goes deeper into this landscape, learn more about himself. It’s a very introspective journey in a relationship with the landscape that I wanted the actors to be inspired by. I wanted Timothée to relive that process. It’s something that I wanted. It’s the way the book was written, inspired by nature, and I wanted nature to be the main character of the film.
Eugene Hernandez: Thank you for that answer, and let me ask a similar question to Hans about the score and the music because I want to go a little deeper. I was doing a little bit of research about you, and I read that you were thinking about the wind and the sand creating instruments and using the human voice. So can you help us understand these different elements you used in collaboration?
Hans Zimmer: Well it actually started off as yet another teenage thing. The first time I saw Star Wars was, of course, a feeling of wow it was amazing and I loved it, I mean I’m such a fan of John Williams’s music in it. But as a teenager, there was that thought that came into my head going, you know, in a galaxy far, far from here, why am I hearing strings? Why am I hearing trumpets? Why am I hearing horns? And I was thinking, if we are set in this different time in a different space, shouldn’t we have different instruments? Shouldn’t our instruments have evolved? So to answer half of your question, yes we made it. We built a lot of instruments. I have a friend called Jazz Smith who is a great musician, a great sculptor, and a great welder. That’s half the answer, the other half of the answer of course is Loa and Lisa Gerrard, and people like that who you know are absolutely phenomenal at just being these fearless instruments and doing things. Because I’m asking things of them which are beyond human and they just go and sit in that cupboard and do it and give us these gifts of beauty and grace and just enormous courage and great musicality.
See Dune in theaters starting October 22.
