Spice, sandworms and game-changing sci-fi
From burrowing monsters to desert planets, Denis Villeneuve is taking his myth-building to a whole new level with DUNE
SOME BOOKS STICK with you. That’s how it was for Denis Villeneuve, director of Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, when he read Frank Herbert’s Dune. The young Quebecois read the novel — devoured it, really — when he was “maybe 13 or 14” and was instantly captivated by its epic scope, intricately crafted civilisation and Machiavellian plot. But most of all he connected to its young hero, not much older than Villeneuve himself at the time, and that connection lingered. So when he was asked what he would adapt for the screen if money were no object, “My answer was definitely Dune.”
That meant recreating the harsh desert planet of Arrakis, nicknamed ‘Dune’, where our hero Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his parents, Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) and Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), are going to live as the story begins. Paul grew up on a world of forests and oceans, but now he must survive a hostile environment where his father’s enemies
have almost certainly left booby traps galore. “This idea of someone who has to adapt to a new world is really something that appeals to me,” says Villeneuve. “Paul, at the beginning, is surrounded by adults making decisions for him, and he will become an adult through that story.”
But to make his dream project, Villeneuve had one condition: he wanted to shoot in real deserts on real locations, no studios. “I said to them, they didn’t make Jaws in the swimming pool.” That meant scouring the planet for the huge, sandy dunes of Arrakis’ deep desert (found in Abu Dhabi), and the dry, rocky wastes closer to that planet’s human settlements (found in Jordan). Conditions were sometimes “like a microwave”, according to Villeneuve, and the crew often had trouble standing up in the fierce winds. Still, they kept the cameras rolling. “They were paratroopers.”
In the image above, Paul and his weapons tutor Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) are aboard an ornithopter (imagine a helicopter had a baby with a jump jet), out in the dunes where Arrakis’ immensely valuable “spice” is mined — when its collectors can avoid the enormous sandworms that infest the planet. In developing those creatures, which can easily reach the size of the Empire State Building, Villeneuve and regular production designer Patrice Vermette took their cues from Herbert, who created a whole eco-system around them. “We talked about every little detail that would make such a beast possible, from the texture of the skin to the way the mouth opens to the system to eat its food in the sand. It was a year of work to design and to find the perfect shape that looked prehistoric enough.”
This scene’s also important because it shows a pivotal moment for our hero. “It’s Paul’s first contact with the deep desert, where he’s mesmerised by it. He has a strange feeling of being home. There’s a lot of action at this specific moment, and [it’s] one of the scenes in the movie that I’m starting to get pretty proud of.” As Villeneuve continues work on the film from isolation, it shouldn’t be the last. Dune hits cinemas — “Massive screens! IMAX!” cheers Villeneuve — this December, bringing a blast of that Arrakis heat with it.
THE CONCEPT
In 2012, while editing my first feature, It Felt Like Love, I came across a newspaper story that left me devastated. It was about Savita Halappanavar, a woman in Ireland who died after being denied a life-saving abortion. I read up on the Eighth Amendment in Ireland and was compelled by the dilemma that women who needed an abortion were forced to travel to London and back to get one — often in a single day. In that narrative, I saw a hero’s journey, shrouded in shame, secrecy and tremendous urgency. I wondered what that journey would look like in the United States, and the idea began to form about a teenager in rural Pennsylvania, secretly travelling to New York to abort a pregnancy. I put it aside to make my second film, Beach Rats, but when Trump was elected, the conversation around abortion — and fear of access to it — suddenly seemed more relevant than ever. I knew this story had to be told next.
THE RESEARCH
I’m not a documentary filmmaker, so I wanted the film to be emotional rather than informational. I tried to put myself in the place of a scared, pregnant teenager in a small town: How would I feel? Where would I go? I wanted to experience it for real, so I went to get tested at several ‘crisis centres’ in rural Pennsylvania. These centres exist all over the US, but they’re not medically licensed. Volunteers run them. In one case, a woman actually had to read the instructions on the store-bought pregnancy test before she gave it to me. Details like that went straight into the script. Minors cannot get an abortion in Pennsylvania without parental consent, so I knew that my 17year-old protagonist Autumn, played by Sidney Flanigan, and her cousin would have to travel in secret to a Planned Parenthood clinic in New York. I wanted to put the audience in their shoes — to fully experience all the barriers vulnerable young women in this situation come up against. The film’s title comes from the answers to a real multiple-choice questionnaire you’re given by counsellors at Planned Parenthood. Patients are asked questions about whether they’ve suffered sexual abuse or violence, and they have to respond: “never”, “rarely”, “sometimes” or “always”. The woman who asks Autumn those questions in the film is a genuine social worker, not an actor. It is important to me to be as truthful as possible: to show people — especially young people — what it’s really like to go through this.
THE REACTION
The film was very well reviewed at Sundance, but winning the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival felt like an incredible triumph. Not just for me, but for female filmmakers — I’m only the sixth female director to win that award in 56 years. However, what really stood out was having women come up to me after screenings and tell their own abortion stories: talking about how they’d felt on the drive to the clinic. The topic of abortion is so stigmatised and taboo: it made me feel that this film could speak truth to power and give a voice to the voiceless.
THE RELEASE
The film was in theatres for just a week before cinemas were closed due to Covid-19. Releasing it on VOD makes me a little sad because a personal connection with the audience is lost, but in another way, it feels like the perfect moment for people to see it. In many US states right now, abortion is deemed ‘non-essential care’, and clinics are closed. Women have no access to that option during this pandemic, and it makes the film seem that much more urgent. I hope it reaches a lot of vulnerable women. I want it to provoke not just empathy, but outrage.