How Denis Villeneuve’s Past Films Prepare Him for Bond

Denis Villeneuve’s announcement as the director of the next Bond film has provided welcome reassurance for 007 after years of uncertainty. Creative control of the Bond franchise was recently handed to Amazon MGM by longtime producers Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, but with no replacement for Daniel Craig lined up, a question mark hung over the iconic character’s future. Villeneuve’s hiring has set it back on course. 

While some may miss the slapstick silliness of the 20th century installments, the serious and contemplative direction of the Daniel Craig era is the perfect match for Villeneuve, who has proven himself to be a master of blending spectacle and emotion.

Based on Villeneuve’s remarkable filmography over the last 15 years, viewers can expect his take on Bond to be a studious investigation into the human cost of conflict and violence, and how that weighs on the seasoned spy. Before Villeneuve brought that lens to legacy sci-fi franchises like Blade Runner and Dune, he was fascinated by humanity’s capability for violence in a range of settings — from Mexican drug cartels to alien invasions and child kidnappings. In the films below, Villeneuve searches for the root causes of these conflicts, while also exposing the ugliness of a world that permits such events to continue.

Incendies (2010)

Before Villeneuve broke into English-language cinema, he directed one of his most bracing, horrifying stories of conflict with Incendies. Based on the play of the same name by acclaimed French-Canadian writer Wajdi Mouawad, the film follows two Montreal twins (Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin, Maxim Gaudette) who journey to their mother (Lubna Azabal)’s Middle Eastern homeland after her death. The voyage fulfills their mother’s last wishes: to track down their missing brother and absentee father. There, they uncover a shocking family history of trauma beyond comprehension, and a profound understanding of the sacrifices their mother made to protect them from the war that nearly took her life and spirit.

Notably, Incendies never names the country it is set in, though its plot closely follows the impact of the Lebanese Civil War. Instead, Villeneuve is hyper-focused on one woman’s personal and political battle with sectarian violence, and how both her bravery and pain reverberates throughout generations. Villeneuve is meticulous, and never gratuitous, in the way he depicts violence, favouring close-ups and dialogue to understand how war is felt on an interpersonal level, rather than graphic detail. This leads to some of the film’s most haunting imagery, like the famous shot of Azabal’s shocking discovery at a public pool, or Désormeaux-Poulin’s gasp in the face of an unthinkable evil. It set Villeneuve’s career on his current trajectory: as a director of thrillers with striking visual beauty, which never waver from humanity’s shameful capability for evil.

Prisoners (2013)

On paper, Villeneuve’s star-studdied English-language debut Prisoners treads familiar ground: missing children, a troubled detective and a father taking matters into his own hands. But across an utterly gripping two-and-a-half hours, Prisoners reveals itself as so much more than a dime-a-dozen American crime drama. Like Incendies, the script (written by Aaron Guzikowski) treats its mystery as a Greek tragedy, meditating on the physical and metaphorical prisons humans find themselves in due to faith (or its absence), anger or revenge. Hugh Jackman plays Keller Dover, a devoutly religious father who descends into violence when his daughter and her friend go missing. Jake Gyllenhaal is Loki, the haunted detective whose obsession with the case brings him face to face with a horror hiding behind the gleaming facade of American suburbia.

Villeneuve and Guzikowski lean heavily on labyrinths as a symbol throughout. Like a Greek hero fighting through a maze, Detective Loki encounters all manner of beasts on his way to the centre of the mystery—encountering venomous snakes at a suspect’s house, or a mysterious corpse under the home of a priest. The reveal of the killer is shattering, and it propels the film towards moral questions of justice and retribution in the face of senseless violence—and how easy it is, weighed down by our own troubled histories, to get lost in labyrinths of our own creation.

Sicario (2015)

Sicario was Villeneuve’s second collaboration, after Prisoners, with legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins, who himself conjured some of the most striking visuals of the Bond franchise in Skyfall. Sicario is the story of the tough-but-idealistic FBI agent Kate Macer (a brilliant Emily Blunt), whose expertise in hostage rescue and drug violence finds her drawn into a task force to apprehend the head of a major cartel. But from the jump, she knows something’s not right, and her firm moral compass is shaken by the CIA’s Matt Graver (Josh Brolin) and his less unconventional methods. 

The film perfectly exemplifies Villeneuve and Deakins’ knack for depicting violence with a disorienting, strangely poignant beauty, in this case telling a story of drug cartels at the US-Mexico border through indelible and often dread-inducing images. The climactic shot of the CIA approaching the tunnels under the Mexican border, with the sunset burning red on the horizon, is just one of many searing images in the film; it feels as though we’re witnessing the characters descend directly into a fiery underworld. Additionally, the intricately blocked action scenes, like the heart-pounding border shootout in the first act, prove the Bond franchise is in safe hands with Villeneuve. He directs action with a sobering precision, never losing sight of the dreadful impact of every shot fired.

Arrival (2016)

Despite depicting a literal alien invasion, Arrival is perhaps Villeneuve’s calmest film, telling the story of a linguist named Louise Banks (Amy Adams, delivering one of the great performances of the 21st century so far). Louise is tasked with learning the aliens’ language and understanding their intentions. Throughout the film, Villeneuve studies humanity’s impulse for war and our mistrust of what we don’t understand. Even as Louise gradually pieces together the aliens’ peaceful mission, miscommunication and paranoia lead the military forces around her to prepare for battle.

As this escalates, Louise is going through her own private turmoil, which—avoiding spoilers—becomes the film’s most unforgettable theme: motherhood and the slippage of time. It’s perhaps Villeneuve’s best example of his ability to bind the personal and political, and the way he injects elevated genres—science fiction, thriller, crime—with our most recognisable hopes and heartbreaks. It’s exactly what a franchise like Bond needs: a director who will treat the character with the seriousness he deserves, and find the most beautiful ways to do so.