Denis Villeneuve wants his last trip to Arrakis to feel unlike the first two. “The idea was to try to make a movie that will have the same DNA, it’s a Dune movie, but it’s a very different movie,” the four-time Oscar nominee told Empire. “It has a different pacing.”
Seventeen years on
Dune: Part Three picks up 17 years after Part Two, which ended with Paul Atreides taking the imperial throne through a political marriage to Princess Irulan and then setting off on his holy war. Timothée Chalamet’s Paul is no longer the reluctant leader from Caladan. He is a ruthless tyrant who sends his Fremen army from one planet to the next.
“We are back with the same characters, but this time the world has totally changed,” Villeneuve said. “Their psyches, their perspective on reality has totally changed, and Paul is living with the burden of what he created, trying to find a way out of this spiral of violence.”
The film adapts Dune Messiah, the second novel in Frank Herbert’s saga. It is barely half the length of the first book, jumps ahead in time and dwells on what the holy war cost the galaxy and Paul himself. Villeneuve wrote the screenplay with Brian K. Vaughan.
A harder Paul to play
Chalamet welcomed the darker turn. The word “antihero” gets used a little too loosely, he said, but it is “fantastic to chew on as an actor, where it’s not purely redemptive.” He called the film “its own beast,” with “its own siege, its own hail of paranoid isolation.”
Jason Momoa, who plays Hayt, a clone of Duncan Idaho, said Chalamet stood up to him physically and mentally on set. “That guy comes in like a nuke, man,” he told the magazine. Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Anya Taylor-Joy, Javier Bardem, Florence Pugh and Charlotte Rampling return. Robert Pattinson and Isaach de Bankolé join as newcomers.
Why he came back, and what follows
Villeneuve says he did not return out of nostalgia. It was the opposite, he said: “I’m tired of it.” He wanted to be severe with the material and not become complacent.
Next comes the James Bond job. “I thought, ‘When it’s done, I need a very powerful rocket to pull me away from Arrakis,’” he joked. “When I was asked to do the next Bond, I said: ‘Okay, this is what I need.’” Dune: Part Three opens in theaters and IMAX on December 18.
Sources
- Denis Villeneuve Teases How “The World Has Totally Changed" in Dune: Part 3
- Dune: Part Three will be a 'very different' film from the first two entries in Denis Villeneuve's sci-fi saga
