Timothée Chalamet’s Paul is not a hero in Dune 2, insists director Denis Villeneuve

15.02.2024 - 15:03 / polygon.com / Denis Villeneuve / Frank Herbert / Paul Atreides

With his Dune movies, director Denis Villeneuve is trying to do what even Frank Herbert couldn’t: make Paul Atreides a villain

When Polygon sat down with Villeneuve about adapting Dune over two films, he said the goal was always to film the story that author Frank Herbert wanted his audience to walk away with, one that showcased the dangers of charismatic leaders and fanaticism. Oh, and he’s working on the screenplay for a third installment that has yet to be greenlit.

Read on for our discussion with Villeneuve, about how strange Dune gets in the back half of the story, the puzzle of what to keep in an adaptation and what to discard, and his thoughts on whether the conclusion of his Dune trilogy — Dune Messiah — will hit theaters after all.

[Ed. note: This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.]

The paradox of Dune is that it’s a story about humanity, but told through a human society so far in the future that it might as well be an alien one. A lot of the truly alien stuff is in the second half of Dune , and it feels like you relished digging into stranger environments, stranger events, and stranger characters.

Denis Villeneuve: Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. In a way, Part One was a slow introduction, gentle. As the main character, the camera was just above Paul Atredies’ shoulder, and we were slowly discovering a planet and discovering the ends of the Fremen culture. But it was very gentle. The second movie is much more muscular. He falls into the river [laughs] he is really immersed in that culture and becomes a warrior. It’s much more of an action movie. It allowed me — because the story is, in a way, more simple — to go deeper, and explore more, and the Fremen culture, and the Harkonnen culture. That was what was so fun for me as a director.

Was it just the events of the book, or was the success of Dune: Part One also part of having more room to expand?

It’s more that with the way that we structured both movies, there was a lot of exposition that was required to do Part One. And that exposition being made gave me more freedom in Part Two, definitely.

When you’re adapting something as dense as Dune you make a lot of choices about what details are going to be in the film, what will be touched on briefly, and what maybe won’t appear at all. Did you have any guiding principles in figuring out what was going to make it in from the book?

My guiding principles were Frank Herbert’s intentions. Specifically for [Dune], he was disappointed how people perceived the story. He felt that people misconceived Paul Atreides; that people were seeing him as a hero, where he wanted to do the opposite. So in reaction to that he wrote Dune Messiah in order to insist on the idea that