“The big challenge was to try not to crush the audience at the start with an insane amount of exposition. ”The storyline is pretty simple - it’s more the density of the world and how rich and complex it is,” Villeneuve says.
While still conveying the broad strokes of the various power players and warring clans, he opted to leave out some of the intricacies of the wider intergalactic landscape in favor of a more focused and viscerally emotional story. While Villeneueve wanted to preserve the novel’s vast scope and its exploration of the ways power can be used and abused, he knew that a Hollywood production on the scale of “Dune” needed to be comprehensible to newbies without requiring supplementary homework or endless exposition.
That’s not to say, though, that Villeneuve and his co-writers, Eric Roth and Jon Spaihts, didn’t make some changes in translating the nearly 60-year-old novel - which chronicles the battle for dominion of the desert planet of Arrakis and the rise of reluctant messianic figure Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) - for a modern moviegoing audience. “My goal was really to make sure that the hardcore fans will find the atmosphere and poetry of the book intact,” he says of the highly anticipated $165-million production, which arrives today in theaters and on HBO Max. So when he set about to tackle the dense, philosophical and supposedly unadaptable book, Villeneuve was determined to stay as faithful as he could to Herbert’s vision. It became a book that stayed with me through the years and that I kept beside me.”
“‘Dune’ merged with the birth of my love of cinema. “I became obsessed with it,” Villeneuve says. Denis Villeneuve first read Frank Herbert’s classic 1965 sci-fi novel “Dune” when he was around 13, and for an impressionable future filmmaker growing up in Quebec, Canada, the book was like an oasis in the desert.
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