Denis Villeneuve Wants to Make A Silent Film

Cinema was started as a series of images, and there was no dialogue during the silent era of filmmaking. Before talkies came in the late ‘20s, complex stories were being told purely via visual language and there was technically no need for sound to enter the cinematic language.

Earlier in the year, Denis Villeneuve caused some backlash by saying, “frankly, I hate dialogue. Dialogue is for theater and television.” He eventually backtracked on these comments a few days later (“I don’t hate dialogue”), but it did open up some theories that Villeneuve might eventually direct a silent film.

Speaking at a BFI London Film Festival, Villeneuve has made it known that he wants to direct a “dialogue-free” movie. The filmmaker reiterated how “dialogue is the tool of expression for theatre, and then it became, for other reasons, one for television,” and that it has less of a place in cinema.

“I love dialogue, but not [always] in cinema,” he told BFI moderator Bret Goldstein. “I hope one day I will be able to make a film that will not use spoken language,” added Villeneuve. “I try as much as possible to use the power of images.”

I get it. Filmmaking is a visual medium, and a film can work, both emotionally and viscerally, on images and editing alone. Cinema was born as a visual medium. It’s in its DNA. For the first 30 or so years of its existence, there was no dialogue in cinema, it was all powered by the visuals.

Silent films have gone practically extinct— there isn’t an audience for them anymore, but it turns out that one day we might be getting a modern-day silent film out of Villeneuve. It would make sense. Villeneuve is very much a visually driven blockbuster filmmaker — “Arrival,” “Sicario,” “Blade Runner 2049” and “Dune” are narratively driven by powerful images.

He wouldn’t be the first filmmaker to attempt such an experiment in the 21st century. There haven’t been many, but some of the more successful silent films of the 21st century include “The Triplets of Belleville,” “All is Lost,” “The Artist” and this year’s “Hundreds of Beavers.”