Is ‘Dune: Part Two’ Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Empire Strikes Back’? He Feels That He Never Left Arrakis

 This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Timothee Chalamet in a scene from "Dune: Part Two." (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)
This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Timothee Chalamet in a scene from "Dune: Part Two." (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)
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Is ‘Dune: Part Two’ Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Empire Strikes Back’? He Feels That He Never Left Arrakis

 This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Timothee Chalamet in a scene from "Dune: Part Two." (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)
This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Timothee Chalamet in a scene from "Dune: Part Two." (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP)

Denis Villeneuve doesn’t feel like he came back to Arrakis for “Dune: Part Two.” In his mind, he never left.

The sequel, which opens in theaters on March 1, is the culmination of a six-year filmmaking journey, preceded by 40 years of dreaming about it. Realizing Frank Herbert’s novel for the big screen is a feat that has bested and befuddled some of the greats, including David Lean, Alejandro Jodorowsky and David Lynch, the only one who actually got to make a film, which was such a flop that its two sequels were quickly abandoned.

Villeneuve finally got his chance at one of the more turbulent times in Hollywood history, facing two delayed releases (one because of the pandemic, the other because of the Hollywood strikes), an historic shift to streaming and zero guarantee that he would get a “Part Two” at all.

“The conditions could not have been worse to release (Part One),” Villeneuve said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “And still the movie did a decent box office.”

Even in that limbo time, he never stopped working on the script for “Part Two” knowing that if they got the greenlight, he wanted to be ready to go. By the time his cinematographer Greig Fraser was picking up the best cinematography Oscar for “Dune,” they were deep into pre-production for the second. And everyone was soon back in Budapest with cameras rolling by July. But though they’d conquered the desert in “Part One,” new challenges awaited.

“We all walked at the beginning into this project feeling confident,” Villeneuve said. “And that confidence quickly eroded.”

“Dune: Part Two” would be much more technically challenging, with at least seven major action sequences compared to two in the first. It picks up with Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides in the aftermath of the calculated and devastating attack by a rival house on his family and followers who had just established control of the mineral rich desert planet Arrakis. With his father dead, Paul and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) retreat to the desert where they establish a tenuous alliance with Arrakis natives known as the Fremen (including Zendaya). Paul trains to fight alongside them against the Harkonnen invaders.

Among the challenges: Filming Chalamet “surfing” on a sandworm in a way that is thrilling and transportive and not at all silly – something that Villeneuve had to figure out how to translate from what he’d imagined into words that would make sense to all the craftspeople working to make it happen in the brutally hot sun.

But none of those stresses seemed to transfer to the atmosphere on location in Wadi Rum, Budapest and Abu Dhabi. In fact, Chalamet said, it was the opposite. Villeneuve appeared to be having fun while making it.

“Denis is so playful. It’s like the greatest evidence of self-confidence to me,” Chalamet said. “It’s ultimately a playful, creative exercise to get to direct any movie. The man who takes himself too seriously, is more focused on the people around him, the audience, than the actual product reeks of a movie that’s pretentious.”

Josh Brolin, who has now worked with Villeneuve on three films, including “Sicario” and both “Dunes,” where he plays Atreides warrior Gurney Halleck, said it takes a unique personality to be a great filmmaker, but that Villeneuve is right up there with the Coen brothers in his ability to do it well.

“Great filmmakers that I’ve had the gift of being able to work with are misfits. They’re true misfits. They’re not cool people. They’re socially totally inept,” Brolin said. “And they found this medium to be able to work through, (where) they can express themselves wildly and specifically. And what’s going on in their head that we never were privy to? Now we get to experience it.”

Villeneuve has almost gotten used to delayed releases – and both times his films have benefitted from the cushion. The first was held almost a year because of the pandemic, which allowed him to tweak and perfect. This time, he got to do something different: Make a film transfer so that it could be projected on IMAX 70mm and 70mm, even though it was shot on digital.

“It’s the ultimate viewing experience and the ultimate format,” Villeneuve said.

“Dune: Part Two” cost a reported $122 million to produce and is arriving in theaters not a moment too soon. The marketplace is a little emptier than usual because of the residual effects of the labor standoff in Hollywood last year, and it's also a landscape where superheroes are no longer the trusty “tentpoles” that they once were.

But “Dune” is a different kind of franchise. The first “Dune” made just over $400 million even though it was also released day-and-date on Max (then HBOMax). And Villeneuve is more hopeful this time around. Audience appetite for theatrical is stronger than it was in late 2021, after all. He also believes “Part Two” is both more broadly entertaining and can be enjoyed without having seen the first.

“Part One was more meditative,” he said. “We were following a boy discovering a culture. Now we are with the boy avenging his father, falling in love. And it’s more of an action movie.”

He knows that “Part Two” “has a soul” as well, but he’s not quite ready to step back and enjoy it as the 13-year-old boy who started him on this path in the first place. It’s one of those paradoxes of adapting something you love, that in order to do so, you have to sacrifice some or all of that, and it will no longer mean what it once did to you.

