Impacting the film industry to a great extent—a multitude of films and TV series have been suspended or pushed back amid coronavirus and quarantine—from big-budget Mulan to HBO’s Euphoria, Denis Villeneuve recently revealed his struggles to finish Dune, although the movie is still due December 18.
Steering away from Lynch’s 1984 adaptation, and honoring everything about the mammoth original novel by Frank Herbert instead, the course of the movie has slowed greatly, with Denis sharing in an interview from the Shanghai International Film Festival that the pandemic and subsequent lockdown had “crushed” the film’s editing and post-production schedule. Though most of the production had been completed just in time, Villeneuve shared that planned reshoots had to be delayed following the film industry’s shutdown.
Like mentioned, the highly-anticipated movie-of-the-year-to be, starring Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya, is to be expected to premiere on the original date which is December 18. In the meantime, read the transcript from the interview down below, or watch the whole interview below the text.
“I was planning to go back and shoot some elements later because I wanted to readjust the movie. I needed time. At the time I didn’t know that it would be a pandemic…as we were about to go back to do those elements. The impact was that it crushed my schedule right now. It will be a sprint to finish the movie on time right now because we were allowed to go back to shoot those elements in a few weeks…it meant also that I have to finish some elements of the movie, like VFX and the editing, being in Montreal as my crew stayed in Los Angeles.
As a director, there are things that can be done remotely to deal with technology. The supervision of VFX with some equipment is easy to do from afar but, editing, for me, the big lesson from this is I thought it would be possible to edit at a distance with my editor, sharing equipment, being far from (each other) (he refers to Joe Walker, the editor who he has frequently collaborated with on previous projects included Arrival, Blade Runner 2049, and Dune) but I realize how much editing is like playing music with someone – you need to be in the same room. There’s something about the interaction, human interaction, the spontaneity, the energy in the room. I really miss not being in the same room as my editor. It’s very, very painful.
Maybe one of the reasons is that the editor is someone…is also a psychiatrist. He’s the only one dealing with my OCD and my panic attacks and my fears and receives my joys. In the future, if something like that ever happens again, I will definitely make sure my editor is close to me.”
