How Denis Villeneuve Shoots A Film At 3 Budget Levels

INTRODUCTION

Great directors are capable of creating and maintaining very deliberate cinematic tones. This is true of Denis Villeneuve. His films are thrilling, dramatic and at times epic in both tone and scope, yet also provoke subtle political, ethical and philosophical questions that provide substance to action.

His career has wound a path from lower budget productions all the way to directing some of the largest blockbusters in the world. 

In this video I’ll look at three of his films at three increasing budget levels, the low budget August 32nd on Earth, the medium budget Sicario and the high budget Dune to unveil the formation of his style and identity as a director.  

AUGUST 32ND ON EARTH

The Canadian filmmaker’s interest in movies was piqued as a child. He began making short films when he was in high school, where he also developed an early love of science fiction. After leaving school he began studying science but later changed his focus to film when he moved to the University of Quebec.  

After winning some awards he began working with the National Film Board of Canada where he established a working relationship with producer Roger Frappier who developed films by emerging directors. 

The NFB funded his first 30 minute short film which showed a lot of promise. Frappier then produced Cosmos, a collection of six different shorts made by six young directors, which included Villeneuve as well as his future collaborator André Turpin. It was a critical success. 

Following this Villeneuve wrote a screenplay with a contained story about a woman who is thrust into an existential crisis after surviving a car accident. Frappier came on board to produce the film under his production company Max Films.

André Turpin was brought on board to serve as the cinematographer on the film. This collaboration established a trait which would continue throughout his later movies - an openness to letting DPs bring their own photographic sensibilities to the project, while at the same time always firmly maintaining his own strong perspective on the script. 

To August 32nd On Earth, Turpin brought his preference for strong, saturated 35mm Kodak colour, very soft side light, character focused framing and use of sharp lenses with a shallow depth of field. This was complemented by Villeneuve’s preferences for using subjective framing with lots of close ups and motivated, smooth camera moves from a tripod, dolly or Steadicam.

Although the film is a mature, cinematically grounded and more realistic production, it also has a dreamlike tone with moments of experimentation, some of which seems to have been inspired by his love of French New Wave Films, such as Breathless. 

From the philosophical walk and talks, to the numerous jump cuts and even the main character's short haircut - Breathless seems to be a clear influence. And if you think maybe these are just coincidences, there’s even a shot with a poster of Seberg who starred in Breathless. While the influence of French New Wave filmmaking is strong, it’s not overpowering. 

Villeneuve took parts of the style that worked effectively for a low budget film, such as a subjective focus on very few characters, and parts that suited his story, such as the experimental editing to visualise the character’s post accident haze, and combined it with own sensibilities for realism, mature drama, cinematic control, and isolated desert locations (which cropped up in much of his later work). 

August 32nd established his strong voice as a director, his ability to maintain a consistent cinematic tone, openness to collaboration and his stylistic sensibilities. 

He made his first low budget film by writing a simple story with few moving parts, using experimental cutting to avoid showing expensive set pieces like the car accident, and instead devoted his budget to creating a deliberate, cinematic camera language.        

SICARIO ($30 Million)

August 32nd got into the Cannes Film festival and premiered in the Un Certain Regard section, which he followed with a string of Canadian medium budget films.

In 2013 it was announced that Villeneuve would direct Sicario, an action thriller on the Mexican border. He was drawn to the philosophical concept of the border, an imaginary line which divides two extremes, as well as examining the idea of western influence and how it is exerted by first world nations. 

At a medium-high $30 million budget it was a step up from his prior Canadian films in the $6 Million range. However, the script involved many large, expensive set pieces and complex action sequences which meant the budget, relative to what needed to be shot, wasn’t huge. After writing or co-writing the screenplays for his early projects, Sicario was penned by Taylor Sheridan.

“The research I did after, as I was prepping the movie, just confirmed what was written in the script… I wanted to embrace Mexico. To see scenes from the victim’s point of view…try to create authenticity in front of the camera and not fall into cliches.”

To capture an authentic, naturalistic vision he turned to famed cinematographer Roger Deakins who he’d worked with before on Prisoners.

They storyboarded many of the sequences as a team during the process of location scouting in pre-production. This nailed down the photographic style they wanted and also allowed them to work quickly and effectively when shooting complex action sequences that needed to be pieced together.

This helped decrease shooting time in the tight schedule. Villeneuve’s clear vision for the shots he needed to get also saved time. For example, after shooting a master of a confrontation scene, Deakins asked if he should move the camera closer to get singles of each character. Villeneuve declined, knowing that he would use the master shot as a single long take in the edit…which he did. Not shooting extraneous close ups saved the production around three hours.

In his trademark style, Deakins shot many of the scenes from an Aerocrane jib arm with a Power Pod Classic remote head, a combination he’s used for over 20 years.

This allows him to quickly and easily move the camera on any axis, making it useful not only for smooth moves, but also for quickly repositioning the frame, allowing for a more organic working style and time saving setup.

“I mean the challenge of the photography of any film is sustaining the look and the atmosphere and not breaking out of that.”