Before they started on the first, composer Hans Zimmer, also a lifetime fan of “Dune,” asked him a question to this effect.

“He said to me, ‘is it a good idea to try to life a dream that we had when we were kids? Is it meant to fail?’” Villeneuve said. “There’s part of the movie that when I look at it, it’s closed the dream. Other parts are new because it’s an adaptation and I have to make choices and distort really the reality of the book in order to make it fit into a film format.”

“It’s mixed emotions,” he said. “It’s joy and pain.”

But even if he can't yet experience it as a fan, his peers can. Christopher Nolan recently compared it to “The Empire Strikes Back.” Villeneuve demurred, but the internet went wild.

“There’s a tremendous amount of visual imagination and worldbuilding on a scale that I have not seen before in a very long time,” Nolan said. “It’s somebody using all of the advantages of cinema in a way that doesn’t often happen.”

Villeneuve has left the door open for more, too. Herbert kept writing books, after all. But for now, he’s going to step back and let “Dune” breathe a little. He's looking at his movies in the macro, in a way that might ensure the future of the medium he loves so much.

“What I tried to do with my last three movies is to push forward this idea of event and the grand scale,” Villeneuve said. “I think that’s the way movies will survive.”



Video Game Performers Will Go on Strike Over Artificial Intelligence Concerns 

SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)
SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)
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Video Game Performers Will Go on Strike Over Artificial Intelligence Concerns 

SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)
SAG-AFTRA signage is seen on the side of the headquarters in Los Angeles on Friday, Nov. 10, 2023. (AP)

Hollywood's video game performers announced they would go on strike Thursday, throwing part of the entertainment industry into another work stoppage after talks for a new contract with major game studios broke down over artificial intelligence protections.

The strike — the second for video game voice actors and motion capture performers under the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists — will begin at 12:01 a.m. Friday. The move comes after nearly two years of negotiations with gaming giants, including divisions of Activision, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Co., over a new interactive media agreement.

SAG-AFTRA negotiators say gains have been made over wages and job safety in the video game contract, but that the two sides remained split over the regulation of generative AI. A spokesperson for the video game producers, Audrey Cooling, said the studios offered AI protections, but SAG-AFTRA’s negotiating committee said that the studios’ definition of who constitutes a "performer" is key to understanding the issue of who would be protected.

"The industry has told us point blank that they do not necessarily consider everyone who is rendering movement performance to be a performer that is covered by the collective bargaining agreement," SAG-AFTRA Chief Contracts Officer Ray Rodriguez said at a news conference Thursday afternoon. He said some physical performances are being treated as "data."

Without guardrails, game companies could train AI to replicate an actor’s voice, or create a digital replica of their likeness without consent or fair compensation, the union said.

"We strike as a matter of last resort. We have given this process absolutely as much time as we responsibly can," Rodriguez told reporters. "We have exhausted the other possibilities, and that is why we’re doing it now."

Cooling said the companies' offer "extends meaningful AI protections."

"We are disappointed the union has chosen to walk away when we are so close to a deal, and we remain prepared to resume negotiations," she said.

Andi Norris, an actor and member of the union's negotiating committee, said that those who do stunt work or creature performances would still be at risk under the game companies' offer.

"The performers who bring their body of work to these games create a whole variety of characters, and all of that work must be covered. Their proposal would carve out anything that doesn’t look and sound identical to me as I sit here, when, in truth, on any given week I am a zombie, I am a soldier, I am a zombie soldier," Norris said. "We cannot and will not accept that a stunt or movement performer giving a full performance on stage next to a voice actor isn’t a performer."

The global video game industry generates well over $100 billion dollars in profit annually, according to game market forecaster Newzoo. The people who design and bring those games to life are the driving force behind that success, SAG-AFTRA said.

Members voted overwhelmingly last year to give leadership the authority to strike. Concerns about how movie studios will use AI helped fuel last year’s film and television strikes by the union, which lasted four months.

The last interactive contract, which expired in November 2022, did not provide protections around AI but secured a bonus compensation structure for voice actors and performance capture artists after an 11-month strike that began in October 2016. That work stoppage marked the first major labor action from SAG-AFTRA following the merger of Hollywood’s two largest actors unions in 2012.

The video game agreement covers more than 2,500 "off-camera (voiceover) performers, on-camera (motion capture, stunt) performers, stunt coordinators, singers, dancers, puppeteers, and background performers," according to the union.

Amid the tense interactive negotiations, SAG-AFTRA created a separate contract in February that covered independent and lower-budget video game projects. The tiered-budget independent interactive media agreement contains some of the protections on AI that video game industry titans have rejected. Games signed to an interim interactive media agreement, tiered-budget independent interactive agreement or interim interactive localization agreement are not part of the strike, the union said.