[Villeneuve’s hugely anticipated, pandemic-delayed adaptation of
Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel Dune is an environmental fable,
a parable of the oil economy, a critique of colonialism, a warning
against putting your faith in charismatic leaders.]
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THE MAN WHO FINALLY MADE A ‘DUNE’ THAT FANS WILL LOVE  
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How Denis Villeneuve broke the curse.
October 13, 2021
New York Times
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_ Villeneuve’s hugely anticipated, pandemic-delayed adaptation of
Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel Dune is an environmental fable,
a parable of the oil economy, a critique of colonialism, a warning
against putting your faith in charismatic leaders. _

, Illustration by Jacqueline Tam

 

Earlier this summer, sitting in a London cinema for a screening of
Denis Villeneuve’s hugely anticipated, pandemic-delayed adaptation
of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel “Dune,”
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found myself unexpectedly close to tears. I’d not been in a movie
theater in almost two years, and I’d forgotten what it was like.
Forgotten how the light inside a big auditorium always feels dusty and
late-night weary, no matter what time it is. Forgotten the particular
smell of popcorn and carpet cleaner, how it evokes a childhood memory
of brushing my fingers across the static on the glass of a
just-switched-on TV set; forgotten the vertiginous scale of the space
and the screen.

When the film began, I heard the thump of a heartbeat working in
counterpoint to my own, bursts of percussive discordance as Hans
Zimmer’s score cut in, and then harsh desert light was burning the
backs of my eyes and I was somewhere else entirely, witnessing the
brutal quelling of an insurgency on a distant planet — and after a
while, I realized I was whispering, “Oh, my God” under my breath
over and over again. Afterward, I walked along empty streets with my
head full of deserts and burning date palms, vast ships, monstrous
sandworms and a sense of wonderment that the book’s visions had been
so exquisitely realized. Josh Brolin, who plays the warrior-minstrel
Gurney Halleck in the movie, took a lifelong “Dune”-fan friend to
a screening in New York, and at the end of the movie the friend
started screaming: “That was it! That was it! That’s what I saw!
That’s what I saw when I was a kid!”

Featuring stars like Timothée Chalamet,
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Isaac,
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Ferguson,
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Brolin,
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Skarsgard,
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Bardem,
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was three and a half years in production and cost approximately $165
million to make. Forgoing the green screens of most sci-fi movies,
Villeneuve shot on location in the deserts of Jordan and the United
Arab Emirates, where actors sweated in rubber costumes in 120-degree
heat. When Warner Brothers announced that “Dune” would be streamed
on HBO Max at the same time as its U.S. theatrical release, Villeneuve
wrote a blistering response in Variety denouncing their action. “It
was for my mental sanity,” he later told me. “I was so angry,
bitter and wounded,” he said, of the studio’s choice. He
understood the pressures of the pandemic, but he had made “Dune”
as a love letter to the big screen. The decision to stream the film
seemed to Villeneuve symptomatic of threats to the cinematic tradition
itself, which he sees as fulfilling an ancient human need for communal
storytelling.

All this made me nervous as I sat down at my kitchen table for my
first interview with the director, conducted over Zoom because of the
pandemic. I knew Villeneuve was a fiercely idealistic figure, and
expected a forbidding auteur. But when his face appeared on my laptop
screen, I was struck by how kind it seemed, and slightly melancholy.
His hair and beard were lockdown-disheveled, and he wore a dark
open-necked shirt and a pair of earbuds. Speaking in a soft
Québécois accent, he apologized for his English and initially
radiated an air of cautious politesse. I later discovered that he was
as anxious about the interview as I was. When I held up my “Star
Wars” mug to demonstrate my sci-fi credentials, his eyebrows rose
high over his half-rim glasses, and he grinned.