One challenge when shooting out in Villeneuve’s favourite location, the desert, was controlling the natural light. Deakins did this by breaking down and scheduling each exterior shot at a specific time when the angle of sunlight was right with the assistant director Don Sparks.If the sun went away or into clouds they had a separate list of shots they could get such as car interiors or close ups which were easier to light.

Another way of exercising control of the lighting and the location was shooting certain interiors in a studio. To free up space for camera moves and to keep the light as motivated and as natural as possible he set up all his lights outside the set - 6 T12 fresnels pushing hard, sourcey light through windows and 65 2K space lights to provide ambience outside those windows. 

He recorded on ArriRaw with the Alexa XT using Master Prime lenses - usually the 32, 35 and 40mm, occasionally pulling out the 27mm for wides.

“The overall approach to the film was this personal perspective. We’re either with Emily, or with Benicio, you know. So we took all that to say well we’ll do this whole night sequence from the perspective of the night vision system.”

To do this a special adapter was used on the Alexa to increase its sensitivity to light. He then lit the scene with a low power single source bounced from high up to mimic realistic moonlight and keep the audience immersed.

The much larger scope Sicario was therefore pulled off with a $30 million budget by: carefully planning out the complex action sequences in pre production to save time and money, casting famous leads that drew audiences to the cinema, shooting some interiors in a studio for increased control and exteriors on location to wrap the audience up in a feeling of authenticity and controlling the score, sound design and pacing in the edit to provide a consistently thrilling tone. 

DUNE ($165 Million)

After Sicario’s critical and commercial success Villeneuve turned to a project he’d dreamt about making since he was a teenager - Dune - based on the sci fi novel by Frank Herbert. 

“I felt in love spontaneously with it…There’s something about the journey of the main character…This feeling of isolation. The way he was struggling with the burden of his heritage. Family heritage, genetic heritage, political heritage.”

With this thematic backing Villeneuve took on this sci fi story of epic proportions with a large studio budget of around $165 million. Since a large part of the undertaking was based on creating his imaginings of the world of Dune, he teamed up with his regular production designer Patrice Vermette and experienced cinematographer Greig Fraser. Together they worked with the extensive conceptual art and storyboards to bring the story to life. Since the way in which the sets were constructed would have an impact on the lighting, Fraser had many pre-production meetings with Vermette about light.

“The main character in the movie for me is nature. I wanted the movie to look as naturalistic and as real as possible. To do so we used most of the time natural light.”

On Arrakis buildings are constructed from rock with few openings to save its occupants from the oppressive heat. So instead of using direct light, the interior lighting is soft and bounced. To create this Fraser and his gaffer rigged Chroma-Q Studio Force II LED light strips to simulate the ambient softness of bounced sunlight. For close ups where they needed more punch he used LED Digital Sputnik DS6 fixtures. 

To create depth Fraser constantly broke up spaces by using areas of light and shadow in different planes of the image. To bring out the incredible heat and harshness on the desert planet, Fraser used hard natural light from the sun which he cut into sections of sharp shadow in interesting ways. 

Generally in cinematography, the larger a space is the more expensive and work it takes to light. This sequence was no exception. 

In a massive undertaking, Fraser’s grip and rigging team put up gigantic sections of fabric gobo over the set’s ceiling to creatively block the sunlight, to create a sense of ominous depth to the space. They then had a precise window to shoot the scene between 10:45 and 11:10am where the angle of the sun would be perfect. 

They photographed Dune on large format with the Alexa LF and Mini LF on large format spherical Panavision H-series lenses to render the taller 1.43:1 Imax sequences and Panavision Ultra Vista 1.65x anamorphic lenses for the 2.39:1 shots.

“I wanted the sky to be a vivid white. A very harsh sky. To bring kind of a violence to the desert - a harshness to it.”

To do this Fraser got his colourist Dave Cole to create a LUT for the camera in pre-production that pulled out the blue in the image and rolled off the overexposure.

The final finishing of the movie in the grade involved an interesting process. Fraser felt the look of the film should be more on the digital side, with the slightest hint of film. 

To do this they took the graded digital files and did a laser-recording-film-out, recording the digital image onto Kodak 5254 print film. This film was then scanned and converted back to digital files. The result was a final file with just a tiny hint of film grain and subtly organic film artefacts.

When it came to sound Villeneuve brought composer Hans Zimmer into the room with the sound design team, so that the two were married together to create the ultimate immersive experience.

Villeneuve successfully grounded Dune’s fantastical world with his trademark realism and used the massive budget to: pull off a long shoot with a big crew, enormous technical setups and set construction, access to any gear they needed and extensive VFX post-production work.

CONCLUSION

Villeneuve’s films are strung together by a thrilling subject matter with political and philosophical themes told in a grounded, realist visual style…and, well, the desert.He’s drawn to scripts that both immerse the audience in a riveting world and pose subtle thematic questions.

Throughout his career he has worked in a collaborative way with different in demand DPs who each imparted touches of their own style on the stories. However, his films are always very much his own and supported by his vision.

Villeneuve’s ability to control the tone of his films using every filmmaking element, from the script to the camera work, the edit and the music, is what has elevated his work to its critical and commercial heights.