interesting interview with Denis V
Blade Runner 2049 director Denis Villeneuve: 'We made a monster. I won't do it again'
Copying the whole article since its behind a freewall registration thing
Blade Runner 2049 director Denis Villeneuve: 'We made a monster. I won't do it again'
3 FEBRUARY 2018 • 7:00AM
When Denis Villeneuve first showed
Blade Runner 2049 to Ridley Scott, he wasn’t sure exactly what he had. But he knew he had something. He had spent months paring an hour and 15 minutes off his initial, four-hour rough cut of the film – a belated sequel to
Scott’s own monumental science-fiction/
film noir hybrid, about a detective hunting lifelike androids in a desolate future Los Angeles.
By the time of that test screening, nothing else seemed dispensable. And though Scott would later grumpily describe the 163-minute version as
“way too f------ long”, saying he would have trimmed another half-hour from it, the studio executives were more warily upbeat.
They’d given the director of Sicario and Arrival $185 million (£131 million) to make a mature and uncompromising sequel to
Blade Runner, and for better or worse, that was exactly what he had delivered. Four months on, Villeneuve recalls one of his producers’ gut reactions word for word: “The lights came up, and he turned around and said, ‘We’ve just made the most expensive art house movie in cinema history.’”
Of all the things that have been written about Blade Runner 2049, none capture it more snappily than that. Even in a strong year for blockbusters, Villeneuve’s stood apart from the pack: it was enormous, introspective, coldly beautiful and unapologetically oblique, not even caring to clarify which of its characters were robotic replicants and which were flesh and blood. (A warning: mild
spoilers lie ahead.)
Released last October in a fog of secrecy, the reviews of the film mostly ranged from positive to euphoric, and the industry itself has been equally dazzled. Blade Runner 2049 is in contention for five Oscars and eight Baftas, including a Bafta Best Director nomination for Villeneuve.
Yet it fell far short of even conservative box office predictions. The film fared notably better in Europe than the United States – “Europe saved my ass,” Villeneuve jokes – but it was
quickly branded a bomb, and its production company Alcon Entertainment is likely to lose $80 million.
When we meet in a fashionably sterile London hotel room – high rise, low lights, the purr of air conditioning overhead – the 50-year-old French-Canadian admits the film’s wildly unbalanced reception means it will probably remain a one-off.
“Let’s just say it would not be a good idea for me to make a movie like that twice,” he chuckles, in mellowly accented English. “When you’re working on a film you’re in a bubble, and it was only when I came out that I realised we had made a monster.”
It’s also only now that he is able to dissect it. During the original press tour, the studio didn’t screen the film for fear of plot leaks, “and I was really tired of talking about the film with journalists who hadn’t seen it,” he says. With its mighty heritage and stars like
Ryan Gosling and
Harrison Ford, it was by far the biggest film Alcon had ever handled. “And they wanted it to be a total secret, like Star Wars,” Villeneuve says. “They didn’t want anyone to know a thing about it.”
Sean Young, who played Rachel in the original film, made a cameo in the new one, as had long been rumoured. The studio “just closed up, like that,” Villeneuve says, and hunches over with a theatrical slurp.
But marketing leaks couldn’t spoil the film’s mysteries, and it’s only on a second encounter that many of Blade Runner 2049’s more elaborate puzzles open up. Take that opening close-up of a green-blue eye: it doesn’t belong to Ryan Gosling’s replicant detective K, as you might assume, but to Carla Juri’s Dr Stelline, the author of the synthetic memories that tip off K to the seismic implications of his latest missing-person case.
This means the actual first shot of K in the film is the one of him waking up in a police hover-car as it arrives at a sprawling protein farm – itself structured like a huge, grey iris in the desert. The film already forces us to reassess who K actually is twice. Does the eye shot and its implied connection to the film’s final moments suggest a further level of ambiguity is there to unpick?
Villeneuve grinningly declines to spell it out, but does say that he cooked up the image with his cinematographer Roger Deakins, a 13-time Oscar bridesmaid whose work on Blade Runner 2049 might well break his duck. He also says he toyed with calling the film Android’s Dream, a tribute to the Philip K Dick novel that inspired the original film, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Dick’s book was published in 1968 when Villeneuve was one year old; Scott’s film of it was released in 1982 when he was 15, and alongside Star Wars, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Scott’s own Alien, it was a formative influence. His first film, August 32nd on Earth (1998), was released when he was 29, and his second, Maelstrom, two years later.
But he was disappointed with both, and took a nine-year sabbatical as a stay-at-home dad, vowing to return “when I was ready to make a film I could be proud of”. Instead, he came back with two, and the second, the twisting war thriller Incendies (2010), piqued Hollywood’s appetite.
And despite Blade Runner’s commercial struggles, he remains something of a flavour of the month. Eon Productions recently approached him to direct the as-yet-untitled 25th
James Bond film, but he turned them down to direct and co-write a new cinema adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, “a project I’ve been dreaming of since I was 14 years old.”
His Bond ambition remains undimmed, though. “One day I would love to do one, but it’s a question of timing. And it is very difficult to do a Bond movie well. I think what Martin Campbell did with Casino Royale was impressive, but now, where to go? I haven’t had time to dream about it yet.”
Besides, Dune is enough to be getting on with. Ignoring the 1984 David Lynch version, he’s adapting the 1965 novel from scratch with Eric Roth, whose unmade screenplay with Michael Mann, Comanche, is, Villeneuve says, “one of the best I’ve ever read”. And the writing process has given him a break from increasingly gigantic and high-stakes film sets.
“I made five movies in six years, which is a privilege but also not a good idea,” he says. “I haven’t had time to think about any of it. I kept feeling like I lacked time, so now to have so much of it feels…”
Like a holiday? He smiles and shakes his head.
“Like a nice puzzle.”