Tanya Lapointe, pictured in Montreal in February, 2025, and her husband Denis Villeneuve have transformed the global film industry, delivering a remarkable run of epics that have redefined the possibilities of the biggest of big screens.Sylie Li/The Globe and Mail
Tanya Lapointe has seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Interstellar gunships on fire off the shoulder of Arrakis. She watched C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will ultimately be lost in time, like tears in the rain. But not this weekend, when the Canadian producer will step into the Oscars spotlight to savour the long-awaited victory lap of her latest film, Dune: Part Two, which is nominated for five Academy Awards, including best picture.
“The Oscars is a fantasy I had growing up that I never shared with anyone, to be honest – I still remember being a kid from Hawkesbury, Ontario, and going to the movie theatre, being in that dark box and taken into another world,” recalls Lapointe from her home in Montreal. “I’m still pinching myself, as it’s a bit surreal.”
By this point in her life, though, Lapointe has become something of an expert in the surreal.
Over the past decade, Lapointe and her husband Denis Villeneuve have transformed the global film industry by delivering a remarkable run of eye-opening, head-spinning epics that have redefined the possibilities of the biggest of big screens. From the timeline-twisting extraterrestrial existentialism of Arrival to the cybernetic neon dreams of Blade Runner 2049 and the skyscraper-sized sandworms of Dune, the couple have turned impossibly heady sci-fi nightmares into easily digestible pieces of blockbuster cinema.
General audiences unaware of the intricacies of major-studio production might assume that the biggest challenges on all those projects fell solely to Villeneuve, who had to scale his epic directorial vision to fit inside a single frame of film. But in her role as producer, Lapointe has been the one figuring out how to realize those artistic ambitions via the real-world mechanics of big-budget moviemaking, in which a dozen different multimillion-dollar problems must be solved simultaneously. Often, in the case of the Dune films, while shooting in desert temperatures that regularly pushed past 50 C.
“Denis has said that every movie was that much more of a challenge, and was built on the experience of the previous one. As the scale of these projects got bigger and bigger – the set pieces, the locations, the VFX [visual effects], which are a language in and of itself – I also learned to be a producer,” says Lapointe. “It’s about figuring out the building blocks of how to tell a story while not compromising on the artistry and emotion.”
After taking on the role of executive producer in the first Dune film, Lapointe received a full producer’s credit in Dune: Part Two and earned the Producers Guild of America ‘p.g.a.’ marker.Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures/The Associated Press
In a way, Lapointe’s Hollywood ascent has been both surprising and somewhat preordained. For 15 years, she was an arts journalist working with CBC/Radio-Canada in Montreal, talking with filmmakers, visiting sets and touring the festival circuit. While Lapointe didn’t have a master plan to transition from one side of the media-film industry divide to the other, she did have an intense curiosity and admiration for how artists spill the entirety of themselves onto the canvas of their choice, for all the world to see and judge.
“As a reporter, you had access to the creative process, but not the raw materials, the actual experience of making a movie,” Lapointe says. “My goal was always to celebrate art, but sometimes that was as a consumer object, like, here’s why you should buy this book or a ticket to this film. When you understand the process and intention of an artist, you have a greater appreciation for it.”
After entering into a relationship with Villeneuve – the pair made their public debut as a couple in 2015 at the foot of the Palais des Festivals in Cannes, where the director was premiering his drug-war thriller Sicario – Lapointe faced an inflection point: Should she continue to work in journalism, or take a giant leap to the other side of the curtain?
At first, she helped Villeneuve during postproduction on Arrival. But when the director was preparing to take on the long-anticipated (and, in some corners, long-feared) sequel to Blade Runner – a job that would require him to be in Budapest for the better part of a year – Lapointe proposed a novel solution to a potential long-distance problem: What if she came along and worked as his assistant?
“I felt like Tanya would be overqualified for the job. I remember telling her that working with her as my personal assistant would feel like going to the grocery store in a Ferrari,” Villeneuve says. “As she is a fast learner and has high professional standards, she quickly gained the respect and trust of everyone on the team and was given more and more responsibilities. I also gave her access to all the information, and she attended all the meetings, which allowed her to become familiar with the entire production process, from A to Z. Seeing her evolve in my world brought a unique joy to my heart.”
Once the first Dune film came around, Lapointe expanded her responsibilities, taking on the role of executive producer. But for the follow-up, Dune: Part Two, she received a full producer’s credit (alongside Villeneuve, Mary Parent and Cale Boyter), earning the coveted Producers Guild of America “p.g.a.” marker, an addendum that signals to the industry that the individual has been verified as a substantial contributor in the making of a movie. (The credit also allows the individual to collect a best picture Oscar, should the film win.)
