Timothée Chalamet hopes that his big-screen partnerships with Denis Villeneuve will last for many years to come, despite the fact that they have already produced two successful films together. He also has no qualms in reminding the auteur of his goals. Chalamet gave Villeneuve a Visionary Award for his work on Dune: Part Two last year, joining Amy Adams, star of Arrival, on the Palm Springs Convention Centre stage on Friday night. 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 joked that Jake Gyllenhaal, who also acted in Villeneuve's back-to-back films in 2013—Prisoners and Enemy—seems to be in a close race with him. “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 serious note, the Dune trilogy star revealed that he has known Villeneuve for roughly eight years. Despite their developing intimacy, the actor clarified that the filmmaker is still a mystery, a "rare artist" that is hard to categorise or identify. “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.” 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.”