Vielleicht stimmen einige Klischees über Kanada doch. Denis Villeneuve, gebürtiger Kanadier, beginnt das Gespräch auf jeden Fall mit einer ausführlichen Entschuldigung. Normalerweise trage er Anzug und Krawatte, wenn er sich mit Journalisten treffe, versichert er. Aber da er gerade erst mit dem Flugzeug in Berlin angekommen sei und der Jetlag ihm arg zu schaffen mache, habe er diesmal um Erlaubnis gebeten, etwas legerer auftreten zu dürfen.
Was er als seinen „Pyjama“-Stil bezeichnet, geht in Berlin als Streetchic durch: schwarze Hose, dunkler Hoodie, gepflegter Fünftagebart, dessen Spitzen silbern glänzen. Das und ein heller Hauch in den Haaren sind die einzigen Anzeichen für seine siebenundfünfzig Jahre, sonst sieht er, Jetlag hin oder her, sehr entspannt aus.
Die erste Frage muss von den Frauen handeln, denn sie spielen in Villeneuves Filmen meist erstaunlich komplexe Rollen. Amy Adams rettet in „Arrival“ als Sprachwissenschaftlerin die Welt, weil sie mit Aliens einen Weg der gemeinsamen Kommunikation findet, Emily Blunt deckt in „Sicario“ als FBI-Agentin das doppelte Spiel eines Kollegen auf, und Zendaya tritt in den neuen „Dune“-Filmen Timothée Chalamet als ebenbürtige Partnerin entgegen, die vor allen anderen erkennt, wie Machtgier den Helden verzehrt. Würde Villeneuve sich selbst als feministischen Filmemacher bezeichnen?
„Ehrlich gesagt, ja. Nicht weil das im Trend liegt, sondern weil mir das schon immer wichtig war. Bereits in meinem ersten Spielfilm, ‚Der 32. August auf Erden‘, ging es um eine junge Frau. Ich wollte eine Figur kreieren, die Distanz zu mir selbst bringt. Außerdem bin ich von sehr starken Frauen erzogen worden“, sagt er. Und dann erzählt er von seinen Großmüttern, mit denen er im kleinen kanadischen Dorf Gentilly in Quebec aufgewachsen ist. „Sie wohnten direkt nebeneinander und haben sich gehasst. Sie waren sehr unterschiedlich, hatten sehr eigenwillige, starke Charaktere.“
When it comes to equality, Canada works differently than the USA
One had raised her children alone as a divorced woman (“that was a big deal in the 1960s”), and the other he describes as a “never-ending source of inspiration,” a woman with a “slight penchant for drama.” One of his brothers made films about her. Villeneuve’s mother was also a feminist and raised her four children with the idea that “a man can only be strong if he has a strong woman at his side.” After moving to the neighboring country, Villeneuve discovered that Canada works differently than the USA when it comes to equality. He had his first successes as a filmmaker in Canada; his drama “The Woman Who Sings” was nominated for an Oscar in 2010 as “Best Foreign Language Film”. So in 2012 he tried to find a new footing and discovered that “society in the USA is much more conservative.”
How does he determine this? Villeneuve gives an anecdotal example: “If I’m in a restaurant in Montreal with a woman and the waiter brings the bill, he asks both of us who’s paying. In the USA there is no question that the man will do it.” And as he recounts this experience, the polite Canadian who doesn’t want to offend anyone comes through again: “Of course I’m not an expert in this matter,” he almost says already apologetic. “I am simply the son and grandson of feminists and believe that men and women should have equal rights.”
He says this as if all emotionality were out of place here. The way he conducts the conversation with great calm and openness, without a trace of the big ego that some people would acquire with less success. Villeneuve combines the rare talent of setting commercial records with Hollywood blockbusters – “Dune 2″ alone grossed more than $700 million worldwide – and at the same time being critically recognized for his work. Instead of self-praise, the director openly shows his doubts when he made the first English-language film in the USA with the top stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Hugh Jackman and Viola Davis: “I was sure when I started shooting ‘Prisoners’ that after three days someone would tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘You’re nice and we love your accent, but you really have no place here.'”