“I had a bit of imposter’s syndrome. Am I doing what a producer does? But getting the mark was not only a title on paper, but recognition from my peers, which has been really meaningful,” says Lapointe, who also stepped in as second-unit director for the sequel, overseeing complex stunt-heavy set pieces. “In any one day, you can have human-resources issues, travel problems, expense issues. It’s about doing whatever it takes to make the movie happen.”
L-r) Executive Producer Tanya Lapointe and Director/co-writer/producer Denis Villenueve on the set of “Dune”.Warner Bros.
While husband-and-wife filmmaking teams might seem an unusual and potentially combustive mix of the personal and the professional, this year’s Oscars race is in fact crowded with such couples. Along with Lapointe and Villeneuve, there are the couples behind Anora (director Sean Baker and producer Samantha Quan) and The Brutalist (director Brady Corbet and producer Mona Fastvold). And last year’s big Oscar behemoths were respectively delivered by their own long-time partners in art and life: Oppenheimer’s Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas, and Barbie’s Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach.
“There isn’t a mathematical equation as to how this works, but we complement each other – we count on each other to be truthful, to support each other through the great moments, but also the harder ones,” says Lapointe. “Directing second unit, I was working off Denis’s storyboards and pre-viz – it was his vision, but I knew on a level that is unexplainable what he would want. It’s almost by osmosis, this deep trust.”
It helps to have balance. After Blade Runner 2049, Lapointe produced and co-directed (alongside her fellow former CBC journalist Laurence Trépanier) the short documentary 50/50, examining the gender gap, while she took the time between Dune movies to produce and direct the feature-length doc The Paper Man, focusing on the life of Québécois children’s entertainer Claude Lafortune. While those films were exponentially smaller in scale and available resources than Lapointe’s work with Villeneuve, they required just as much intensity and rigour.
“In smaller projects, there’s no distinction between director and producer – you can’t abandon yourself to your vision and hope someone will figure out how much it’ll cost,” says Lapointe. “But it’s two different muscles, the creative side and the logistics side. I love figuring out, how do we actually do this? When I was a reporter, it was similar: How do we get all the stars to align so we can make a news broadcast at 6 p.m.?”
Lapointe arrives at the Academy Awards this Sunday alongside Villeneuve – who was frustratingly overlooked in the best director category – as one of Hollywood’s most vocal supporters of the Canadian film industry. Not only has the couple ensured that much of the postproduction work on their projects is done in Montreal, but Villeneuve has also made a major donation to help the independent Montreal movie theatre Cinéma du Parc remain financially stable, and publicly urged the federal government to keep its promise to permanently increase Telefilm’s funding.
“We need to keep telling our stories, and the more we screen and celebrate films like Universal Language, the more justified we’ll be in financing them,” Lapointe says of Matthew Rankin’s new Winnipeg-set comedy, which just missed the cut for this year’s best international film category at the Oscars. “Denis and I saw that at the London Film Festival and felt the need to support and celebrate it in any way.”
Meanwhile, as rumours swirl about a third Dune movie, Lapointe can only say that she is not ready to say goodbye to those pesky sandworms just yet.
“I’m not sure what I’m allowed to say or not, but there is a love for this world,” she says. “I will always remember when we were in South Korea last year for the premiere with Timothée [Chalamet] and Zendaya, and the crowds are just going wild. Everyone was asking for Dune: Part Three, or whatever the name will be. So let’s just say there’s a lot of excitement for us to go back and continue the journey of Paul Atreides.”
Whatever might happen to the future of the franchise – and on the stage of the Dolby Theatre Sunday night – Villeneuve feels that he has already won the biggest award on any planet, be it Earth or Arrakis.
“Making cinema with the woman I love,” he says, “is one of the most beautiful things that has ever happened to me.”
Oscars’ Canadian invasion
In addition to Lapointe and Villeneuve, Canada will be represented at Sunday’s Academy Awards by the following homegrown artists:
- Patrice Vermette and Shane Vieau, up for best production design for their work on Dune: Part Two
- Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, co-directors of best documentary feature nominee Sugarcane, which follows an investigation into abuse at a residential school in Williams Lake, B.C.
- Linda Muir, nominated for best costume design for Robert Eggers’s remake of Nosferatu, a film which also counts Canadian Traci Loader as part of the team up for best makeup and hairstyling