An environmental fable, a parable of the oil economy, a critique of
colonialism, a warning against putting your faith in charismatic
leaders, “Dune” tells the story of Paul Atreides, an aristocratic
teenager who travels to a distant land; joins with a desert people,
the Fremen; becomes their messiah; and leads them into revolt against
their colonial oppressors. Paul’s story recalls “Lawrence of
Arabia” (Herbert was influenced by T.E. Lawrence), and
“Lawrence” came to mind as I watched “Dune.” Each movie is a
character-driven geopolitical epic, each was filmed in Jordan’s Wadi
Rum and each is a spectacularly beautiful cinematic ode to the desert.

Denis Villeneuv. Pat Martin for The New York Times

Villeneuve’s movies have often revisited desert landscapes: salt
flats in Utah in his first movie, “Un 32 Août Sur Terre”
(“August 32nd on Earth”); the Middle Eastern desert
of “Incendies”;
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Chihuahuan desert for “Sicario”;
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sands under postapocalyptic fog shrouding Las Vegas in “Blade
Runner 2049.”
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he told me his impulse to make “Dune” was just a pretext to go
back deep into the desert, he laughed. Villeneuve’s laughter, I
would learn, often precedes statements of searching honesty. He loves
deserts for the feeling of isolation they bring, he explained, how
they “reflect your interiority, and the deeper you go in the desert,
the deeper you go in yourself. That kind of introspection always had a
very deep melancholic impact on me,” he added. “In the desert I
feel strangely at home.” He drew a parallel with Paul Atreides,
played by Chalamet in “Dune.” “When Paul is for the first time
in contact with the desert,” Villeneuve explained, it “feels
strangely familiar. That for me is the moment that deeply moves me.
The fact that he is in a totally alien landscape, but he feels at
home.”

Villeneuve has a particular talent for making the alien feel familiar.
Working with renowned cinematographers like Roger Deakins, Greig
Fraser and Bradford Young, he has an extraordinary ability to ground
sci-fi in a sense of lived reality. When I watched his 2016
movie, “Arrival,”
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which Amy Adams’s academic linguist learns to communicate with
visiting aliens, its monolithic spaceships hanging above lush valleys
and rolling fog felt impossible but somehow absolutely plausible.
“Arrival” can also be read as an exquisite allegory for the power
of cinema: Fragile humans in a dark space face a luminous screen
behind which strange forms move and speak in a visual language that,
once deciphered, transforms the world.

“He’s in that rarefied Christopher Nolan space,” Timothée
Chalamet told me. “The space of directors that can make movies at a
huge level but not lose any of the sort of — I don’t say indie
qualities, but whatever, auteur qualities.” From the devastating
exploration of trauma, identity and the legacies of violence in
“Incendies” (2010), to the claustrophobia of “Enemy” (2013),
in which Jake Gyllenhaal’s character battles what appears to be his
subconscious in the person of his own double, to the disturbing
exploration of extraterritorial state power in “Sicario” (2015)
and the meditation on objectification and misogyny of “Blade Runner
2049,” Villeneuve’s movies pay painstaking attention to character
and place and are always profoundly intimate, no matter how epic their
scale. He moves easily among genres — his love of American pop
cinema, he told me, made him abolish these boundaries in his mind. He
hates snobbism, he hates boxes. He sighs when he says the word
“genre.”

Making “Dune” presented vast challenges, not least of which was
the novel’s history as a graveyard of cinematic hopes — to such an
extent that the phrase “the Curse of ‘Dune”’ haunts the
internet. David Lynch was so unhappy with the cut of his 1984
adaptation, which starred Kyle MacLachlan and an infamously codpieced
Sting, that he disavowed it; Alejandro Jodorowsky’s detailed plans
for a 10-plus-hour version featuring Orson Welles, Mick Jagger and
Salvador Dalí unsurprisingly never got off the ground. (“I’m not
sure if he was interested to adapt ‘Dune’ more than to do a
fantastic Jodorowsky movie,” Villeneuve mused. “I don’t know if
he was really interested by ‘Dune.’ And Lynch, it’s a bit the
same way, I think, you know?”) Villeneuve doesn’t think he’s the
only person who could have done “Dune” justice, but for him, he
said, it was “about the book, the book, _the book.”_ He also
wanted to make his film as grounded in reality as possible, eschewing
the supernatural. Paul Atreides might have visions of the future,
which are heightened when he is exposed to Arrakis’s most valuable
commodity, a compound mined from the desert sands called spice, but
though he’s an extraordinary being, he isn’t “a wizard,”
Villeneuve says. “He’s just someone who is very sensitive to a
psychedelic substance.”

