Director Denis Villeneuve had been obsessed with Dune since he was a teenager, he said in a conversation with Christopher Nolan for the Directors Guild of America podcast. And Villeneuve was finally able to realize (at least half of) his dream of adapting the book for the big screen this year, with the release of Dune: Part One. The filmmaker also spoke about why he didn’t shoot his planned sequel back-to-back with the first film, and the Star Wars-shaped elephant in the room that he forbade his crew from acknowledging.

Following Dune’s release in the U.S., a lot of the conversation surrounding the film has been about the potential sequel. As of now, Villeneuve’s vision remains incomplete, as the first film traces roughly half the plot of Frank Herbert’s epic novel. He said that his decision to divide the unwieldy source material into two parts was never contested. But Villeneuve admitted that in hindsight, he is "so happy" that he wasn’t allowed to make both films back-to-back, partially because his last movie, Blade Runner 2049, didn’t perform as well as many might have expected. He also joked that he probably would "have died" after having taken on such a challenge.

In Villeneuve's words:

"It’s something that I proposed to the studio right at the beginning because I was feeling that trying to put that story into one movie would be damaging; it would be a mistake. It was not a discussion; they agreed spontaneously. The only thing where we started to talk was that I wanted to do both movies at the same time, and that felt too expensive. And, I should say, you know you’re always as good as your last movie, and I think Blade Runner wasn’t a major box office success. I think they were a little cold at the idea of investing in two movies right away. I think that’s the truth I understood."

Dune Denis Villeneuve Timothee Chalamet
Image via Warner Bros.

RELATED: Box Office: 'Dune' Pulls in $40 Million for Biggest Weekend for a Movie Also Debuting on HBO Max

As Villeneuve sheepishly admitted that Blade Runner 2049’s lukewarm box office performance might have given Warner Bros. cold feet about his ambitious plans for Dune, Nolan joked that it was probably “a negotiating tactic on the studio’s part,” before adding, “Blade Runner was a very successful film and an incredible piece of work.”

Villeneuve also spoke about forbidding his crew from drawing inspiration from the internet, particularly Star Wars:

"The thing is that I said to the crew that we were not there to express ourselves but to try to bring the words of Herbert to the screen. The book was the Bible. We went back to the book all the time. At the very beginning of the process, I sat along with my storyboard artists, and I spent weeks drawing along with them, a bit like I did when I was 13 years old with my friends. It was exactly the same, trying, like an archeologist, to go back to the images that I had when I read the book for the first time, those uncorrupted images, and the emotions that I had when I read the book. Focusing on nature, and the place of humans in the ecosystems. I did that work with the storyboard artists and I brought one designer, and it was forbidden to take any reference from the internet. I wanted it to come from dreams and trying to meditate, and trying to find images. You know, there’s an elephant in the room, and that is Star Wars. To design a movie like that — Star Wars is inspired deeply by Dune — trying to bring something fresh. So the idea was to focus on dreams and the book, the book, the book."

Nolan was highly effusive in his praise for Dune, hailing the film’s epic scale, the casting, and the visuals, which he described as “one of the most seamless marriages of live-action photography and computer-generated visual effects” that he has seen. Villeneuve was similarly complimentary of Nolan’s science-fiction film Tenet, which he described in a recent appearance on the ReelBlend podcast as a “masterpiece.”

Dune is currently playing in theaters and streaming on HBO Max. All eyes will now be on how well it performs both theatrically and on streaming, as WB deliberates about the franchise’s future.

KEEP READING: ‘Dune’ Ending Explained: Meeting Paul Atreides Halfway