Denis Villeneuve: “” Dune “is a precursor of the idea according to which ecology is a movement which goes beyond politics and can also become violent”

Quebec’s only nuclear power plant is still visible from the house on the banks of the St. Lawrence where Denis Villeneuve grew up. As a child, the director told his friends that he was born in the heart of the reactor and had acquired its intrinsic qualities, those which are, in general, the stuff of superheroes. Then the power station became more ambivalent for him. An emblem of the most extreme technology, it symbolized both its benefits and its dangers. There was a taste of the unknown there, the sensation of living in a land with an unusual imagination.

The strangeness of the place undoubtedly nourished the taste of the fifty-something for science fiction. Denis Villeneuve signed two of the genre’s most significant films in the 2010s, First contact (2016) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017), the sequel to Ridley Scott’s masterpiece revealed in 1982. Today, it is released Dune, based on Frank Herbert’s bestseller written in the first half of the 1960s.

Extreme narrative complexity

This cycle with the abundant imagination was the Grail of several directors, a sea serpent that swallowed all those who attacked it, because of the difficulty – and the enormous cost – to restore the incredible universe to the cinema. . Alejandro Jodorowsky, who spent part of the 1970s trying to bring his project to fruition, ended up declaring that his film existed… in another dimension.

Ridley Scott, who should have made it his second feature film, moved on to Alien (1979). As for David Lynch, who in 1984 managed to deliver an adaptation, it is considered his least successful film. the Dune de Villeneuve, whose release has been postponed several times, is therefore one of the most anticipated films of this season.

When he evokes the famous novel, a saga of extreme narrative complexity addressing questions as diverse as ecology, the political and religious organization of power, the economic rivalries between different peoples of the universe, the acquisition and the preservation of resources, artificial intelligence and its threats, the instrumentalization of religion to enslave populations, the Canadian director takes the book out of his pocket.

He shows the blanket, illustrated with the head of a bald man with sparkling blue eyes that overlooks a desert expanse. It was a time when science fiction publishers called on an illustrator to conjure up, in one image, the imagination of a novel.

“You cannot imagine the happiness of unexpectedly discovering such a masterpiece, without having heard of either the novelist or the saga. »Denis Villeneuve

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