Denis Villeneuve wants to do something “smaller” after Dune…What about Dune Part 2?

Denis Villeneuve upcoming Dune movie adapts the first half of Frank Herbert’s science fiction epic. Where does this leave the second half?

For my money, the most exciting movie yet to come out in 2020 (assuming anything new comes out this year with the coronavirus shutting down theaters everywhere) is Dune, Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic. It looks beautiful, the casting is insane, and as the guy behind great sci-fi films like Arrival and Blade Runner 2049, Villeneuve absolutely seems like the right guy to do the story justice.

But there’s a catch: The upcoming Dune movie only adapts the first half of Herbert’s book. Now, the novel is famously dense, so this isn’t going to be another Hobbit situation where the movie version is stretched way too thin; there’s more than enough book here to justify two movies. But it does leave us wondering what happens when the sequel is (hopefully) made. Cinematographer Greig Fraser has said that the new movie is “a fully standalone epic film,” but it’s still just half a book. We want the rest, and ideally, we want Villeneuve back in the director’s chair to give it to us.

As it ends up, that’s not a foregone conclusion. Talking with his longtime collaborator Roger Deakins on his “Team Deakins” podcast, Villeneuve suggested that after working on Blade Runner 2049 and Dune back to back, he’s “dreaming” of changing course a bit. “It would be healthy for me to do something small,” Villeneuve said. “It will be good to go back to the size of something like Sicario where I am not having to dream about the design of a car or the design of a wallet or gun for months before. I can just embrace the scale for what it is. It will be nice to go there.”

Now, this could mean a lot of things, but the least charitable is that Villeneuve could bounce after he’s done directing Dune. Maybe he could direct something small and then come back for Dune: Part 2? At minimum, I’d love for him to finish out the first book. There are also a lot of Dune sequels that Warner Bros. may or may not want to adapt depending on how well the first film does, but we can cross that bridge when we come to it.

Overall, it sounds like Villeneuve likes a lengthy cooling-off period after he makes a movie. He still hasn’t watched Blade Runner 2049. “It takes time to be able to digest and make peace with [your own movies],” he told Deakins. “For me, when I make a movie, there’s a lot of deep joy and pain and anger linked with the process. When it’s done, it takes me years until I am able to watch it again and see the movie for what it is. I am not there with ‘Blade Runner.’”

Dune comes out on December 18…hopefully.

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h/t IndieWire