Villeneuve and Zendaya on the set of “Dune” in Jordan in April
2019. Chiabella James.

Villeneuve was 14 when he first saw the book, an edition with an
arresting cover in the small library near his school in
Trois-Rivières, Quebec: the face of a dark-skinned man with piercing
blue eyes against a remote desert background. It was beautiful, he
told me, lifting a copy with the same cover from his desk. He has kept
it through the years, and is using it to write the second movie
(“Dune” is a famously complex novel, and Villeneuve only agreed to
adapt it if it could be broken into two films). Looking at it even now
evokes the same emotions he felt back then: “mystery, isolation,
loneliness.” Villeneuve has dreamed of making “Dune” since he
was a teenager; he tried to make his movie as “close to the dream as
possible, and it was very difficult, because the dreams of a teenager
are very totalitarian. I was not expecting it would be so difficult to
please that guy!”

IN OUR CONVERSATIONS, Villeneuve was passionate, extremely funny and
honest to the point of vulnerability. Soon it felt so much like
talking with an old friend that I started telling him stories about my
own life. When I asked him about his childhood, I apologized,
explaining that I get impatient when people ask about my own childhood
to gain insight into my work; it has always seemed reductive. But then
Villeneuve gave me a lesson in how early memories can shape creative
practice. As a young boy, he told me, he’d sit with his mother
watching a children’s television show called “Sol et Gobelet.” A
low-budget set, a black backdrop. “Two clowns having adventures
together in an imaginary world. I know deep in my soul that I owe a
lot to these two guys.” He said that the show changed his life, that
you could see his cinematic influences as a cross-mix of these clowns
and the work of other filmmakers. Their level of suggestion, their
theatricality, the way they played with the theater of convention,
their minimalism — there’s even a direct connection between the
black nothingness of the show’s backdrop and Roger Deakins’s
red-desert set in “Blade Runner 2049”: “Where there was nothing,
I put sand on the floor, and Roger filled the space with a kind of
smoke, a specific smoke, so it created infinity. And I remember having
the best time, and it was that feeling of infinity, and the tension
that emptiness created.”

Villeneuve grew up in Gentilly, a small village near the St. Lawrence
River whose wide horizons gave him a predilection to dream. His love
of sci-fi began with a gift from his Aunt Huguette when he was 7:
three cardboard boxes stuffed with French sci-fi comics, “Métal
Hurlant,” “Pilote” and others, distant worlds brought into
existence by Moebius, Enki Bilal and Jean-Claude Mézières, Philippe
Druillet. Soon he was writing sci-fi stories on his grandfather’s
typewriter — they were no good, he tells me, miming tearing out the
page, with an exasperated _“Bof!”_

Villeneuve’s deep love of nature, his craving to be in contact with
it, came from his maternal grandmother. She was a paragon of nurture
— he smiled with nostalgia at the image he remembers of her
gardening: “a big butt in flowers!” Both of his grandmothers were
“strong characters. And very opposite. One of them was an operatic
character, the other one was a benevolent, warm grandmother, it’s
fantastic. I realize I receive so much from them, but there are so
many — there are a lot of neuroses.” In his earliest discussions
with the screenwriters Eric Roth and Jon Spaihts, all were clear that
Villeneuve wanted to foreground the story’s women, particularly Lady
Jessica, “a very complex character — she has multiple agendas.”
As Paul’s mother, a duke’s partner and a member of the ancient and
mysterious female order of the Bene Gesserit — the most significant
power in the story — she is “the architect, the thinker, the
reason why this novel exists,” Villeneuve told me, adding: “She is
the one who is the teacher. She is the guide, she’s the one with the
inspiration.”

