Discussion Denis Villeneuve to Direct Dune - Release Date: December 18, 2020

Back in the '70's Dune was on the mind of Sci-fi fans. All part of the memes of the time.

 

This is just a fact check. I have a dim recollection of reading somewhere that Lucas originally wanted to film Star Wars in Indonesia / South East Asia because he wanted Tatooine to be tropical. This is the kind of factoid, if it was a fact, that gets completely overwhelmed in the noise of 'history'. That intention fell through and he optimized the economics of principal photography, and therefore by feed back the internal vision, when he went with Tunisia. The rest is "history". I would love to lift the degeneracy of Lucas' first intentions being to work on his own statements about (Nixonian overreach and) the Vietnam War, in a possibly analogous visual iconography, prior to being 'compelled' to 'resort' to something that rightfully gives rise to assertions of gross similarity to Herbert's vision.
Has anyone ever heard that Lucas first intended or wanted to shoot in Southeast Asia?

 

I wish Peter Jackson had put his foot down like Denis and insisted that The Hobbit be a two-parter as originally planned.

 

He not only didn’t put his foot down. He and Philippe Boyens are the ones who asked for it to be turned into three films. That wasn’t a studio decision. Peter Jackson loves bloat. It’s his thing. His films are chock full of a lot of pretty indulgent and shlocky nonsense. Including LOTR.

 

I'm reading The Hobbit for the first time since third grade, and it's astounding how a tight, economically paced adventure for children story was turned in three overlong installments, the last of which was rated R in the extended cut.

Peter Jackson has a lot of strengths as a director, but I feel he's very much of a mind with the kind of fans who want every detail on Wookieepedia to find its way into the film's story, all in the name of worldbuilding and lore expansion.

 

The bloat didn't feel too bad in the LOTR trilogy. The extended cuts require a bit of stamina to get through, but they are still enjoyable. I found The Hobbit trilogy just painful. I have only seen it once, that's enough. I admire Jackson's willingness to take these films on, and I think he did a great job of realising Tolkien's world, but what a chore.

 

The Lord of the Rings movies are my favourite films, but this is exactly why, as a massive fan of the films and the books, I think the Extended Editions are vastly inferior to the theatrical versions.

To return to the topic, it feels miraculous to me that firstly, Dune is happening at all - Villeneuve's last high-budget sci-fi release with WB was hardly a satisfactory return on a monumental investment - and Dune is arguably an even riskier project than a sequel to Blade Runner. Secondly, not only is the movie getting made, but Villeneuve somehow convincing WB to guarantee two films would've been unthinkable if he hadn't already gone and done it.

The man is not only a cinematic genius, but apparently a genius at getting whatever the hell he wants from studios.

 

Yeah, LOTR bloat was fine because it was mostly derived from the books and not Boyens fanfiction (there was that too but in smaller doses). Hobbit trilogy, OTOH, was about 80% Boyens fanfic and 20% Tolkien. They had no interest in Bilbo. They beautified Thorin to make him the main protagonist and then dumped him in the next 2 movies to turn Legolas into the main character. They invented trashy OC. When you look back, it's really a big Legolas fic more than anything else. Oh yes, they also gave us



I don't think Dune is going the way of Hobbit. Villeneuve isn't a bloater and as far as I can see he doesn't have a notirous fanfic-er on his writing team either.

 

I'll always be grateful to Villeneuve for giving us images like this. She is one beautiful woman...

 

Imagine how grateful Ben Affleck must be.

 

Agreed. Though I think that’s only a small part of it. A much worse instinct of his is the desire to transform simple beauty into 30-minute, loud, melodramatic action sequences with dumb stunt after dumb stunt. I love the LOTR and Hobbit books, and all of Tolkien’s Arda lore, from the Silmarillion and beyond. And I think Jackson misses the quiet spirit of those books in both his Hobbit and LOTR films (with the former being a worse offender, and with some exceptions - there are some sublime moments in both trilogies). But Tolkien’s Middle Earth is nothing like Jackson’s fantasy theme park.

The kind of stuff like that clip of Legolas and the collapsing bridge doesn’t cone from Boyens. That’s pure Peter Jackson. He deserves just as much, if not more, of the blame as director. He made the final decisions, not Boyens. And I’d also argue that all the problems with the Hobbit were evident in LOTR. He turned Tolkien’s interesting world into a theme park. The main difference was the development of CGI tools, and Peter’s decision to film most of the Hobbit trilogy in a studio, with ten times as much full green screen work. And then the decision to just pump the film full of everything...and nothing.

 

Theme park is on Jackson. Dwarf-Elf-Legolas love triangle wahtever that was supposed to be, ramblings about Legolas mother, anything Tauriel, bard's annoying kids, Alfred are all on Boyens.

 

I love the LOTR film trilogy. The Hobbit film trilogy, not so much. I don't hate them. I actually think The Desolation of Smaug is the strongest of the three. The third film is a complete waste of a film and almost offers nothing that couldn't have been in the first two films. Indulgence and maybe even greed played a role there, for sure. I also think The Fellowship of the Ring is by far the strongest film in the LOTR trilogy. No doubt, there is some great filmmaking on display in the entire trilogy. The build-up to the battle of Helm's Deep is still pretty jaw-dropping to this day, for example. But the FOTR is a superb film.

Peter Jackson is still an excellent filmmaker, IMO, and I would like to see him doing features once again. I did think his WW1 documentary was pretty beautiful.

 

Now here is some interesting stuff I didn't know. Lynch's original cut was 3 hours long, which explains a lot in terms of why so much of the story was left out; he didn't have control over the final cut (and they went wild with cuts to make it just over 2 hours), which clearly butchered the story he was trying to tell with the movie.
Despite box office and critical failure at the time, I certainly wouldn't call the film's larger footprint in pop culture history anything close to a failure, but given what is in this article, I can see why Lynch sees it that way. He stresses that the finished film was not the film he wanted to make.

https://www.gamesradar.com/dune-david-lynch-1984-movie-interview/

To document the myriad of problems that beset Lynch’s Dune would require a tome as dense and packed as Herbert’s sci-fi classic itself. In summary, it was an unwieldy project that suffered numerous issues, not least of which was Lynch’s original version having a runtime of three hours – the theatrical version ended up 136 minutes long.

 

I don't think that editing was the only problem with Lynch movie. Acting and dialog were supremely stilted. I get that he tried to keep as much of the book dialog as possible but as Ford said to Lucas, you can write that __, George but you can't say it. Some writing sounds good only on paper but not in an actual spoken word. IMO, keeping the intact dialog brought the acting to a halt. Everyone felt like robots.

 

His WWI documentary and Heavenly Creatures are his best work, IMO.

 

Not Bad Taste?

 

Nor Brain Dead?

 

The same exact question came to my mind. We then went and had burgers at Five Guys.

 

A good choice, although I myself am partial to Shake Shack, or Whataburger if I'm in the south and hungover.

 

Meet the Feebles is genius.

 

And Braindead.
The good ol' days when he was a hilarious blood drenched low budget lunatic.

Mortal Engines made me think that Peter should be a Producer now.
It was "fine", but I have no interest in ever seeing it again.

ANYWAY. Denis. This French Canadian dude.
He's awesome.
I think his next movie should be some twisted sex thriller. Like Showgirls or Basic Instinct.