Dune Director Rules Out Hopes of Ever Releasing Deleted Scenes or Extended Editions

Director Denis Villeneuve has bad news for anyone wishing they could spend more time on his Arrakis, as he confirmed that he has no plans to release extended editions of Dune or Dune: Part Two, nor should we expect to even see deleted scenes from the films. The filmmaker expressed that, if he cuts out any scene from a film, it’s painful enough the first time, so to revisit those sequences in hopes of offering up a new look at what was excised is too difficult a process. Dune: Part Two will be landing in theaters on March 1st.

“I’m a strong believer that when it’s not in the movie, it’s dead. I kill darlings, and it’s painful for me,” Villeneuve shared with Collider. “Sometimes I remove shots and I say, ‘I cannot believe I’m cutting this out.’ I feel like a samurai opening my gut. It’s painful, so I cannot go back after that and create a Frankenstein and try to reanimate things that I killed. It’s too painful. When it’s dead, it’s dead, and it’s dead for a reason. But yes, it is a painful project, but it is my job. The movie prevails. I’m very, I think, severe in the editing room. I’m not thinking about my ego, I’m thinking about the movie.” 

What will hopefully come as some relief to audiences is that, as opposed to David Lynch’s adaptation of Dune, which aimed to tell the whole journey of Paul Atreides from Frank Herbert’s original novel, Villeneuve split the experience into two parts. With Villeneuve’s first Dune running two hours and 35 minutes and Dune: Part Two having a run time of two hours and 45 minutes, fans will have gotten to spend more than five hours in this world.

Villeneuve also noted that the run times of his films aren’t dictated by anything other than what he feels they should be as opposed to them having to follow certain criteria or limitations.

“The run time of a movie, for me, the length of the movie is based on what the story needs. Sometimes I’ve made movies in my life that were 75 minutes, and this one is two hours, 45 [minutes], I think, something like that. It’s not, for me, the run time, it’s about the storytelling, and I felt that I wanted to create a momentum. I wanted an energy in the movie that I was looking for that excited me, and I thought that was the perfect run time,” Villeneuve shared. “For me, no matter what is the physical length of the running time, it’s always the experience as you’re watching the movie and how you feel. You can be bored by a five-minute movie, and there are some movies, we know some of them, that are three or four hours that you could live there forever. So, you just have to find the perfect running time, and that’s what I tried to do.”

Dune: Part Two lands in theaters on March 1st.

What do you think of the filmmaker’s remarks? Let us know in the comments!