With the bleak blockbuster that is “Dune: Part Two” set to arrive in theaters March 1, 2024, Denis Villeneuve will wrap up his epic retelling of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” novel. Rather than take the David Lynch route and pack Herbert’s famously dense story into one film, however, Villeneuve spread his adaptation across two films which together run an impressive 322 minutes. Even after splitting the narrative in this way, when the first film, “Dune,” arrived in 2021, it came teeming with scenes full of dense dialogue, featuring various characters whisper-shouting intensely at each other. All of which you’d think would point to Villeneuve’s fondness for the spoken word.
But as we know, the director isn’t all that big a fan of dialogue. So what gives? Well, Villeneuve recently spoke to The Times, where he once again reiterated his preference for visual storytelling. He said:
“Frankly, I hate dialogue. Dialogue is for theater and television. I don’t remember movies because of a good line, I remember movies because of a strong image. I’m not interested in dialogue at all. Pure image and sound, that is the power of cinema.”
It’s an odd thing for a good buddy of Christopher Nolan, whom Villeneuve thinks of as a “master,” to say. Nolan loves to pack his films with line after line of complex dialogue — though he’s gotten complaints from his fellow filmmakers about that dialogue being inaudible. Villeneuve, meanwhile, is just much more interested in what he can do without relying on spoken lines. In fact, he’s got ambitious plans in that regard.