THE SANDMAN
Denis Villeneuve loves a challenge. The Quebecois filmmaker turned a horrific real-life misogynistic massacre – the sort of material that would normally yield only the lowest form of exploitation – into 2009’s sensitive Polytechnique (shot twice, in French and Englishlanguage versions). He adapted José Saramago’s unfilmable novel ‘The Double’ into 2013’s sublimely singular Enemy. He took on a sequel to Ridley Scott’s much loved Blade Runner and crafted from it an soulful epic of humanity’s evolution.
Blade Runner 2049, from 2017, and 2016’s excellent Arrival, marked Villeneuve’s own evolution towards science fiction, and now he is characteristically essaying another impossible work: Frank Herbert’s expansive 1965 novel ‘Dune’. Shot in IMAX, the first part of this sprawling space saga, with its internecine, interplanetary dynastic struggles, its desert uprisings and gigantic worms, is now complete. Villeneuve talks us through the collision of this arid alien world and his own wildly fertile imagination.
LWLies: From your feature debut August 32nd on Earth to Incendies, Sicario, Blade Runner 2049 and now Dune, you have often been a director of deserts. What keeps drawing a filmmaker from cold-climate Canada to the dry sandy wastelands?
Villeneuve: I was raised by the St Lawrence River, and I was someone who spent a very meditative childhood looking at the horizon. There are similarities, in wintertime, with the horizon. It’s like something that has an impact on the soul.
