The Blockbuster That Hollywood Was Afraid to Make
When I asked him about his film adaptation of Dune, the writer-director Denis Villeneuve quickly held up his prized copy of Frank Herbert’s book, a French-translation paperback with a particularly striking cover that he’s owned since he was 13. “I keep the book beside me as I’m working,” Villeneuve told me cheerfully over Zoom. “I made this movie for myself. Being a hard-core Dune fan, the first audience member I wanted to please was myself. Everything you receive is there because I love it.”
His enthusiasm is infectious, but that’s a bold approach to making a movie with a reported, only the second big-screen adaptation of the highest-selling science-fiction novel of all time. The first, David Lynch’s 1984 effort, was such a critical and financial flop that Lynch still hates the of it. That film’s failure gave the book a reputation for being unadaptable: too long, unwieldy, and dense with lore to work on a’s immense depth and breadth are strengths, not challenges—his movie , rather than trying to rush through them in search of a Hollywood ending.
