Denis Villeneuve: A Career Retrospective (1998-2024)
At this point in his career, Denis Villeneuve is regarded as one of the best contemporary filmmakers in the entire world, having cemented his place as a science fiction master. It feels like it is only a matter of time before he’s finally winning an Academy Award (for Picture or Director) for one of his works. Could Dune: Part Two be the missing puzzle piece? Before we try and solve that answer, let us wind back the clock and look at how the French-Canadian director reached his place in the cultural landscape.
1998 – 2010: Honing his craft before Hollywood came calling
After his cinema studies at the University of Quebec in Montreal in the mid-90s, Villeneuve was ready to try his hand at directing his first feature film. In 1998 his debut film August 32nd on Earth was released, both written and directed by Villeneuve. The film follows a model who after a near-death experience decides to conceive a child with her best friend. While not widely released and only moderately well-received by the critics, it was selected by Canada as their entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. Though it was not nominated, it immediately showed that the director would be knocking on the Academy’s doorstep more often than not in the years to come.
Two years later, he made his second feature, Maelstrom, which he also wrote and directed (something he would do on all four of his films in this era of his career). This film was a significant step up for Villeneuve, as he began playing with the medium in ways that would show themselves again in future films, such as Incendies, Enemy, and more. The film plays with the idea of life events colliding together in unexpected ways, all the while being narrated by a talking fish. Yet again, Canada submitted this for Best International Feature at the Oscars, but it was not nominated.
Instead of chugging along full steam ahead, Denis decided to wait nine years before his third feature, marking the largest gap in time between two films in his career. What we got with 2009’s Polytechnique was a stark change for the director. This time, he decided to tackle his darkest subject matter to date, a mass school shooting told through the eyes of two young students. Based on the actual events of the 1989 “Montreal Massacre”, the film, while controversial, was a critical success in Canada. It went on to win nine Genie Awards (think the Oscars, but for Canada) including Best Motion Picture. To some surprise though, it did not get chosen as Canada’s selection for Best International Feature at the Academy Awards. Instead, they put up for selection Xavier Dolan’s debut film, I Killed My Mother.
The fourth and final film in this era of Villeneuve’s career was 2010’s Incendies (the French word for “fires”). The intense story follows a twin brother & sister who return to the Middle East to track down their family’s dark history following the death of their mother. To reveal anything more about this twisting, turning story would be a disservice to the uninitiated. Though it can be hard to find on streaming services in the United States, it is well worth the small rental fee on Amazon Prime. The scintillating film was a massive critical hit and resonated with audiences. It has been on the IMDb Top 250 movies list for many years and does not appear to be going anywhere based on its current position (#108). Villeneuve had another dominant year at the Genie Awards, this time taking eight trophies including his second Best Motion Picture win. He also finally broke through with the Academy Awards, getting nominated for Best Foreign Language Film (losing to Denmark’s In a Better World).
2013 – 2015: Welcome to the big leagues! Hollywood’s next great director has arrived
After twelve years and four films on his resume, the time had come for Denis Villeneuve to take the next step up the ladder and begin making Hollywood films. Enter 2013’s Prisoners. The film’s script, written by Aaron Guzikowski, was on the 2009 Annual Black List (a list of the best scripts not currently being produced) and had bounced around with a number of directors and actors attached before it found its way into Villeneuve’s lap. The brutal, gut-wrenching film about the abduction of two young girls and the town’s search for them was the perfect entry point for the director to show his capabilities in building suspense and dealing with bleak content. Featuring an array of top-tier actors, including Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis, and Paul Dano, it was another critical and commercial success for the talented director. The film grossed over $120 million on a budget of less than $50 million and earned a lone Academy Award nomination for its Cinematography. This would also be the first time Villeneuve would work with cinematographer, Roger Deakins (legend!), and composer, Johann Johannson, who both became repeat collaborators.
