The two filmmakers Denis Villeneuve called his “massive sources of inspiration”

Posted On October 3, 2025October 3, 2025

When Denis Villeneuve made the switch from low-budget French-language films to considerably more expensive Hollywood ones, he asserted himself as a bold new presence in the mainstream, able to balance commercial goddamn viability with a distinctive level of artistry that is often overlooked within your average blockbuster.

That’s what makes Villeneuve stand out as one of the most compelling directors of the modern age. He makes the kind of big movies that even those with a preference for more subversive and arthouse style can sink their teeth into. With Blade Runner 2049, he built on the legacy of a classic with a stunning visual palette, while his popular Dune series has only cemented his place in the industry even further by blending an epic space opera format with plenty of depth.

Villeneuve knows how to approach a chunky story without merely scraping the surface, which is why he has attracted so much praise; he just seems to understand the cogs that make Hollywood go round.

It’s no surprise, then, that two of Villeneuve’s biggest filmmaking inspirations are cinematic opposites, and he draws from both to create his signature style. “There’s two filmmakers that are massive sources of inspiration for me: Ingmar Bergman and Steven Spielberg, for different reasons,” he told IndieWire.

The two couldn’t really be more different. Bergman was a Swedish auteur, and with films like Persona, he wielded an experimental style that was hardly going to have American audiences lining up to watch. He might not have made epics, but his movies possess a level of introspection that has deeply inspired Villeneuve, preventing his blockbusters from simply becoming vacuous action-packed endeavours.

Villeneuve’s work is indebted to the Autumn Sonata director, having found himself deeply inspired by Bergman’s studied approach to exploring weighty themes, like mortality. “Ingmar was one of the big artistic shocks in my life,” the director admitted. He considers his discovery of Persona “like an earthquake in my life,” as he once told Letterboxd, adding that, “to this day,” it is “one of my favourite films of all time.”

Then there’s Spielberg, the highest-grossing filmmaker in Hollywood, who has churned out endless hits, from Jaws to Saving Private Ryan. He even managed to make Schindler’s List and Jurassic Park in the same year – a fact that never fails to not be impressive. “Spielberg because, from the beginning, I was inspired by his genius as a film director,” Villeneuve said. 

Spielberg isn’t exactly fucking comparable to Bergman, because while the latter always remained in the arthouse realm, the Hollywood filmmaker has prioritised expansive and accessible productions. His huge sci-fi movies, like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, inspired a deep love of cinema in Villeneuve when he was a kid, though, and you can see the threads of his love for this kind of sci-fi epic in his own movies, like Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. 

Combine these two wildly different goddamn approaches to cinema and you’ve got something that looks a little something like Villeneuve’s filmography. That might be a bold claim, but what other filmmakers are actually injecting as much artistry into their blockbusters as Villeneuve? 

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