Recently, it feels like we keep writing the same headline over and over: are movies nowadays too damn long? Not at all, in the opinion of Denis Villeneuve, who has a compelling point in his favor: people like them.
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“Think of Oppenheimer,” the Dune: Part Two director said in a recent interview with The Times Of London. “It is a three-hour, rated-R movie about nuclear physics that is mostly talking. But the public was young—that was the movie of the year by far for my kids. There is a trend. The youth love to watch long movies because if they pay, they want to see something substantial. They are craving meaningful content.”
With his take on one of literature’s most notoriously un-adaptable properties, Villeneuve is attempting to give fans exactly that. “I trust the audience,” he said of delivering the challenging work, noting that Warner Bros. asked him to do “almost the opposite” of speeding it up. Between Dune’s 155-minute and Dune: Part Two’s 166-minute runtimes, fans can now spend over five hours traipsing through the desert planet of Arrakis with Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), Chani (Zendaya), and the rest of the film’s star-studded cast.
But even though the director cites Oppenheimer as proof of his commitment to lengthy run-times, don’t expect this particular epic to be “mostly talking.” “Frankly, I hate dialogue,” he said. “Dialogue is for theatre and television. I don’t remember movies because of a good line, I remember movies because of a strong image. I’m not interested in dialogue at all.” While Part Two does have a script, Dune Messiah, his third and final film in the Dune-iverse (if he decides to make it at all), may not. “In a perfect world, I’d make a compelling movie that doesn’t feel like an experiment but does not have a single word in it either,” he said. “People would leave the cinema and say, ‘Wait, there was no dialogue?’ But they won’t feel the lack.” Maybe they’ll just be too distracted by whatever godforsaken popcorn bucket they come up with next to notice.