Fresh off his big blockbusters flop Blade Runner 2049, filmmaker Denis Villeneuve is diving into the rich, dense world of Dune, adapting the Frank Herbert novel for fantasy and sci-fi fans on the big screen. Quite honestly, while Blade Runner 2049 was a solid piece of filmmaking (even if I find it boring), I am surprised the studio is allowing him to go big with another sci-fi property. We’ll see if this one turns out better.
We do know that this novel is no stranger to the big screen. back in 1984, the legendary auteur David Lynch provided an appropriately Lynchian take on the material. But how will Villeneuve’s take compare? Speaking with Cinema Blend, actor David Dastmalchian revealed that we can expect a more faithful take.
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“I’d read the book and I’d seen the film. I’m a very big David Lynch fan, so there was so much about the film that I had loved, but to be quite honest, I had not seen the film since probably college. It had been a long time since I’d seen the film. Once I got cast in [Dune], I decided not to revisit the film. But I did go back and revisited the book because like I said, I love it. I’ve only read the book once, but I’ve gone back to it many times just to dip in and out and pull quotes. It’s just a fun and very dense piece of philosophical writing… It’s so exciting the thought that this level of maturity and complexity in Herbert’s writing is going to be put on a giant screen by Denis Villeneuve. And the cast that he’s put together, it’s so awesome.”
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“I can’t really discuss much about the script or the plot itself, but I can just tell you that that old phrase ‘True to the spirit’ or ‘honoring the spirit of’, and to be quite honest I haven’t even seen the most recent of the script, but in the way Denis has talked about the film and what I’ve seen, it’s absolutely true to and in honor of everything that Frank put into the novel. And translating something from novel form to cinema form requires a lot of mastery as storytellers go, and I think there’s no one better for that job than Denis. He’s just so fearless, man. He makes choices and then he goes into the places that we need right now as audiences.”
But my big question here is whether or not a “true to the spirit” take can actually be successful in today’s landscape. Can those complex ideas actually bring people out to the cinemas? Let us know your thoughts down below!
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SOURCE: Cinema Blend
