Denis Villeneuve first read Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel ‘Dune’ as a teenager, making storyboards for an imagined film adaptation. Now that vision is a reality.
A string of production delays has left “Dune: Part One” fans antsy for the film’s sequel, which hits theaters this Friday. But director Denis Villeneuve himself waited more than 40 years for the project to come to fruition.
Villeneuve read Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel “Dune” for the first time when he was around 13, he said on an episode of NPR’s “Fresh Air” late last November. Shortly after he was done, he and childhood best friend Nicolas Kadima began storyboarding an imagined movie adaptation.
“Nicolas was very strong at drawing, and me, I was very bad, but I was good at telling stories,” Villeneuve said. “Our friendship was born from that dream of, that one day, we could be filmmakers.”
A couple of decades later, Villeneuve made his feature debut with “August 32nd on Earth,” which premiered at Cannes in 1998 but never received a U.S. theatrical release. His second film, “Maelström,” gave him more international recognition, and by the time he was tapped to direct “Dune” in 2016, he was a critically acclaimed director with a penchant for sci-fi plots and shooting in the open desert.
