Luis Martínez London
London
Updated Wednesday, February 28, 2024-9:30 p.m.
Léa Seydoux "I like to show myself naturally and without makeup, the nude is beautiful"
Wonka Review: When Timothée Chalamet ate Johnny Depp (covered in chocolate) (****)
Interview Javier Bardem: "Lately my children decide my films for me"
Relaxed (one would even say happy because of the broad smile) and with his elbow, he says, slightly sore from shaking hands so much ("I should have prepared myself for this. People are very effusive"),
Denis Villeneuve
(Trois-Rivières, Quebec, 1967) welcomes us in a central London hotel while, on the other side of the sea, the Berlinale is taking place.
Gone are all the controversies that accompanied the launch of the first installment directed by the Canadian of the
Dune
saga , designed in the 60s by Frank Herbert.
Then, the premiere was delayed due to the coronavirus, the Warner production company decided to throw the film on its platform (HBO) and he
became angry to the point that he threatened a lawsuit
.
But not only that.
He also had to deal with the evil fario that has always accompanied
Dune
.
He faced the challenge of ending one of the most persistent curses in the history of cinema, capable of devouring gigantic figures such as
Alejandro Jodorowsky and David Lynch
with the same gluttony .
All this is behind us.
In front, there is confirmation that his desire and even dream is to complete the Arrakis trilogy.
Dune Messiah
will be the third and final installment that Villeneuve will sign and will follow his character according to the author's second novel, the one in which
the hero stops being one
.
"Then the novels become more esoteric," he says.
The second part, the one that concerns us now and hits theaters, does not admit past controversies or speculation about what is to come.
Everything flows like an exhalation across the screen, determined to leave the viewers' eyes filled with the
ocher dust
of the essence.
It is adventure and it is, above all, an exaggerated vindication of cinema in cinema, of the movie theater as a pagan sanctuary of spectacle and fever.
Dune part 2
puts religion at the center and demands devotion.
Amen.
To know more
Cinema.
Denis Villeneuve: "There are too many Marvel movies that are nothing more than a cut and paste of others"
Editor: LUIS MARTÍNEZ Venice
Denis Villeneuve: "There are too many Marvel movies that are nothing more than a cut and paste of others"
Venice Festival.
And 'Dune', finally, became flesh and lived among the classics
Editor: LUIS MARTÍNEZ Venice
And 'Dune', finally, became flesh and lived among the classics
He recently declared that he understands science fiction as an act of hope, as a place of dialogue.
She said that it is perhaps the last chance we have left to talk about important issues. Without a doubt.
It is perhaps the last way to explore relevant and basic issues such as, in the case of
Dune
, religion.
And do it without offending anyone.
A world can be created with a functional logic and an organic religion system.
But do it in such a way that no one feels directly referred to, because although it is obviously linked to our reality, it is not our reality.
In any other area, talking about religion today is doomed to failure.
There is no possible understanding.
We live in a world where we are all constantly offended or judged.
Léa Seydoux, in 'Dune part two'.WARNER
How are we supposed to understand religion then? Religion, like all forms of power, needs to be questioned.
No argument, not even religion, can be taboo in a free society.
And, to go back to the beginning, this is where science fiction comes in.
I maintain that as a genre it has value in itself, but it is also a powerful tool for thinking about our world.
That's what I meant by the act of hope.
Yes, definitely, science fiction is an act of hope. Generally, religion is seen as a tool of domination.
The old
dictum
does not say that it is an opium for the people.
In
Dune part two
, as in the book obviously, it is presented as a form of liberation.
Do you think so?
Is religion for you also a way of thinking about the future and hope? Without a doubt, for many people religion is a way to alleviate existence and can be very useful to move forward, to endure pain or to cope with fear.
But let's not lose sight of the fact that what vitiates everything is the mixture of power and religion.
When religion becomes politics it is very dangerous, because its scope does not allow for reply or discussion.
Religion, don't forget, deals with the absolute.
And if you use the absolute to control people, what you do is play god, adopt their role.
This is when the matter becomes extremely dangerous for everyone. It turns out that
Dune
It is not so much science fiction as I said, but rather a treatise on contemporary politics. Let us not forget that when Frank Herbert wrote and published his book he was very aware of what was happening around him in the 20th century.
We are talking about a time when the impact of colonialism and the perverse consequences of the exploitation of natural resources were already evident.
The dangers of hypercapitalism and the new marriage between different modes of faith or beliefs and power were already intuited.
The lie was already beginning to have the same relevance that it has now.
What is really striking is that everything is current again.
It's as if we haven't learned anything from our mistakes.