The Bene Gesserit are not benevolent shapers of history. Paul Atreides
is part of their breeding program, his messianic role on Arrakis a
result of their seeding the planet with myths thousands of years
earlier. As Villeneuve sees it, he’s a victim of religious
colonialism, full of ancestral voices talking with him. I thought of
Paul when Villeneuve spoke of his own fascination with the baggage of
generational memory. Villeneuve doesn’t consider himself just the
product of his grandmothers and great-grandmothers; he has them inside
him. “I have their being. I have their fears. I have their weight of
existence.”

He spent much of his childhood on the bench watching other kids
playing hockey. He doesn’t blame the coach. “I was probably,” he
said, amused, “one of the 10 worst hockey players of all time in
Canada. I was, like, so clueless with the puck, you know?” The best
days were those of heavy rain, when sport was impossible and he could
retreat into a book-filled room at home. It was pure paradise to close
the door and spend the whole day reading sci-fi novels.

One day at school, Villeneuve was tapped on his shoulder. “See that
guy over there?” another pupil informed him. “He’s mad like you.
He wants to do ‘Star Wars’ in his basement next summer. So I think
you should meet him.” Pretty soon he was best friends with a kid
named Nicolas Kadima. Where other boys their age were smoking weed and
discovering girls and soccer, Villeneuve and Kadima were “clueless.
We were like cinema monks.” They spent their nights watching
Eisenstein and Godard, were obsessed with Spielberg, Ridley Scott and
Kubrick. They weren’t filmmaking (“We were too lazy for that”),
but they wrote screenplays, drew storyboards — Villeneuve still has
some that Kadima drew for “Dune” — and they dreamed.

Villeneuve needed to shoot the movie in real desert landscapes, he
told me, ‘for my own mental sanity.’

“It was intense,” Villeneuve recalled fondly. “There’s
something there that was, like, pure, and beautiful in a way.” As
soon as you take a camera, you learn humility. “But before that
moment, you think you’re the next Kubrick.” He and Kadima stopped
going to church, he told me, hoping to be excommunicated, but were
“ready to give our blood to the gods of cinema, like Coppola, like
Spielberg, Scorsese.” (He admitted that nowadays, when he runs into
some of his idols, he is thrilled. He becomes a child again, he
explained. “I can start to cry, sometimes. The first time I met
Spielberg, I cried — I mean, not in front of him,” he adds
quickly. “But I cried.”)

He was expected to become a biologist, but decided to follow his
interest in film. “There was something that needed to get out,” he
said, “and I would have got depressed if it didn’t get out,
that’s the truth.” After studying communications and film at the
University of Quebec in Montreal and winning a Radio-Canada filmmaking
competition, Villeneuve began working in what he describes as the
“beautiful laboratory” of the Québécois documentary tradition.
What does it feel like, I asked him, to have moved away from his
cultural and creative roots? “It’s a big wound,” he said,
seriously. “I feel a crack in myself.” But he felt he had to
leave. Until the 1960s filmmaking in Canada focused on the documentary
form, he said, and fiction was relatively unknown. “I realized at
one point that — and that’s very arrogant,” he admitted —
“nobody could teach me anything here, I had to go outside.”

Today, he said, living in Montreal but working in Hollywood, he’s
asked on an almost daily basis: “So, Denis? When are you coming back
to make a movie here? We are looking forward to seeing a movie in
French.” But, he said, “the thing is that I feel that I am at
home.” It was American movies that moved him when he was young, so
much so he was nicknamed Spielberg at school. Only later did he become
interested in European cinema. (Villeneuve discovered the French New
Wave as a teenager after watching François Truffaut in Spielberg’s
“Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”) With his first feature
film, he confessed: “I was trying to be closer to my roots. My
influences were more European. But at one point there was a moment
where I said: Stop that crap! That’s not what I am! And when I
realized that, it was so much freedom.” The moment he understood
that at heart he was an American director “was the beginning of pure
happiness. And that’s where I started to have fun with cinema. I
think I started to make better films. That’s where I started to
become a real director, I think.”

