Denis Villeneuve Screen Talk LFF 2024: Science Fiction and Silence
An icon of cinema with a flawless filmography, French-Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve graces Royal Festival Hall with his presence and sits down with Brett Goldstein to discuss the expansive range of his career. From Blade Runner 2049 and Arrival to Dune, Villeneuve is critically acclaimed and revered among film fans for his striking visual style and complex narratives; citing Nolan, Hitchcock, Godard, and Bergman as some of his cinematic influences. Over two thousand attendees restlessly await his entrance inside the auditorium, poised to see a legend in the flesh.
Villeneuve is relaxed yet contemplative as he launches into his Screen Talk, mingling earnest dialogue with jovial anecdotes: at one point, upon hearing a baby crying, he interrupts Goldstein to state “I just want to say, I love babies. It makes me so happy to hear a baby!” earning him prolonged laughter from the audience. When discussing how he chooses which screenplays to direct, Villeneuve explains that it is not so much that he gravitates towards a particular story, but that the stories choose him. His method of filmmaking is like a staircase, he intones, in which every project is the next step up, escalating higher and higher. When attending film school he avoided acting, and he recalls a memory in which he attempted an audition but managed to cut his hand until it was “pissing blood”, a story he laughs at fondly. When discussing one of his first films, Polytechnqiue, he interrogates the relationship between fiction and reality, stating that it was inspired by the idea of “trying to observe reality, and being as honest as possible” – on the first day of shooting, he told himself “I’m full of shit.” to emphasise that he could never recreate reality.
Incendies is the next film deconstructed and analysed in the Screen Talk, and Villeneuve contemplates producing a story of origin and a “heritage of violence”, based on the 2003 play. Intensely brutal and deeply shocking, Incendies is arguably one of the most powerful films of Villeneuve’s career. A short clip plays on the expansive screen, and Goldstein remarks on how silence is utilised to make the onscreen revelation all the more chilling, isolating the moment to its core. This can be seen across his works: to build tension, to emphasise loneliness, to focus on his stark visuals. On Sicario, Villeneuve relays that he views the United States-Mexico border as a particularly “meaningful part of the world”, and that the atmosphere is infused with a “moral ambiguity… that is not black and white”. When reflecting on his cinematic history, he concentrates on nuance and mystery, and the complicated nature of his characters that may not be clearly defined.
In contrast to the weighty darkness of films like Prisoners and Enemy, Arrival is described as the “light and hope” that Villeneuve needed, a “brilliant” exploration of how “language shapes reality”. Despite being strikingly sorrowful, Arrival (which was nominated for eight Oscars and won one) is a film of “love” and loss that reinvents the alien invasion trope entirely.
Finally, he delves into Dune and Dune: Part Two, and his struggle to preserve the authenticity of Frank Herbert’s epic – he reiterates the importance of Dune as a “cautionary tale”. Sustaining the tone and energy over lengthy shoots is like him “playing an instrument out of tune”, but the real work is before the camera begins to roll. Shooting is “a visceral process”, one that must be “as natural as possible… no shackles”. The iconic worm riding sequence in Dune: Part Two took 44 days to film which, he explains with a smile, was managed by his wife Tanya Lapointe’s ‘Worm Unit’. To condense the epic to a single word, Villeneuve simply said “Women.” – the elusive Bene Gesserit are brought to the forefront of the narrative, their sisterhood being the most “meaningful” element of the grand tale.
As the Screen Talk draws to a close, he tells the audience of his love for science fiction: after making Sicario, he thought “if I can do one sci-fi movie and risk everything, that’s beautiful.” even if it meant the end of his career as a filmmaker, he jokes. With the massive commercial and critical success of his most recent release, Dune: Part Two, and a third installment of the Dune trilogy in the works, I highly doubt Denis Villeneuve will be going anywhere – instead, he will likely continue higher on his stairway to stardom.
Edited by Humaira Valera, Co-Film & TV Editor
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