There is a belief that progress means moving forward in an act of enlightenment.
Well, it is clear, from what we see around us, that this is not the case.
We can be perfectly aware of humanity's greatest climate crisis and do nothing to remedy it.
Or very little.
We haven't learned anything.
The really sad thing is that Herbert's book is still explicit today, that we read it and everything that seems to be a fantasy illustration of his time is exactly the same as ours. The Dune desert is the image of the planet that is coming If it still doesn't rain... Good fantasy talks about current events.
Dune does not take place in a distant world of the future, it is a mirror where our darkest shit is reflected. The film talks about a people, the Fremen, without a State.
What is happening in Gaza comes to mind.
Do you dare to draw a parallel? When I wrote the script for the book, which has in view the problems we have already talked about, I could not foresee that the Middle East conflict would return to the forefront.
But it is obvious that the conflict in that part of the world has never gone away.
It has always remained latent.
Hatred is always present there, sometimes dormant and other times, in full explosion.
I feel very humble and not at all prepared to talk about it. His controversy with the distributor is left behind.
Dune part two
goes to movie theaters.
Without ceasing to talk about religion, do you feel like a messiah of the movie theater yourself? The first thing I would like to highlight, in order to close the controversies, is that the movie theater experience is not a whim of mine, it is part of the language of the film.
It's not that I want the film to be seen one way or another, it's that the film is designed to be seen in a movie theater.
I have nothing against television screens, cell phone screens, or theater stages.
What I'm saying is that each of them has their own language and they are not at all interchangeable.
Cinema is not better than TV, it is different.
The way you design the sound or the music, not to mention the image, which is the most obvious, is different.
We use technology that only makes sense in cinema.
If you see the movie somewhere else, you see something else. Understood, but we would stop watching many movies if it weren't for the other screens that are not those in theaters. Let's think about the pandemic.
We are not destined or programmed to be isolated.
The human being is a social animal.
We are a species that improves when we work together.
And art has to play a role in this regard.
Art is a form of communication and communion.
A concert, a play or a movie is seen in community.
Sharing emotions is part of the very beauty of the human experience.
We talk about bubbles, the internet bubble;
Well, public space serves precisely to put an end to those islands of isolation that make us worse. It is now time to talk about the algorithm. What reaches the movie theaters is not selected by an algorithm.
I don't go to the cinema to see a movie because an algorithm tells me I have to see it, but I choose to go to a public space to see it.
That decision is very important and, furthermore, we need to be able to exercise that power if we want to change things.
We have to return to places where we are together not only with our peers, but also with those who think differently from us.
We have to experiment, share and discuss together. Do you use Artificial Intelligence? We must start from the fact that technology was never the problem.
The problem is the use we make of it.
I know it's obvious to say this.
The problem is background.
We live in very conservative times in every sense, also creatively.
All creativity has become very predictive.
There is less and less imagination and it is not that the algorithm dominates us, it is that we behave like algorithms.
If you look at the Hollywood way of working now, you will clearly see that their whole effort is to reproduce the way of working of the past without taking any kind of risk. But you work in Hollywood and Yorgos Lanthimos' latest film is produced by Disney. Lanthimos is an exception.
I wish everyone was like him.
The problem is that we are talking about isolated cases.
It's not the rule at all.
To return to your question from before, it is not so much how Artificial Intelligence transforms our world, but how we react to it.
The responsibility is always ours, not the machine's.P.
It would seem that cinema is, to use its image, compartmentalized in bubbles and independent cinema does not want to know anything about cinema for all audiences...R.
Yes, that is part of the problem, limiting creativity to minority cinema is a mistake.
I don't know if we have to look for unanimity or accessibility for everyone.
Our job is about creativity, not about making mass-produced products. What would be the most important feature of that creativity that you talk about in
Dune part two
?I've tried to move to the extremes.
If you look closely, Dune speaks of a very intimate personal journey.
He goes into all sorts of detail on the characters' survival strategies and pays close attention to the thought process.
Always very close, as if he were looking through a microscope.
But, at the same time, it deals with an entire planet at war, where families that each come from a point in the galaxy, from all the galaxies, confront each other.
He wanted both extremes to be seen, but without dwelling on gadgets or technology.
The special effects in my film are the faces of the actors, what is seen through their eyes. Are we talking about Javier Bardem's eyes? Javier is one of my favorite actors of all time.
He is someone with impressive humanity.
Working with him is like working with a living laboratory, always pushing beyond the limits.
Always searching, searching... You see him on the set, but when you sit down with time in the editing room he takes your breath away.
For a conductor it is a great responsibility, because it is as if you were playing a Stradivarius.