That didn’t happen during filming, nor was there any pushback when Villeneuve showed his final cut to the producers. “I felt so respected as an artist and as a director,” he says. This wasn’t always the case in his homeland: “At home in Canada, I sometimes felt more like a beggar who wanted to borrow money from the government for his projects. You feel like a parasite. And that’s completely different in the USA, filmmaking is an important socio-economic activity there – they take cinema very seriously in America.” He adds that he couldn’t have made a film like “Dune” anywhere else.
Fascination for nature in its aesthetics
We’re talking before Villeneuve scored two Golden Globes nominations for Dune 2 in December, including Best Picture. Outside the window of the hotel room, the late autumn sun shines on the zoo and attracts the director to the balcony, where he lets his gaze wander over the trees and visibly admires the park with enthusiasm. The fascination for nature is also reflected in his aesthetics. Most of his films seek to capture the interaction between people and landscape at some point. Culture and nature are not in opposition, they belong together narratively.
When he brings Frank Herbert’s desert planet to life for Dune, the sandhills shimmer across the screen with such cool beauty that you wonder whether heat can really be cold? Where other blockbuster franchises such as Marvel’s superhero cinema cosmos or the Harry Potter film adaptations paint their worlds, which were largely created on the computer, in the warmest colors, Villeneuve relies on hard realism. “The Marvel films have their own visual peculiarities, they work a lot on stage with green screen and have to stick to very tight specifications for the characters. ‘Dune’ is completely different, it focuses on people. When we shoot, we do it on real locations, in the desert,” says the director.
It wasn’t easy to convince the producers of this much more complex filming: “At the beginning I had a few meetings in which I had the feeling that they would be very happy if I told them: ‘Oh, I’ve changed my mind ‘We’ll do it in the studio.’ But then they understood when I said: ‘They didn’t record the great white shark in a swimming pool either. And if the desert plays a major role, then we have to shoot there too.’” You can’t recreate the influences of nature in the studio: “If the characters are running through the desert and the forces are affecting them, then I can’t do that in one go Staging a small sandbox, that doesn’t make any sense.”
He may have gained the courage to dare to do greater things from the European graphic novels of his childhood (“When I discovered Moebius and Bilal, it was a big aesthetic shock for me.”), and his fascination for science fiction material stems from this. As a child he devoured novels by Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick and of course Frank Herbert. The story of “Dune” didn’t let him go: “That a boy finds his identity in another culture – I thought that idea was very nice. Instead of being afraid of something foreign, he embraces it and it makes him stronger. “I also immediately fell in love with the descriptions of the ecosystem and the way Frank Herbert describes the interaction between people and nature, their culture and technology, religions and customs, that completely captivated me as a child.”
The first “Dune” film adaptation by David Lynch disappointed him; he missed aspects of the book that he thought were essential. “Frank Herbert was also a feminist; he wrote The Sisterhood as a love letter to his wife; the most powerful characters in his books are women. When author Eric Roth sat down to adapt the script, he asked me if I could summarize in one word what struck me as most important about this complex work. I answered: the women. I said, if we can put the sisters and Lady Jessica in the foreground, then we have an interesting starting point.”
Together with Roth, he even went so far as to turn a male character in the novel into a woman: “It made the role more interesting and modern.” Otherwise, however, he wanted to be loyal to Herbert. “He wasn’t particularly happy with the first film, and he also disliked how some readers celebrated Paul Atreidis as a ‘hero’. So he wrote ‘Dune Messiah’ in response to that – that plays into my implementation. I want people to question Paul’s decisions at the end of the film.”
To do this, he expanded the role of Chani, Paul’s lover from the desert people, and gave the increasingly powerful hero a strong female counterpart. Zendaya got such a lead role in Dune 2; Her Chani becomes the lover’s biggest critic. This is again an interpretation that ventures beyond the original novel, but with a lot of respect for the author’s attitude. Villeneuve retains this much Canadian politeness even after more than ten years in the USA.