“You have made one of the most brilliant science fiction films I’ve ever seen,” Steven Spielberg says to Denis Villeneuve. It’s fair to say he quite liked Dune: Part Two.
Steven Spielberg really liked Dune: Part Two. So much so that, in a podcast for the Directors Guild of America – simply called Director’s Cut – Spielberg said to its maker, Denis Villeneuve, “It’s an honour for me to sit here and talk to you.”
Spielberg – no slouch when it comes to making sci-fi films himself – then said, “You have made one of the most brilliant science fiction films I have ever seen.”
Comparing Villeneuve favourably to other filmmakers who are “builders of worlds,” including Ray Harryhausen, Stanley Kubrick and Ridley Scott, to name a few, Spielberg then went on to talk about Dune: Part Two’s sandworm taming sequence.
“This is a desert-loving story, but for such a desert-loving film there is such a yearning for water in this movie,” Spielberg said, as reported by Variety. “For all the sand you have in this film, it’s really about water. The sacred waters that are yearning for green meadows and the blue water of life. You film the desert to resemble an ocean, a sea. The sandworms were like sea serpents. And that scene surfing the sandworms is one of the greatest things I have ever seen. Ever! But you made the desert look like a liquid.”
Read more: Dune: Part Two review | Bleak, beautiful blockbuster filmmaking
This isn’t the first time a major director’s praised Villeneuve’s work on his second Dune chapter. Earlier this year, Christopher Nolan, with terribly British restraint, described it as an “incredibly exciting expansion” on Dune’s first part, comparing it to The Empire Strikes Back.
Having imbibed all this praise – from the directors of such out-and-out sci-fi classics as Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and Inception, no less – we half wonder whether Villeneuve will let all of this go to his head a bit. If it were us, we’d be having T-shirts and baseball caps emblazoned with the words, “Steven Spielberg thinks I’m amazing” – perhaps in gold sequins. We’d also constantly start conversations with things like, “As Steve was saying to me the other day…”.
Given that Dune: Part One was nominated for 10 Oscars and won six, it seems likely that Dune: Part Two will have an even greater presence at the next awards – particularly given that Spielberg and Nolan are Hollywood royalty, and could be regarded as a barometer for how the Academy will nominate and vote.
By then, of course, Mr Villeneuve’s head will have swelled to the size of Arrakis.