“I MUST NOT FEAR. Fear is the mind-killer” is the most famous
line in “Dune.” It appears on innumerable motivational posters,
has been inked by tattooists into uncountable arms. It’s part of the
litany of the Bene Gesserit Order. Because fear obliterates thought,
the litany holds, it must be mastered and discarded. But for
Villeneuve, fear is a generative emotion, and cinema is what he has
used and continues to use to defeat it. He sees cinema — not just
watching movies, but also the act of making them — as the force that
drives him out of his shell, brings him into contact with other
people. Without cinema, he told me, he could be easily trapped in a
hole with the door locked, afraid of the world. “It brings me,” he
said, “solace.” His forehead furrowed. “Solace, or ... I do not
know what is the right word.” He looked worried. “Solace? What
does it mean, solace, exactly?” He searched for it on his computer.
It was the right word, of course.

Risk and danger are, for him, intrinsic to creation. One of his
favorite movies is a 1956 documentary called “Le Mystère
Picasso,” by the French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot. It was
“like a bomb in my soul,” he told me. In it, a shirtless Picasso,
then in his mid-70s, paints upon a screen filmed from behind so that
the artist is invisible, and all you can see is the work coming into
existence, line by line, brush stroke by brush stroke. “He can do a
painting and then add something, and then add something, and add
something, then says, It’s a piece of [expletive] — and we are
talking about three weeks of work — and then he destroys it, and
does it again, 20 times.” Watching it moved him deeply. “Because
it shows that creativity is an act of vulnerability, where your path
to success is narrow, and you have to let yourself experiment.”

Villeneuve’s insistence on real-world locations for “Dune” led
him to spend days in a helicopter on reconnaissance flights over the
desert. “When you go up in the air, there are things that reveal
themselves, like some twin mountains that look like two old
grandmothers, that I feel were so linked with the nature of the movie,
and they became kind of characters for me,” he explained. The
movie’s cinematographer, Greig Fraser, came to the project straight
after working on “The Mandalorian,” a “Star Wars” series
filmed almost entirely in a virtual studio where real-time computer
rendering of scenery moves seamlessly on screens behind the cast. This
process gives directors absolute control over the environment — it
“takes out the problem of [expletive] that goes on in the world,
like cloud cover, like someone parking the portaloo in the wrong
spot,” as Fraser puts it. When Fraser offered some of this
technology to Villeneuve, he declined. Villeneuve needed to shoot the
movie in real desert landscapes, the director told me, “for my own
mental sanity, to be able to inspire myself to find back that feeling
I was looking for of isolation, of introspection.”

Villeneuve wanted tactility, not control. He knew that real locations
would fuel the creativity of his cinematographer and actors too. The
sets in Budapest were constructed as massive environments and rooms so
that their physical reality might spark ideas, bring something into
the actors’ performances. “You cannot do that with green
screens,” he said. “It’s not possible. Not for me. Maybe some
people can, but not me.” Usually, when filming on location, Greig
Fraser told me, everyone always has backup plans, just in case. But
with Denis, he said, the philosophy was the opposite. “Well, in Abu
Dhabi, coming from the top — and that’s Denis — we all went:
‘No. We’re not going to. We’re basically going to walk out on
the gangplank, and we’re going to give ourselves no options.’ When
I say no options, well, first of all we had a fantastic script, with
fantastic actors, in fantastic costume, in a fantastic location — I
mean, it’s not like we didn’t have any options. We removed the
noise of backups.”

The “Dune” production designer Patrice Vermette told me they used
Google Earth to look for the right location for the scenes on Arrakis:
a desert with rock formations that the Fremen would use as refuges
from the searing, inimical heat. They found promising candidates in
Iran, Chad, Mauritania, Libya. “Pretty difficult,” he admitted.
They ended up in Wadi Rum, “like a trade show of rock formations,”
but it lacked dunes. The team collected samples of sand from Jordan in
water bottles so they could match its color to another location, and
ended up in the vast dune fields of the Rub’ Al Khali desert in Abu
Dhabi.

