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EXCLUSIVE: Denis Villeneuve says that his “break” is over and that he will ”go back behind the camera faster than I think” to film the third instalment of his “deep” immersion into Frank Herbert’s Dune universe.
“I’m in the writing zone right now,” the filmmaker says, referring to Dune: Messiah, though he was careful not to call it Dune: Part Three.
Villeneuve insists that Dune: Part One and Part Two are ”for me like one entity. It’s a movie made in two parts. It’s finished, it’s done.”
The Canadian-French director says that he could have stopped at Dune: Part Two, “but yes, like Herbert did with Dune: Messiah, I think it’ll be a great idea to do something completely different. The story takes place like 12 years after where we left the characters at the end of Part Two. Their journey, their story is different this time, and that’s why I always say that while it’s the same world it’s a new film with new circumstances.”
That new movie, he continues “will finish the Paul Atreides arc.”
And that will also end Villeneuve’s association with the Dune universe, even though Herbert penned four other Dune sequels after Dune: Messiah.
Villeneuve says the central players returning for Dune: Messiah are Timothée Chalamet as Atreides; Zendaya as the Fremen tribal warrior Chani, who tries to guide him; and Florence Pugh and Anya Taylor-Joy.
“They have to return. They are with the main cast when it happens. And more worms. What can I say?” he shrugs.
I push him for more and refer him to a conversation we had last year when he marked late 2025 or early 2026 as possible start dates for Dune: Messiah. He murmurs “2026,” then looks perplexed.
“These movies take a lot of time to be made, so it’s best not to say out loud when I might shoot,” he says as he looks up to see his longtime publicist Bebe Lerner from ID PR, who has strategically placed herself in his eye-line. “Unfortunately, I’m supposed to shut up,” he says, laughing.
“Let’s say,” he begins, “that I thought that after Part Two that I will take a break, that I will go back in the woods and stay in the woods for a while to recover. But the woods weren’t really suiting me, and I would go back behind the camera faster than I think. But that’s all I can say.”
Well, Dune: Part Two is one of those rare instances of a cinematic artistic masterpiece masquerading as a blockbuster. For some reason, although they’re, obviously, completely different: The success of Dune: Part Two reminds me of the artistic and box office achievements of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II.
And the intimacy within its epic stature reminds me of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. Both won Best Picture Academy Awards.
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Villeneuve, who’s in the middle of a whirlwind awards-season campaign for the Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures movie, welcomes such comparisons. “When you think about it, [Dune: Part Two] is not really about technology. So it’s not really sci-fi. It’s more a human journey. It’s more an adventure movie, but also, again, a human journey. And so the technology is more in the background,” he says.
The essential point of Dune is the desire by the Fremen to transform their desolate homeland into fertile land, “and that’s relatable now more than when Herbert wrote his stories,” Villeneuve argues convincingly.
What also interested him were the cultures Herbert explored “and the shock between those cultures and the political game between those cultures and the journey of this adolescent boy, Paul Atreides, that becomes a man being in contact with a new culture with Chani, this young woman.”
Their relationship, he observes, “is at the heart of the film.”
He adds, ”It’s like the whole movie is structured around Paul and Chani’s relationship.”
But, principally, he remarks of the novel, “I like the idea that we will, through the eyes of Paul Atreides, discover a culture, start to fall in love with this culture … and what moved me in the book at first was the idea that a young man can consolidate his identity in another culture and find himself. It’s beautiful.”
It’s clear that Villeneuve “absolutely loves” the characters that populate the Dune universe, particularly, he says, seeing Paul “falling in love” with Chani. “But unfortunately the politics of the world will bring him back to his origins,” and that’s the tragedy of Paul Atreides because, ultimately, “he will have to do something awful and betray the love of his life.
“So it’s a very intimate story that opens up the whole scope of the movie,” he pronounces.
And creating the worlds within which the film navigates was invigorating, Villeneuve says.
“World-building is fun,” he says of working with the great production designer Patrice Vermette, with whom he first collaborated on Prisoners 12 years ago.
It’s about trying to create “visually without words” the depths of those tribes who live in those worlds “so that you can feel the root of their way of thinking, their behaviurs, their cultural customs.”
Any movie, big or small, is “difficult to make,” but the blockbusters can take several years of “long journeys, long hours” Villeneuve says.
And it’s vital “that I get people who I can work with for the next three years or whatever. I’m not there to make new friends, but creativity involves vulnerability. It involves trust. And if I want to direct, my heart needs to be absolutely open, and I need to be in total communication with the human beings I’m around.”
His No. 1 rule is: “I could not work with someone that would be abrasive or toxic. When I cast, of course — talent first — I’m looking for the best actors but also someone that I will make sure that I will be able to communicate.”
The Villeneuve version of a chemistry read is “the coffee test.”
He explains:” There’s always a moment before all the projects where you take a tea or a coffee with the actor or the actress. In that moment, there’s a lot of things that you can feel. You know how the person listens, what kind of human being are you dealing with, and it’s a coffee test. That moment is tremendously important.
“It’s more important than any audition. Again, I’m not making friends, but I’m looking for someone I would be able to work with,” he adds.
It’s the same with heads of department and key crew. “You have to make sure that it’ll be someone that will not be a narcissistic person but someone who is there for the love of cinema, and that’s you can share creativity together.”
Noting the thousands of names in Dune: Part Two’s end credits, I suggest that it’s like being like a General Patten, having to marshal all those people and knowing when the war will end, as it were.
“You’re in trouble when there is more people in the end credits than live in your home town,” he says, smiling. “Those movies are our beasts.”
He doesn’t know the exact number of people who worked on the movie but reckons it to be three or four thousand range, or more. “That’s why you need to have great heads of departments to split the responsibilities,” he states.
Before we met in Soho for our chat, Villeneuve had been in conversation with director Joe Wright (Atonement, Darkest Hour) to discuss the making of Dune: Part Two, and Villeneuve spoke movingly about cinema being about “the collective act of creativity” that cannot be made solely by computer.
When I bring the subject up during our own conversation he declares that collaboration “is one of the beauties of cinema.”
It’s the idea of it being a “collective art form” and that to work with other human beings “to create poetry is what makes sense to me.”
In between his “break’ and making preparations for Dune: Messiah, Villeneuve is keeping track of several other possible future projects that includes the long-gestating Cleopatra movie based on Stacy Schiff’s bestselling 2010 biography of Egyptian queen.
Krysty Wilson-Cairns (1917) is writing the screenplay.
“It’s a very difficult project, fantastic project, but very ambitious, and the writing needs to be perfect.” And, he stresses: “It’s a very long-term project. It’s a beast to crack.”
Warner Bros. Pictures and Legendary Pictures are rereleasing Dune: Part Two into selected cinemas in Los Angeles for a big-screen return from October 20-25. Super opportunity to see it again in a theater.
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The movie originally was released back in February, and Villeneuve recently has been crisscrossing Europe and the U.S. reminding awards-season voters that Dune: Part Two is a serious contender in a race with several great pictures but, as yet, no clear front-runner.
It’s all up for grabs.
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