MAKING THIS FILM is a dream that is very old. My very best friend and I were two nerds: while all the other kids were playing football, we were making drawings and storyboards of Dune. I still have those drawings somewhere. In one of my first conversations about this film with [composer] Hans Zimmer, he said to me, “You know, it’s one of my oldest dreams to score a Dune movie. But is it a good idea to try to tackle your oldest dream?” I think it is. When it came time to shoot Dune, every day was hard, but I felt a deep happiness.

When I read Frank Herbert’s book as a teenager, I quickly became a Dune maniac. In the book, you’re following a teenager, Paul Atreides, who is struggling with a massive burden. Family heritage, political heritage, genetic and environmental heritage. He has a lot of pressure on his shoulders. Still, he is slowly making his way into the world, trying to find his identity and finding home. When he has lost everything, when he’s in the deep desert, I remember experiencing that feeling of isolation with him, that melancholia. I would not say that I was a lonely kid, but I identified with those feelings.

I also loved the fact that nature is a main character in the novel, these incredible ecosystems that Frank Herbert created. I have always been fascinated by biology, and the way he used science was so inspiring and so compelling. When you read it as a teen you’re taken with the notion of adventure, finding your place in the world, this strong and exciting narrative. As an adult, you begin to see that there are a lot of layers, that it says a lot about ourselves and our times. It looks at politics and religion, and that’s why the book has stood the test of time. You can use science-fiction as a mirror for reality; sometimes science-fiction is a critique of reality.

THE FIRST TIME I talked seriously about making Dune was at the Venice Film Festival in 2016. I was shooting Blade Runner 2049 and releasing Arrival. A journalist asked me what my dream project would be, and I said Dune. By coincidence, Mary Parent, production chief at Legendary, had just gotten the rights and was thinking, “I need a director.” She read that article, and the next time I was in LA, we had the fastest meeting in history. I said that I would love to make Dune; Legendary said that they would love to make Dune with me. We shook hands.