Denis Villeneuve Is the Sci-Fi Remake Master with Blade Runner 2049 and the Upcoming Dune

When Arrival made the awards-season rounds last year, director Denis Villeneuve was already eyebrows-deep into making Blade Runner 2049, the Ryan Gosling-led sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult favorite, Blade Runner. “Amy Adams,” Villeneuve says, “did it all for me. Now it is my turn.”

Villeneuve is currently in New York to present his film at the Museum of Modern Art’s Contenders series, though one can still catch the early October release at more than a few theaters. I met the 50 year-old Québécois director in the lobby of a boutique hotel in Lower Manhattan, the type of place with taxidermy on the walls and the day’s newspapers on carved wooden rods.

He could have been working on what he calls the “dreaming stages” of his next big project: an adaptation of the Frank Herbert’s tome Dune (which, when he says it with his French-Canadian accent, comes out sounding like “Toon”). Instead he’s still fielding questions about Blade Runner 2049. Which prompted my first query:

Vanity Fair: Are you sick to death of talking about this movie?

Denis Villeneuve: As we were shooting, I said to the producer, “I cannot talk about something as it is being made—it’s like asking a hockey player how he will score as he is skating toward the net.” I’ve been asked about this movie for almost two years. I admit, today I was waking up and I said, “what is left to say?”

Do you miss doing lower-budget films?

No. Maybe I will one day? To do a movie like Blade Runner requires a lot of energy and a lot of stamina, and I have it right now. I’m not sure I’ll have it in 20 years if I am still doing this job.

The process is mostly the same. The initial dream is great. To communicate your vision with thousands of people? That’s the big difference from smaller movies, when you move from chamber orchestra to symphonic orchestra and have everyone play the same tune.

With Blade Runner, you inherited a pre-existing visual world.

The most difficult thing I’ve ever done was to take someone else’s dream and make it my own. I didn’t want to feel like a vandal in Ridley’s church. It took a long process of dreaming and meditation. And [cinematographer] Roger Deakins was a huge part of this.

Rigor. Insane rigor. Is that a word in English? Yes, rigor. Each shot needs to reach its full potential. He will never do a pickup quickly. It all needs to be approved by him. He has a hypersensitivity to light that I’ve never seen.

In every shot there is a feeling of pressure. Tension. Tension from the dynamics of the frame, the inner rhythm of the camera movement.

Roger and I approach a scene similarly. There’s not a lot friction. It’s so strange. We are otherwise so different. It’s like a lobster working with a giraffe.

I don’t know, but at the end of the day it works. [This movie was] like launching a rocket, there was a precise window. And time was compressed.

Right now I am designing Dune in my bubble. On Blade Runner, I needed the dialogue and to bounce ideas quickly.

The look of David Lynch’s Dune is masterful. The design is insane, honestly. But on this, I feel totally free. On Blade Runner? No.

When I did Prisoners and Blade Runner, I signed on a story. I was not allowed to bring in pink elephants, you know? Surely, they are my movies; I consider Blade Runner to be as close to me as Incendies. But for Dune, I am working on the script now. Maybe in six months, we’ll see: “oh, I’m unemployed!” Maybe they won’t like what I am doing.

Back to Blade Runner. Critics loved it, but the box office . . .

No. It’s not enough. The truth is, it did good box office in the world. It is honest, solid box office. In the States? It is not good.

From an artistic point of view, the film is a total success. To make a follow-up to Blade Runner? I was expecting to be welcomed with baseball bats. I’ve never had good reviews like that. So artistically, I am the God of Cinema! I was blessed by the Gods of Cinema!

It’s a mystery. All the marketing tools were predicting good box office. The tracking, they call it—it was very strong. They had all the champagne in the fridge. It was cold, it was ready to drink! And then, no.

The people who saw it, loved it. Why? From what they figured out, the landscape, educated people—people from big cities, New York, L.A., Chicago, Boston, Toronto—they went to see the movie. The center of America, no.

Some critics accused the “world” in Blade Runner 2049 of being hostile to women.

I am very sensitive to how I portray women in movies. This is my ninth feature film and six of them have women in the lead role. The first Blade Runner was quite rough on the women; something about the film noir aesthetic. But I tried to bring depth to all the characters. For Joi, the holographic character, you see how she evolves. It’s interesting, I think.

What is cinema? Cinema is a mirror on society. Blade Runner is not about tomorrow; it’s about today. And I’m sorry, but the world is not kind on women.

There’s a sense in American cinema: you want to portray an ideal world. You want to portray a utopia. That’s good—dreams for a better world, to advocate for something better, yes. But if you look at my movies, they are exploring today’s shadows. The first Blade Runner is the biggest dystopian statement of the last half century. I did the follow-up to that, so yes, it’s a dystopian vision of today. Which magnifies all the faults. That’s what I’ll say about that.

Your films are very serious. On the set, do you ever tell jokes, play music?

I can’t work with music. I had the experience one time directing with music, and thinking that what I was doing was so great because the music was so good. Then I saw the dailies and it was shit.

I like silence. I love a quiet, calm environment. And my cinematographer is the same. Roger is like a monk. He doesn’t like to talk.

Jared Leto has a bit of a reputation for getting into character. On this one, his character considers himself to be a god. Did that manifest itself during his preparation?

No, he was very gracious. I worked with a secure, prepared, direct, and friendly artist. He was not an a-hole at all.

I don’t mean an a-hole—I mean wacky. Did he send you a fish in the mail or anything?

No, he did that on the previous movie. On Blade Runner, he was only there for a short period of time. Two or three weeks. I think I was protected. Had it been longer, maybe I would have gotten in the danger zone.

The idea of him being blind was beautiful and created a beautiful atmosphere on set. When he was walking, it was like a priest coming into the church. He had those contact lenses done by hand, done by an artist to imitate the eyes of one of his friends who is blind. He never saw my film crew! He just heard them.

It was really nice, because it created little details, especially with Harrison Ford—moments like, “he can’t do that right now” because he can’t see. I didn’t know he was going to do it this way.

I had designed a set with Dennis Gassner, a set with pools of water. So can you imagine, he was in a little island surrounded by water. I had to direct him like a computer. “You walk nine steps this way, five steps this way, now stop—or else you will fall in the water.”

You work very hard, you make ambitious films, and you are prolific. What do you do for fun?

Someone asked when I was finishing the film, “are you going off to an island?” I said no; I want to go back to Montreal and cook for my kids. I want to wake up in the morning and drink a coffee, and the only thing I have to think about is what I am going to buy at the store to cook for my kids for dinner.

Right now cinema is the only thing in my life. For the past 10 years it has been cinema. It means I read, eat, breathe cinema all the time. Just everything I do is in contact with a project. So what that means is I am a very boring human being. I don’t do tennis; I don’t do chess. It might be a problem. I need to do something else.