With his first proper Hollywood studio production in the rear-view mirror, Villeneuve didn’t stop at making one film in 2013 and brought along one of his Prisoner’s actors, Jake Gyllenhaal, for the smaller-scale Canadian-produced film, Enemy. It is at this moment in time that we saw what the director would eventually blossom into as a bona fide science fiction legend. The story follows a college professor (Gyllenhaal) who one day stumbles upon his doppelganger. The discovery leads to his character obsessively trying to understand how this is possible, until their worlds start crossing paths in dangerous and unimaginable ways. The film also has one of the most memorable, ambiguous endings in any recent science fiction film. I have seen Enemy five or six times, each time finding a new interpretation for its ending. Once again, Denis was recognized by the Canadian critics, winning five awards, including Best Director at the Canadian Screen Awards (formerly the Genie Awards, see above).
After knocking out two spectacular and contrasting films in 2013, Villeneuve turned his attention to the Taylor Sheridan-written, Sicario, dealing with the American government’s battle to stop Mexican drug-trafficking. Like Prisoners, Sicario (2015) features an all-star cast of actors including Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, Benicio del Toro, and Daniel Kaluuya. The film is full of mystery, increasing anxiety, and several action set pieces that are still wonderous to watch almost a decade later. Another Denis Villeneuve film, another hit! It grossed nearly $100 million on a modest budget, was critically acclaimed, and landed three Academy Awards nominations for cinematography (Deakins), original score (Johannson), and sound editing (Allan Robert Murray).
With seven successful, varied films to his name, Denis Villeneuve had shown the world he could tell almost any story he wanted to, genre be damned. So where would he decide to take his career next?
2016 – Present: A science fiction auteur emerges
Though he dabbled in science fiction material with 2013’s Enemy, it wasn’t until 2016 and his film Arrival that the world discovered where Denis Villeneuve appeared to be steering his career all-along. Citing influences like Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, and Steven Spielberg gives you an idea of the style and scope Villeneuve planned to take his career once he had proven his credentials and been afforded the luxury of picking his projects unilaterally.
Arrival is a fresh, fascinating, sophisticated new take on the “alien invasion” story that we have seen told frequently throughout cinema’s long history. What Villeneuve did is capture some of the essence of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, utilizing the idea of language and communication as the focal point that the story hinges on. Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner play a linguist and scientist, respectively, as they work towards interacting with and understanding why twelve alien crafts have arrived on Earth and what their ultimate purpose is. Villeneuve also takes an intellectual look at the concept of time not being linear, much in the same way Christopher Nolan did with his own science fiction epic, Interstellar (2014). This won’t be the final time these two directors are mentioned in the same breath during this article. Would it come as a surprise to anyone at this point that Villeneuve’s film was a monumental success both at the box office (grossing $200 million) and with the critics? It was up for a whopping eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director that year. It won one award at that year’s Oscars ceremeony for Best Sound Editing, making it the first Oscars win for a film directed by Villeneuve. It’s also worth mentioning that Amy Adams was infamously snubbed in the Lead Actress category that year, something that a number of cinephiles still haven’t gotten over, myself included.
With Arrival’s critical and commercial achievements, Warner Brothers greenlit Villeneuve’s most ambitious project to this point in his career: a $150 million budgeted sequel to one of the most revered films of all-time, 1982’s Ridley Scott-directed Blade Runner. Denis has long been on record stating that this seminal film was a core memory for him as an inspiration to his own dream of becoming a filmmaker. Could he do the unthinkable and actually make a Blade Runner sequel 35 years later, featuring Harrison Ford himself, that wouldn’t feel like it diminished the original in any way? The answer to that question, at least in my humble opinion, is a resounding “yes”! Much like the original Blade Runner which famously struggled at the box office but found an intense cult following in the subsequent years, Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) “bombed” at the box office. Whether it was poor marketing, audience hesitancy to see a sequel to such a legendary property touched again, or a misstep in the release date (released in October in the United States), people did not turn up to the theater to experience this grand, stylish, and complex tale of replicants, humanity, and the nature of life itself. With each passing year since its release, more and more movie lovers are discovering Blade Runner 2049 and realizing the error of their ways in overlooking it when it initially came out. It wasn’t all doom and gloom though. The film did manage to connect with critics in 2017, grabbing five Academy Award nominations and picking up two wins on the night of the ceremony for cinematography (Deakins, yet again!) and visual effects.
