ON THE CUTTING EDGE
How do you follow in the footsteps of a sci-fi masterpiece? Montreal director Denis Villeneuve says he’s ‘serene’ now that Blade Runner 2049 — perhaps the most anticipated release of the year — is done. And he’s happy its Canadian première will be at the
Blade Runner 2049 opens the Festival du nouveau cinéma at an invitation-only screening on Wednesday, Oct. 4 and previews in theatres on Thursday night before opening wide on Friday.
Denis Villeneuve was in a good place Thursday morning — and not just because he was home in Montreal.
He seemed remarkably calm less than a week before the world première of the biggest film of his career — the long-awaited sequel of one of his all-time favourite movies and perhaps the most anticipated release of the year: Blade Runner 2049.
“I feel serene because the movie is made,” he said, sitting on a couch on the top floor of an Old Montreal boutique hotel, clad in a smart black suit, speaking just above a whisper.
“From the beginning, I made peace with the idea that my chances of success were very small and that I couldn’t make this film expecting results or the approval or affection of the film community or the public.
“I had to make this film only as a gesture of creation.
“If not, if I had put pressure on myself linked to the fact that (the original) is a masterpiece, I wouldn’t be here today. I wouldn’t have found freedom or joy.
“When you make cinema, there’s a profound joy of creation, which you have to be in touch with.”
Villeneuve’s freedom is on full display in Blade Runner 2049, a visually spectacular, tonally haunting, dream-like epic that conforms only nominally to Hollywood norms.
“My producer saw the movie and said, ‘OK, we just produced the most expensive art-house movie in film history,’ ” Villeneuve said, mimicking a mock-rueful “ha-ha” for good measure.
At 163 minutes, the $185-million blockbuster unfolds at its own esoteric pace, more concerned with exploring the bruised psyche of Ryan Gosling’s LAPD officer/blade runner, K, and the dark corners of the dystopian world he inhabits, than with shootouts and spaceship chases.
“One of the qualities I wanted to capture is that melancholy, which I found so magnificent in the first film,” Villeneuve said. “It touched me a lot.
“I wanted this film to bathe in that same sweet melancholy.”
Blade Runner 2049 is stunningly faithful to Ridley Scott’s 1982 original, including the return of Harrison Ford, who reprises his role as Rick Deckard. Despite the vast leaps in filmmaking technology in the 35 years between the two films, Villeneuve keeps his future down to earth.
There is grit and tangible texture to every image that appears on-screen.
Which brings us to the images themselves, a trove of mystical tableaux that might well earn cinematographer Roger Deakins his 14th Academy Award nomination and first Oscar.
“This was a project I made with Roger,” said Villeneuve, who first recruited the longtime Coen brothers collaborator for his 2013 thriller Prisoners.
“He was on board from the first day. I agreed to do the movie and that night I had dinner with him and he accepted on the spot.
“I needed help, because of the scope of this project. He came to Montreal and we spent several weeks sketching out and conceiving the film together.
“I owe a lot to Roger Deakins. Esthetically, it was important to me to conserve the film noir qualities of the first film.”
Ironically, the entry point to noir, for Villeneuve, was the white snow of winter he grew up with in Quebec.
“The light of winter,” he explained. “It appears banal but we have this rapport to winter as Canadians, as Québécois.
“Winter speaks to me. I have an intimate rapport with the light, how people walk, how they talk to each other, how they move and think in winter.
“For me, that was the way into Blade Runner.”
Deakins paints the screen with darkness, crafting mesmerizing interplay between shadow and light, and using his characteristically exquisite framing to create an audacious visual language, the likes of which is rarely seen in mega-budget behemoths.
Blade Runner 2049 is not a perfect film. Gosling is rock solid but comes up shy of the required gravitas, while the rare but inevitable concessions to action-film tropes and a tidy narrative arc disrupt the movie’s free-form flow.
That said, it’s a monumental cinematic achievement that is sure to propel Villeneuve’s career into the stratosphere.
“One thing that’s important, and I don’t say this lightly, is that Ridley Scott liked the film, and Harrison Ford, too,” Villeneuve said. “The two fathers (of the original) liked the film. From the moment (I heard that), I was OK.”
Next on the horizon for the childhood sci-fi fan is another reboot of a cherished institution of the genre: Frank Herbert’s Dune, which David Lynch tackled with very mixed results in 1984.
A rumour has been making the rounds of late linking Villeneuve to a franchise of a different kind. He has become a reported frontrunner to direct the next James Bond film.
“I like talking about projects when they’re done,” he said. “Now I have to talk about them before they’re even begun.
“It’s true — I’ve been in discussions with (producer) Barbara Broccoli and (actor) Daniel Craig. It’s a magnificent project; I would love to do a James Bond, but I don’t know how it would fit with my current projects. We’ll have to see.”
In the meantime, he has a
movie to put out. Blade Runner 2049’s world première takes place Oct. 3 in Los Angeles.
Montreal will get its own sneak peek the following night at the Festival du nouveau cinéma, thanks in no small part to Villeneuve.
“Montreal, to me, is associated to Blade Runner,” he said. “I saw the film in Montreal. It’s a city where I remember discovering everything in my adolescence — sexuality, esthetics, fashion.
“When I arrived at (famed punk dive) Foufounes électriques for the first time, I (felt like I) was in Blade Runner. It’s a city that is home.
“And the FNC is one of my favourite festivals. It’s one of the only festivals in the world where I can buy a ticket at random and know I will never be disappointed — there will always be a spark, something singular and stimulating.
“I did a lot of lobbying and pushed hard with the distributors and the producers, and they said OK. It was a gift they gave me. I wanted to bring it to Montreal.”