Denis Villeneuve: “Frankly, I Hate Dialogue. Dialogue is for Theater and Television"

Denis Villeneuve is telling The Times of London that, if it were up to him, he actually wishes his films were driven by image and not dialogue:

Frankly, I hate dialogue. Dialogue is for theatre and television. I don’t remember movies because of a good line, I remember movies because of a strong image. I’m not interested in dialogue at all. Pure image and sound, that is the power of cinema, but it is something not obvious when you watch movies today. Movies have been corrupted by television.

That’s an interesting way of seeing things. However, don’t people continuously quote memorable quotes from movies?

Then again, there’s this school of thought, and, film school professors love this one, that before talkies came in the late ‘20s, complex stories were being told purely via visual language and there was no need for sound to enter the cinematic language.

I do agree that Cinema was started via images, and there was no dialogue during the silent era of filmmaking, but to go on to state that “movies have been corrupted by television” is a strange opinion. If anything, the recent “golden age” of television was influenced by movies, not the other way around.

Villeneuve goes on to hint at his growing desire to one day make a film without any dialogue, adding that he’d love to make “Dune: Messiah” without any lines uttered by his actors. That’d be something …

In a perfect world, I’d make a compelling movie that doesn’t feel like an experiment but does not have a single word in it either. People would leave the cinema and say, ‘Wait, there was no dialogue?’ But they won’t feel the lack.

Villeneuve is just asking to be mocked here because if there has been any criticsm of his films it’s that they are visually rich statements with banal dialogue. Don’t get me wrong, it’s worked numerous times, most notably in his acclaimed “Incendies,” “Arrival,” “Sicario” and “Blade Runner 2049.”

In a nutshell, this is Villeneuve basically telling us that he’s more talented at images than words. There’s no question he’s a visual storyteller, but in that same interview he praises “Oppenheimer,” which was a 3-hour film driven by dialogue.

I do get what he’s saying, but maybe he’s just not explaining it properly. To me, cinema should be a set delivery of powerful images thrown at the viewer, but effective dialogue can be immensely powerful.