Josh Brolin and Timothée Chalamet in “Dune.” Chiabella James

Villeneuve’s insistence on filming in real-world environments was
shaped by his early work as a documentarian. In the early 1990s he
traveled to Ellesmere Island as part of a small unit with the
Québécois filmmaker Pierre Perrault to shoot a poetic natural
history documentary, called “Cornouailles,” about musk oxen
defending their tundra territories. “It’s about French Canadians
and America,” he told me, wryly. He was there to bring the tripods
and make the soup, but the experience was transformative. “I saw
things there,” he said, “that I will never see again in my life.
And that I will never experience again. To walk inside a glacier,
things that are difficult to describe — but it was like being on
another planet.” Like the desert, the tundra had a deep
psychological impact on him, instilling a sense of humility, the
feeling that he was “seeing the earth without any skin. It’s like
you are at the core, you are in contact with time ... with infinity
and time.”

The “Cornouailles” shoot taught Villeneuve to embrace the
exigencies of a real-life location where “every day the landscape in
front of you is totally different, according to light and the nature
of the elements” — and in a more existential sense, the tundra
revealed to him how small and insignificant we are, an experience
familiar to many of those involved with “Dune.” Patrice Vermette
told me that on entering Wadi Rum, “there is this thing that hits
you — you’re humbled by the magnitude. It was a spiritually
amazing experience just to be there.” Sharon Duncan-Brewster, who
plays Liet-Kynes, the imperial planetologist, found the shoot
psychologically as well as physiologically affecting: “It was
intense to begin with, but of course the body just sort of adapts. And
once you make peace with it — and I think that’s the glorious
thing about exactly what this story is about — it’s once you go,
‘It’s hot, and there’s nothing I can do about this, the only
thing I can do is sweat, right? And drink water, and remember to piss
when I can,’” she says, she started to see these landscapes as
magical, mysterious, alarming.

These grueling location shoots forged a strong sense of community
among cast, crew and production. “If we were shooting in obscure
rock formations in Jordan, you would see Denis picking up a camera
battery,” Chalamet explains. “Everyone taking their part and
helping out.” Duncan-Brewster agrees, pointing out that for
Villeneuve, “it doesn’t matter who it is: As long as you are on
the team, you are _team._ You could be the person who has picked up
a bottle of water and put it in a bin, right up to Denis’s
right-hand person, and he’s still there 100 percent.”

Villeneuve inspires intense devotion in those who work with him. “An
incredible human being,” Josh Brolin told me. Timothée Chalamet
described him as “one of the most beautiful souls.” “A
magician,” Rebecca Ferguson maintained. “Genius.” The
screenwriter Jon Spaihts described him as “generous and humble and
charming and everything you could want in a creative partner.” The
only person who told me anything different was the film’s production
designer, Patrice Villette, one of Villeneuve’s longtime
collaborators and friends. “He’s a monster,” he told me,
solemnly, before bursting out laughing at the ludicrousness of this
statement.

At the heart of “Dune,” Villeneuve explained, is the necessity for
adaptation: how evolution requires contact with others. Paul comes of
age through adapting to Arrakis’s hostile desert environment,
freeing himself from the past by joining with the Fremen community and
learning from them. “To me it’s a beautiful thing, and it sounds
probably naïve and simple,” he told me, “but we need other people
to evolve.” Villeneuve has a fascination with the charged space
created when one culture encounters another, and the complex ways in
which selfhood and identity shift and move on both sides in response.

But it’s not just identity that is negotiated in that space: It’s
also where creativity is realized. Artistic creation is born in the
space between a person and a landscape, between self and other,
between minds engaged upon the same project. However much a film might
be an individual director’s dream, the deepest joy of cinema for
Villeneuve is the magic that comes from collaboration. For Villeneuve,
the process is bodily, instinctive and intuitive. When the pandemic
made it impossible to work in the same room as his long-term editor,
Joe Walker, he found virtual working taxing. “It’s not the
same,” he maintained. “It’s like playing music.” While
editing, you need to “feel the other, feel his reaction, feel your
own reaction. There are so many ideas that Joe and I have, I don’t
know if it’s his idea or my idea — it comes from the addition of
us both being in the room. Which is by far my favorite thing about
cinema.”

