Jon Spaihts Talks Oscar Nominations, 'Dune Part II,' Adapting Frank Herbert, and Why Sci-Fi is More Than a Genre
WITH A LANDMARK PROJECT NOW BEHIND HIM, AND THE OSCARS AROUND THE CORNER, JON SPAIHTS LOOKS TO SCIENCE FICTION AND THE WORDS OF FRANK HERBERT AS THE GUIDING LIGHT FOR HIS NEXT CHAPTER AS A WRITER.
Jon Spaihts had, arguably, a career year in 2021. His sole credit, as a co-writer of Denis Villeneuve's monumental Dune - FilmSpeak's pick for the best film of the year - has propelled his name onto the awards circuit to a level beyond anything the writer has experienced before, including his first Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. “It’s been a pleasure to be in the midst of it all. It’s not common for big sci-fi movies to be honored, and that’s mostly where I work," said Spaihts, acknowledging the steep hill that sci-fi has had to climb to get recognition alongside "prestige" genres like historical epics and biopics. “I think a lot has changed. Science fiction was thought of, for a long time, as a genre of storytelling. Of course, it isn’t, it’s a family of settings. Science fiction can be horror, a love story, a historical epic. Dune is genetically more a historical epic, a Shakespearean adaptation, a Lawrence of Arabia or War and Peace.”
Dune's source material - the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert - has inspired an endless range of media over the decades, from Star Wars to The Matrix. Spaihts went into adapting the novel aware of the challenges in how familiar it might play with genre-savvy viewers. “It’s a funny thing where a young person would watch Casablanca now, and it feels like a fabric of tropes and cliches," said Spaihts. "Casablanca is where these things were born, but it can still feel threadbare to a new viewer. But Dune is Dune, and while many things have been influenced by it - Game of Thrones, Star Wars - so much of what it’s doing has such a distinct fingerprint. It felt like all that was necessary was to be true to the book, to its spirit, to tell it straight.”
Elaborating on why Dune still feels fresh, even after more than 50 years of influence on sci-fi, Spaihts added, “I think Frank Herbert did something incredibly savvy. He created a world whose rules essentially banish many of the stock elements of science fiction. There are personal shields that make projectile weapons useless, so there are no blaster pistols and ray gun fights. Sword and knife play have returned to the center of combat. Human skill and coordination are suddenly the greatest weapons. People have developed the human mind to its fullest extent, human beings become the replacement for computers. It’s a world where human beings are in the foreground." On the technological front, Spaihts similarly sees Dune as a unique universe. "Space travel is relegated to a monopolistic spacing guild, that gives space travel a more nautical mode, where Star Wars makes a spaceborne road movie available where you just jump in your ship," said Spaihts. :This is more like the age of sail, where you book passage, ride a while, the story stops when you get on the ship and picks up when you get off. There are no space battles, dogfights, Flash Gordon rockets. What we’re left with is a world that has many elements of medieval culture. We get a very human-centered universe in which to play out a larger than life story.”
Despite the richness of Dune's worldbuilding, and Herbert's elaborations on the technology that makes said world run, Spaihts was also aware that such an elaborate, almost encyclopedic breakdown of the world wouldn't translate properly to the screen, particularly thanks to his experience as a science fiction writer. “I fight that fight on everything I write, because I tend to do world-building fiction," said Spaihts. "When you build a world, you want everyone to understand how clever and wonderful it is, how everything works together, and it’s almost never the right answer. There are some stories where technology is at the center, but Dune has lived as a story for so long because it’s about people, about human nature, not spaceships, gadgets, or some futuristic culture that’s been built. That was always the compass we followed: what does the human story require? That’s the beating heart of the novel and film. [Denis] said to me early on that his ideal Dune would be a Dune without dialogue, just a dreamlike sequence of images, and he’s talking about one of the wordiest novels in science fiction. But I think it was the right goal, one that you’ll never achieve but that can school you along the way."
Beyond aiding in the pace and flow of a story, Spaihts also feels that leaving elaborate explanations out of the script is more complimentary to the audience, and makes for a more immersive viewing experience. "I have felt for many years that most movies overexplain themselves," said Spaihts. "We, as people, step into the middle of stories all the time. You arrive at a party and you don’t know who everybody is. You pick it up as you go, and you realize there’s backstory, you slowly put the picture together. That’s the best way to take in stories. It’s beautiful to step into things midstream, they come alive and feel real. Poetry is stronger, very often, than preaching.”
Moreso, Spaihts emphasized that the benefits of this approach aren't just limited to science fiction. “This isn’t specifically genre advice. You look at the early films of Scorsese, they often play like this. A series of scenes unfold, you piece together a notion of who this protagonist is, and sometimes the cuts are disjunct. You don’t know what the relationship is, why this guy has a certain skillset or agenda, but you keep following, and you begin to piece it together. Ultimately, a lot of your understanding may remain dreamlike throughout. I think that’s some of the bravest storytelling. Our hearts respond to it.”
With Dune's success at the box office combined with the critical adoration heaped upon it, Dune: Part Two was almost inevitable. Spaihts hinted at the direction the second film will take. “As we move to the second half of the book, we’ll be looking to make sure that the powerful women in the first half stay central, and have powerful hands to play," said Spaihts. "The politics of the book feel absolutely modern with respect to imperialism, resource extraction. The patriarchal monarchy feels antiquated, but that’s something the book itself is in dialogue about. I think that’s the right way forward when dealing with a dated piece of source material. Rather than throwing away whole chunks of it, it can be more profitable to let elements of that remain and let your story be in dialogue with them. We hope to do that with Dune. We know where we’re going, we’re still guided very faithfully by the book, but the second half of the novel leaves more for us to solve. That part of the book takes greater leaps, and will oblige us to create a more coherent structure.”
Beyond Dune: Part Two, Spaihts briefly discussed the possibilities for the cinematic future of Dune, from a potential third film adapted from Dune Messiah, to Dune: The Sisterhood, the HBO Max prequel centered around the Bene Gesserit that is currently in development. “The prospect of launching Dune as a wider cinematic universe lets you get into some of the beautiful weeds that surround foreground action," said Spaihts. "They allow you to flesh out the institutions of this world that we’ll never have time to shine a bright light on while we’re telling the central story of ‘Dune’ and its novels, because movies require an economy of us that makes that impossible. Branching projects that follow sub-strands of our story give us the possibility of digging into that.”
Dune is nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay for Jon Spaihts and co-writers Denis Villeneuve and Eric Roth. Listen to our full conversation with Jon Spaihts below, as we dig further into Dune, the brilliance of the character Lady Jessica, why the relevance of Frank Herbert's original novel has persisted for so long, and more!