Dune: Part Two with Denis Villeneuve

12/16/24 • 32 min

Season’s greetings, Script Apart listeners. As you may have noticed, it’s the last week before Christmas – the year’s coming to an end, and so, we figured, let’s end 2024 strong. So all this week, on this podcast about the first draft secrets of great movies and TV shows – interviews with the writers behind some of the best movies of the last twelve months that we didn’t manage to cover upon release. And holy prince of House Atreides, what a way to begin today.

Our guest today made one of the most pulse-racing crime thrillers of the century so far, in the form of 2015’s Sicario. He’s made one of the greatest movies about the power of language of all-time, in 2016’s Arrival. And in 2017 and 2021, he took on the impossible twice – crafting first a sequel to one of the greatest blockbusters ever, in the shape of Blade Runner 2049, and then a movie adaptation of a novel previously thought unfilmable: Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Yes, the great Denis Villneueve is with us today, stopping by for a chat about how his gargantuan Dune: Part Two – starring Timothee Chalamet and Zendeya – helped define 2024. Not just in the way it dominated the box office, earning almost three quarters of a billion dollars (which by the way, is not bad for a hallucinatory epic full of spice-induced visual experimentation). No, it’s reflective of the year just passed because notions of fascism, faith, false messiahs... these have all been uncomfortable parts of the backdrop of 2024.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, Al had thirty minutes to ask Denis his most probing questions about the script. Questions like: was there ever a moment in the making of Dune: Part Two when he contemplated keeping Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen – played by Austin Butler – alive to explore in further films? What does the ending of the film, which veers away from Frank Herbert’s source material, mean for the future of the franchise? And if Dune: Part Two is a film that warns about colonialism and facism, does he believe that cinema has the power to actually dismantle those structures, or is just about expressing a kinda howl of resistance?

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on [email protected].

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft, FILMD and WeScreenplay.

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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on [email protected].

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft, FILMD and WeScreenplay.

To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.

Support the show

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

Nightbitch with Marielle Heller

Motherhood is a doggone nightmare in the new film from Marielle Heller. This week, the writer director of movies like The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood returns to cinemas with one of the more surreal-sounding offerings of the year – Nightbitch, a drama in which Amy Adams plays a parent by day and a dog by night. If you weren’t already familiar with the 2021 Rachel Yoder novel on which it’s based, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this film is a frantic comedy, or possibly the mad fever dream of Charlie Kelly from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia – a character with his fair share of hound-based ideas for movies. But no, Nightbitch is something else – an affecting, magical realist tale of a woman pushed over a feral brink by the physical and societal demands placed on women, that needs to be seen to be believed.

On today’s episode, Marielle joins Al Horner to break down in spoiler-filled detail this remarkable film. We get into why the realities of birth – the body horror of it all – are so under-acknowledged in pop culture. We talk about why, after the gentleness of films like A Beautiful Day In The Neighbourhood, Marielle fled in the opposite direction, towards this anarchic scream of a story. And you’ll also discover the truth behind some of the movie’s more ambiguous, unresolved questions: such as, are the women that Adams character befriends also secretly dogs?

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on [email protected].

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.

To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.

Support the show

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Next Episode

Hit Man with Richard Linklater

Richard Linklater is a hit man, but not in the assassin sense of the word. No, the hits he trades in are of the movie variety – stylish cult classics that vary in genre and form, but always manage to ignite something powerful in viewers. It’s been that way for three and a half decades now: among his hits, dating back to 1990, are Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight, Boyhood, School of Rock, A Scanner Darkly, Slacker, Waking Life, Everybody Wants Some, Fast Food Nation... the list goes on. No wonder the Texan is one of the most respected names in modern American cinema – a force both prolific and patient, as his multiple movies shot across numerous decades prove. 2014 coming-of-age drama Boyhood was filmed across twelve years, with Merrily We Roll Along – a Paul Mescal-starring Sondheim adaptation, to be shot across twenty years – among his current projects.

Earlier this year, he released Hit Man – a romantic comedy of sorts, with a hint of thriller thrown in for good measure, about a bashful college professor with a unique side hustle. Gary, played by the film’s co-writer Glen Powell, has a recurring gig with the New Orleans police force, pretending to be an contract killer. He wears a wire to meet with people seeking to order a hit on their spouses, their work colleagues, their parents and so on. It’s a gig that’s going smoothly for Gary, until he meets Madison, played by Adria Arjona – a woman trying to escape an abusive husband, who Gary begins to fall for. What follows is Linklater in full-blown crowd-pleasing mode.

In the conversation you’re about to hear, we discuss what it was about this true-ish story, adapted from a newspaper article by journalist Skip Hollandsworth, that spoke to Richard. We talk about the baseball injury that put him on a path to filmmaking (and how it might have led to the unstoppable pace with which he makes movies). And we break down every detail of Hit Man, one of the movies of 2024, in spoiler-filled detail.

Script Apart is hosted by Al Horner and produced by Kamil Dymek. Follow us on Instagram, or email us on [email protected].

Support for this episode comes from ScreenCraft, Final Draft and WeScreenplay.

To get ad-free episodes and exclusive content, join us on Patreon.

Support the show

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.