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They’ve already made two blockbusters together but Timothée Chalamet is hoping that his big-screen collaborations with Denis Villeneuve continue for many years to come. And he’s not afraid of reminding the auteur of his intentions.
Chalamet joined Villeneuve’s Arrival star Amy Adams on the Palm Springs Convention Center stage on Friday night to present the filmmaker with a Visionary Award for his work on last year’s Dune: Part Two. In doing so, Chalamet called Villeneuve a “terrific director I was dying to work with to a father figure, to a mentor and a close friend, and someone I like to gently remind every couple of weeks, usually over text, that God forbid anything happen to Denis or myself, ‘Can you be the director I work with most in my career, and can I be the actor you worked with the most in [your] career?’”
Chalamet then quipped that the race seems to be neck and neck with Jake Gyllenhaal, who previously starred in Villeneuve’s back-to-back films in 2013, Prisoners and Enemy. “If you look at the exact number of production days, I’m in the lead on that,” Chalamet teased. He later joked: “With apologies to Jake Gyllenhaal once more, who is in the earlier, smaller movies because as they’ve gotten bigger, it tends to be me who’s the lead.”
On a more earnest note, the star of the Dune franchise said he’s known Villeneuve for about eight years, and despite growing close during that time, the actor explained that the filmmaker remains an enigma, a “rare artist” who is impossible to box in or define.
“I know he’s deeply passionate about his work and perhaps as an anomaly of the times, he’s private about his passion for his work,” Chalamet said. “His work is between he and the work. He doesn’t wear his career like an armor. In fact, his usual armor is the same pair of army cargo pants and a linen white dress shirt. Like many of the great artists of our times, what makes Denis tick is beyond me. … I know that he’s intrinsically warm, quick to laugh with a huge heart, and I know he throws himself into his work, and yet he remains a Quebecois enigma to me.”
For her part, Adams praised Villeneuve’s determination “to get to the heart of each story, and he does not shy away from complicated things like vengeance, identity or loss. Instead, he races towards them, bringing them to the screen, allowing us to see ourselves, giving us the opportunity to rebel, to squirm, to embrace, to roam, and to be awestruck and even to know what it’s like to ride a sand worm or communicate with extraterrestrial visitors.”
In accepting, Villeneuve praised his many collaborators, studio partners, wife and creative partner and said that “our future needs more empathy” and “cinema is one of the most powerful art forms to generate it.”
Amy Adams, Visionary Award winner Denis Villeneuve and Timothée Chalamet pose backstage at the Palm Springs International Film Awards.
Presley Ann/Getty Images for Palm Springs International Film Society
Chalamet made two appearances on the main stage inside the Palm Springs Convention Center. After teaming with Adams to honor Villeneuve, the 29-year-old actor came back out to accept a Chairman’s Award for his work as Bob Dylan in the current release, A Complete Unknown.
“The Chairman’s Award, that’s got a hell of a ring to it man. I don’t know what I did to receive the Chairman’s Award as opposed to an acting award, but I will carry this trophy with pride and I’ll make sure my friends and my family respect me for it,” said Chalamet following a tribute from Gary Oldman, someone he encountered as they were both in the Oscar race in 2018. (Goldman won for The Darkest Hour.)
Chalamet mentioned that awards season. “I sat in this very room seven years ago, like Gary said, and I was stunned to be in the company of someone like Gary Oldman, a man whose career any actor could only hope to emulate. … I remember sitting in that audience and I was looking at Gary Oldman humbled and I felt overwhelmed and I felt grateful but I felt kind of daunted by the opportunities in my life and where my career was taking me,” said Chalamet, who was nominated for his turn in Call Me By Your Name. “And seven years later, I sat here tonight and I felt humbled and grateful but I feel clear-sighted on the real gift of this work and an honor like this, and that’s the opportunity to do it again. Nothing more, nothing less. A wise man once said they can hurt your feelings if they boo you, but they can also kill you with kindness.”
In closing, Chalamet said he would be driving back to Los Angeles later in the evening with his “award in the backseat, listening to a podcast.”
The Film Awards gala is the annual and always star-studded kick-off to the Palm Springs International Film Festival. Held at the Palm Springs Convention Center, the event saw trophies presented to The Brutalist star Adrien Brody (Desert Palm Achievement Award, Actor), A Complete Unknown’s Timothée Chalamet (Chairman’s Award), A Real Pain’s Kieran Culkin (Breakthrough Performance Award, Actor), Sing Sing’s Colman Domingo (Spotlight Award, Actor), Wicked’s Ariana Grande (Rising Star Award), Maria’s Angelina Jolie (Desert Palm Achievement Award, Actress), Babygirl’s Nicole Kidman (International Star Award), Anora’s Mikey Madison (Breakthrough Performance Award, Actress), Dune auteur Denis Villeneuve (Visionary Award), the Conclave cast (Ensemble Performance Award), and the team from Emilia Perez (Vanguard Award) including Selena Gomez, Zoe Saldana, Edgar Ramirez, Karla Sofia Gascon and auteur Jacques Audiard.
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