For the inaugural episode of Esquire Talks, Dune: Part Two director Denis Villeneuve has opened up about the films that inspired his much-anticipated sequel – and revealed the Martin Scorsese movie that left the biggest impact on his approach.
The French-Canadian filmmaker has never been shy about his admiration for Scorsese. He even reached out to him for advice before starting work on 2013’s Prisoners, his first project in Hollywood. According to a panel talk he gave last year, the legendary auteur urged him to try to “stay intact, protect your identify and protect your integrity”.
So far, so good. We can’t say for sure if he’s still reaching out to Marty for advice, but they did recently combine forces to declare war on "content".
When we met up with Villeneuve to discuss the films that inspired him during the making of Dune: Part Two, it didn't take long for him to start declaring his love for Scorsese's work – specifically, 1988's The Last Temptation of Christ.
“It’s a movie that absolutely blew me away,” he told us. “It’s an exploration of the doubt of the human who is obsessed with visions and ideas that are bigger than him […] it’s a portrait of Christ that always moved me because it brought so much humanity in that figure.”
He saw parallels in the story he was trying to tell with Dune: Part Two. “It was pretty close to the trajectory of Paul Atreides," he said, paying tribute to Scorsese's once-controversial film. "I must say, in the way Martin Scorsese portrayed that period of time, there’s something about the level of precision of the details, it’s like he had taken a time machine.
“It was a movie that tremendously influenced me as I was doing this adaptation."
Watch the full video above, and catch Dune: Part Two in cinemas on 1 March.