Due to Blade Runner 2049’s financial challenges, it would have been easy for a major studio to have hesitancy in giving Villeneuve such a large budget again or take on another risky property with his next project. To the credit of Warner Brothers executives, those concerns did not get in their way, leading us to 2021’s Dune!
Frank Herbert’s Dune. A holy grail piece of science fiction literature. The backstory on Dune’s film adaptations (plural) is well documented at this point. Alejandro Jodorowsky spent five years of his life in the 1970s trying to get his version of the film off the ground. He ultimately failed, though there is a brilliant 2013 documentary detailing his quest (Jodorowsky’s Dune) which you should check out as soon as you finish reading this article. After Jodorowsky’s unsuccessful attempt, David Lynch was next to the table. Though Lynch managed to actually complete work on his feature length film in 1984, the finished product was a disaster. It’s a visual nightmare, even by 1980s standards, with some of the most laughable visual effects and a disjointed script that wasn’t helped by the horrendous acting. This is not an indictment on anyone involved in the project. Lynch showed before his version of Dune and in the years since that he is a singular, remarkable director. The quality of 1984’s Dune illustrates the “unfilmable” feeling fans of the novel had towards it. We jump ahead almost forty years and in walks Denis Villeneuve onto the spice-laden sands of Arrakis. The director, who had been meticulously improving his skills behind the camera for over thirty years, was ready to take on the beast. Something special happened with 2021’s Dune. Villeneuve was the right director at the right moment in time. He was able to recruit some of the best talent for the technical departments. Greig Fraser for cinematography, Hans Zimmer to compose the music, and a visuals department that could utilize 21st century technology mixed with the director’s love of shooting on location to capture the essence of the novel better than anyone believed possible. Thankfully, Dune did not suffer the same fate as Blade Runner 2049 and was an instant blockbuster classic, grossing over $400 million at the box office, winning six Academy Awards of the ten it was nominated for, and catapulting stars Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya into the stratosphere as 2020s Hollywood royalty.
This takes us to the present moment. I hope you enjoyed that trip down memory lane. Dune: Part Two is here. The world is ready. Though I won’t have a chance to see this film during its opening weekend, the early reviews and fan responses to advance screening have only added to my excitement level. Comparisons are already being made to some of the best sequels in film history; classics like The Empire Strikes Back and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers to name a couple. At the time of writing this, we are about a week away from this year’s Academy Awards ceremony where it feels all but cemented that Christopher Nolan will finally have his career celebrated on the grandest stage with a Best Director/Best Picture double win. Nolan and Villeneuve are both colleagues and friends with similar artistic sensibilities and bodies of work. I personally think it would be beautifully poetic if in successive years the two directors took top honors at the Oscars. I know it’s way too early to start predicting what will happen in twelve months’ time but indulge me for just a moment. A strong case can be made that Dune (2021) should have won Best Picture over the feel-good CODA and that it only didn’t get the crown because much like Peter Jackson with his Lord of the Rings trilogy, Academy voters either consciously or subconsciously figured they would just wait to give the award at a later date with more films in the series on their way. We know Villeneuve would like to make Dune into a complete trilogy with Dune: Messiah as the third film, but that’s not a guarantee, at least as of this moment. Will that sway Hollywood to open their arms to a Denis Villeneuve Best Director or Best Picture win next year? It’s a distinct possibility, and one I wouldn’t be surprised or upset by.
If you have seen Dune: Part Two, let me know what you thought of the film, a potential third film in the series, and Denis Villeneuve’s chances of winning Best Director or Best Picture in 2025.
