Dune director explains how he brought Frank Herbert’s vision to the screen

Frank Herbert’s Dune is an incredibly popular, very influential work of science fiction. It tells the story of Paul Atreides, the scion of a noble house who gets caught up in a vast drama that plays out across planets and millennia. There are lots of characters, all of them playing a complex game of one-upmanship as they attempt to control the spice, an addictive substance native to the planet of Arrakis, aka Dune, that the galactic empire needs to run. There are themes of destiny, ecology, religion and politics — Dune is dense, and other filmmakers have stumbled when trying to bring it to the screen.

Alejandro Jodorowsky famously tried to adapt Dune as a movie in the 1970s, predicting that the movie would need to be 10-14 hours long to do the story justice. It never got made. David Lynch’s 1984 film crammed the whole book into one movie — it has its charms but is mostly seen as a failure; not even Lynch likes it.

Now it’s Arrival and Blade Runner 2049 director Denis Villeneuve’s turn. “The thing is, from the start, I didn’t talk about Jodorowsky’s ideas or David Lynch’s ideas,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “What I said to the studio and my crew was to start from scratch and go back to that, the essence of the book. The book was the bible. I kept saying to my crew, ‘I want the people who love the book to feel that we put a camera in their mind as as they were reading.’”

To that end, Villeneuve asked Warner Bros. to let him tell the story of the book in two parts — the first comes out this October. “I didn’t have to fight for this idea,” he said. “I just said to them, ‘Guys, the story is so rich, so complex, it takes all its strength from its details and its poetry. I truly think to do justice to the book, we should do it in two parts.’ And they immediately said yes.”

"The book, for me, is about prescience. A character that can see the future. I feel that Herbert himself had a pretty good view of the future, people exploiting natural resources with brutality and other people fighting for the sake of nature."

But even with that extra space, there’s still a ton of information to get across, and Villeneuve struggled with finding a balance. “I knew the big challenge was to make sure that to enjoy the movie you don’t have to have read the book,” Villeneuve said. “But at the same time, for me, it was even more important that fans of the book will find all the elements and the poetry and the atmosphere that they loved about the book.”

"The storyline is actually pretty simple but it’s more the density of the world and how rich and complex it is. The big challenge was to try not to crush the audience at the start with an insane amount of exposition. It took a long time to find the right equilibrium."

But he doesn’t want to give us too much information, since part of the fun of visiting Frank Herbert’s expansive universe is getting lost in the sheer size of it all. “I love the unknown,” Villeneuve said. “I love to feel vertigo, to feel that there’s a door that is not open for you, that you have to peek through. There’s a word in French that you don’t have in English, envoutant, which means being bewitched by mystery. It was very important for me that we not explain everything.”

Making changing to Frank Herbert’s Dune

So Villeneuve seems to have a good handle on things, but still things had to be cut — that’s how huge this story is. The Mentats Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and Piter De Vries (David Dastmalchian) — a Mentat is basically a human computer, the real article having been banned long ago after a robot uprising — have reduced roles, and the villainous Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen — played by Sting in Lynch’s movie — isn’t here at all.

Hopefully, Villeneuve will shore up some of these elements in Part 2. ”There are some elements that I went a bit fast on and some characters that are less developed that I’m keeping for the second one,” he said. “We tried in this one to stay as close as possible to Paul’s experience. Then in the second one, I will have time to develop more some characters that were left aside a little bit. That is the theory. I hope it will work.”

While some characters cut, others were changed. Take the character of Liet Kynes, the planetary ecologist of Dune who embeds himself among the native inhabitants of the planet, the Fremen. In Villeneuve’s movie, the character is played by actress Sharon Duncan-Brewster, flipping the character’s gender from the novel.

That change was recommended by screenwriter Jon Spaihts. “Herbert’s novel is, to some extent, an artifact of its time and it definitely skews male in ways that don’t feel completely contemporary now,” he said. “Of all the messages in the story, the message brought by Liet Kynes of planetary stewardship, of the preciousness of resources, of the necessity of building bridges to local communities to sustain ourselves going forward — those are modern messages, and it seemed right to modernize the messenger.”

Duncan-Brewster weighed in as well: “Personally, I didn’t see how Kynes being a woman would affect any aspect of the plot,” she told Empire. “I believe Frank Herbert wouldn’t have minded.”

From the beginning, Villeneuve made sure to focus on the female characters. “At the very beginning of the creative process, I remember [screenwriter] Eric Roth asking me, ‘What is the most important element I should focus as I’m starting to write the first draft?’ I said, ‘Women.’ There are so many things in the book that are so relevant and so prophetic but I felt that femininity should be up front. We needed to make sure that Lady Jessica is not an expensive extra.”

Lady Jessica, played by Rebecca Ferguson, is Paul’s mother, and part of a powerful order of women called the Bene Gesserit who cultivate influence in high places throughout the galaxy. Paul himself is played by Timothée Chalamet. That brings us to the movie’s other secret weapon: its insane cast.

Meet the impressive cast of Dune

Chalamet knew he wanted to be involved in Dune the second he heard a movie was in development. “I can’t pretend that I was sitting there evaluating whether I wanted to do this or not,” he said. “It’s very obvious, just the opportunity to work with Denis. I’m a huge fan.”

For Villeneuve’s part, he never considered anyone else for this central role. “He has an insane charisma,” the director said. “Timothée has been gifted by the gods of cinema.” And that’s just the beginning of the crazy cast. Jason Momoa and Josh Brolin are on board as House Atreides retainers Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck respectively, Oscar Isaac plays Paul’s father Duke Leto, Javier Bardem is Fremen leader Stilgar, and Zendaya is Fremen warrior Chani.

“When I read [Dune] again, Leto is the character that popped out to me,” Isaac said. “Not only from the description physically, but also the conflict between wanting to protect his family, his people, but being forced into an impossible situation that is perilous and yet hoping that he can gain advantage in it.” It was also interesting for Isaac to be shooting in “the same desert” where he made Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.“ But it’s kind of incredible how two different filmmakers can take a place and give it a completely distinct feel.”

Zendaya is excited to play Chani. “She’s tough and she’s very straight up,” she said. “She’s already sizing Paul up and not quick to trust.” Chani doesn’t have a huge role in the first half of Herbert’s book, but there’s a bigger part waiting in the sequel, and Villeneuve was so taken with the character that he expanded her presence in the first movie:

"As the movie was evolving, Chani just kept growing and growing because I just was fascinated by Zendaya and her presence and how magnetic she was. I shot more and more scenes with her. We improvised stuff. I was just so inspired by her."

Dune comes out in theaters and on HBO Max on October 22. There’s no guarantee yet that we’ll get Part 2, but the signs are good, and we’re pulling for it. Villeneuve says that while the first film is tightly focused on Paul’s origins, the second will see him come into his “full potential” as a leader.

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