Josh Brolin spoke with amused fondness of the consequences of
Villeneuve’s need for physical presence while collaborating.
“We’re friends and we’re close, but when you get a call at 3 in
the morning and he says: ‘My friend, I just had a dream. I had a
dream. ... I had whole new idea for Gurney, and I think that you
should come over here and we should talk.” When Brolin replied,
“No, no, no, just tell me!” he says, Villeneuve “was like,
‘No, you need to come over here.’ I was like: ‘No, man! Just
tell me! It’s the middle of the night, I don’t wanna come over.’
And he was like: ‘No, no, no! It doesn’t work!’ In the end,
Brolin went over and they talked and wrote together. With anyone else,
Brolin said, this kind of behavior would be an affectation, but not
Villeneuve. “To me Denis is one of these guys that you know he’s
truly the black sheep. Like, without this, what would have happened,
what would he have done? Without being able to utilize his
imagination, his sensitivities, his vulnerabilities, his, you know, I
don’t know man, you know? He’s just. ... He’s off, Denis is off.
And in a way that I find so beautiful and so ingratiating and so
gentle, even though he’s yelled at me and I’ve yelled back at him,
it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because it comes from a place
of real love.”

ONE AFTERNOON, I told Villeneuve about how, as a child, I developed
an obsession with the nuclear-power stations at Sizewell in Suffolk,
England, visible from the seaside town where we spent our family
holidays. I was transfixed by the unimaginable power and peril it
held, and I told him that his vast ships in “Arrival” and
“Dune” gave me an eerily similar sensation. I knew that Villeneuve
grew up near such a plant and wondered if there was a connection.
Villeneuve laughed with surprise and delight. “You said that, and I
feel two wires touching in my brain — I never made the
connection,” he said. But, yes, he went on, there was a link between
what he felt at the plant’s two concrete towers and the ships built
for “Arrival” and “Dune.” “There’s something about that
terror that from a subconscious point of view I’m bringing back to
the screen.” He remembered his father’s reassurances that the
power plant was safe, but it always felt an act of faith that all that
power would be held there safely. “I was born in a place where there
were two churches,” he explained, “the church and the
nuclear-power plant.” The links among risk, fear, generation,
creation, destruction and memory run old and deep in Villeneuve.
Despite the threat of nuclear apocalypse, “we were innocent,”
Villeneuve said, of his childhood in Gentilly. “We had hope.”
Hope, as the activist Mariame Kaba has said, is a discipline, and
it’s one that’s hard to maintain. To keep hope for the future
alive we have to consider it as still uncertain, have to believe that
concerted, collective human action might yet avert disaster.

“Dune” the movie has clear contemporary relevance: It’s an
ecological epic that warns against religious and imperialist dogma and
portrays a people suffering under colonial occupation, a film whose
main character is forced to adapt to a new reality or die. When
Villeneuve describes “Dune” as a “coming-of-age story,” it
feels far more than the coming-of-age of Paul Atreides. The phrase
speaks more generally of our need to adapt and evolve, shed the ghosts
of how we have always lived, in order to survive. For the strangest
thing happened to me after watching “Dune” this summer: It slipped
into a different part of my memory than films usually do. It felt like
news. Images from it have unexpectedly become part of the way I’ll
always remember this summer and fall: images of burning ships and
glittering sands interspersed with forest fires, the terrible legacies
of colonial crimes, failed wars, the constant drumbeat of the
pandemic, waves of religious and neo-religious fervor spurred by
societal inequities and the constant, dreadful background knowledge
that the climate is breaking down around us. “Dune” was always an
allegorical novel; sci-fi’s ability to hold up a mirror darkly to
culture is one of its primary aims. But “Dune” the film has
somehow become part of the world for me, less a reflection than a
refraction of reality, burnished with desert dust and shadow.

_HELEN MACDONALD is a contributing writer for the magazine and the
author of the best-selling memoir “H Is for Hawk” and the
short-story collection “Vesper Flights.”_

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