The Making of Dune

 

New York Times - "The Man Who Finally Made a ‘Dune’ That Fans Will Love"

"The decision to stream the film seemed to Villeneuve symptomatic of threats to the cinematic tradition itself, which he sees as fulfilling an ancient human need for communal storytelling.

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An environmental fable, a parable of the oil economy, a critique of colonialism, a warning against putting your faith in charismatic leaders, “Dune” tells the story of Paul Atreides, an aristocratic teenager who travels to a distant land; joins with a desert people, the Fremen; becomes their messiah; and leads them into revolt against their colonial oppressors. Paul’s story recalls “Lawrence of Arabia” (Herbert was influenced by T.E. Lawrence), and “Lawrence” came to mind as I watched “Dune.” Each movie is a character-driven geopolitical epic, each was filmed in Jordan’s Wadi Rum and each is a spectacularly beautiful cinematic ode to the desert.

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Villeneuve’s insistence on real-world locations for “Dune” led him to spend days in a helicopter on reconnaissance flights over the desert. “When you go up in the air, there are things that reveal themselves, like some twin mountains that look like two old grandmothers, that I feel were so linked with the nature of the movie, and they became kind of characters for me,” he explained. The movie’s cinematographer, Greig Fraser, came to the project straight after working on “The Mandalorian,” a “Star Wars” series filmed almost entirely in a virtual studio where real-time computer rendering of scenery moves seamlessly on screens behind the cast. This process gives directors absolute control over the environment — it “takes out the problem of [expletive] that goes on in the world, like cloud cover, like someone parking the portaloo in the wrong spot,” as Fraser puts it. When Fraser offered some of this technology to Villeneuve, he declined. Villeneuve needed to shoot the movie in real desert landscapes, the director told me, “for my own mental sanity, to be able to inspire myself to find back that feeling I was looking for of isolation, of introspection.”

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The “Dune” production designer Patrice Vermette told me they used Google Earth to look for the right location for the scenes on Arrakis: a desert with rock formations that the Fremen would use as refuges from the searing, inimical heat. They found promising candidates in Iran, Chad, Mauritania, Libya. “Pretty difficult,” he admitted. They ended up in Wadi Rum, “like a trade show of rock formations,” but it lacked dunes. The team collected samples of sand from Jordan in water bottles so they could match its color to another location, and ended up in the vast dune fields of the Rub’ Al Khali desert in Abu Dhabi.

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For the strangest thing happened to me after watching “Dune” this summer: It slipped into a different part of my memory than films usually do. It felt like news. Images from it have unexpectedly become part of the way I’ll always remember this summer and fall: images of burning ships and glittering sands interspersed with forest fires, the terrible legacies of colonial crimes, failed wars, the constant drumbeat of the pandemic, waves of religious and neo-religious fervor spurred by societal inequities and the constant, dreadful background knowledge that the climate is breaking down around us. “Dune” was always an allegorical novel; sci-fi’s ability to hold up a mirror darkly to culture is one of its primary aims. But “Dune” the film has somehow become part of the world for me, less a reflection than a refraction of reality, burnished with desert dust and shadow."