'Dune: Part Two' Director Denis Villeneuve Breaks Down the Sandworm Scene | Vanity Fair

Hello, I'm the denv

director

of Dune,

part

two, and this is a note about a

scene

. This

scene

is very, very iconic in the novel, where Paul Atries will finally become a freman and be completely accepted by the tribe by riding a sorm for the first time. The timing of writing

sandworm

s is something that is

part

of the fman tradition, it is something that fman generally learn at a younger age. It's one of the scenes where I tried to get as close as possible to the actual dialogue from the novel, you're brave, we all know that. keep it simple, keep it direct, nothing fancy, nothing sophisticated, I like that dialogue, the fact that we strongly feel that sgar became a kind of surrogate father to Paul, that sgar was like part of Paul's healing process, hey , am.

Seriously, nothing fancy or you'll embarrass my teachings. I won't embarrass you. I understand that Shulu decides if you become a fan or if you don't have time. There's something I love about making movies is the things you write, but then the actors bring it. something even better than I expected, which is that I was looking for that kind of warmth, feeling a little humor coming from sgar, but the way Timoy reacts to the line makes the scene even better for me, so I the way Timoy becomes a straight man, The way Sgar introduced Paul to the customs of the desert.

There is something about humor that comes across. I thought Timothy brought some kind of touch of humor. I really liked Shaka in the first part. There we were introduced to human language. There was a little bit of that at the end of the movie, but in the second part the character Paul Atries and his mother Jessica immersed themselves in fan culture. It was very important to me that there would be a preeminent use of chupa, the fman language, and David Peterson. Linguist Beyond the language design in the part, one does an enormous amount of work to bring this dialogue to the screen.

It's a dialogue that is based on what we have in the book, but there was substantial. amount that was created for the film the yakub of him is an actress that he was very excited to work with. I love the actor who feels free in front of the camera where I feel there are no limits. Shackle in the novel is a young man but I wanted to increase femininity in the fman tribe because Frank Herbert insists in his novel on saying that there is equality between men and women, that women are as good fighters as men and that responsibility in tribes is shared equally, but the novel expresses, but does not show that when the first novel came out, Frank Herbert was disappointed by the way the book was perceived, he felt that the reader thought Dune was a celebration of poetry, but quite the opposite, his intention was to make a cushion story, a warning towards messianic figures and to correct that perception of the first robot, he wrote another book about the Messiah, as if it were almost like a small book like an epilogue where We understand what Paul really means to Frank Herbert, which I did. is that I transformed Shen's character.

I made her more prominent in the book. Shani disappears, she dissolves into Paul's shadow, she's in the background, she's a believer, there's nothing special other than she's Paul's lover, uh uh uh, there was a big opportunity there. a character who could help me have a critical distance from the poates. I love witness people who are listening in corners or you can just feel their presence without dialogue and understand what they're going through and Zena is incredibly expressive with her eyes and she brought that strength to the character that was required that I wanted to see and she the power of youth and someone who wants to transform her world that she does not believe in the old ways of seeing the world and is a free character in her eyes they will understand what Paul becomes and what direction he is going and that transforms the film no in a celebration, but since Frank Herbert wanted more warning for the eyes, the preparation of the second part was much more compressed than the first because he wanted the film to come out as quickly as possible, it is not a sequel.

It's a part two, which was important for us to get the movie out to the world quickly and now I say this, there's a huge amount of R&D going on while we were making the first part. We knew the vocabulary, we knew the design, there was something where we were on solid ground, but there are still some technical advances that were made and, like in the first part, the eyes were made. From end to end, this time the software was designed so that the AI ​​was as a way to help us bring the level of realism that I want in the eyes of the second part, much more precise than what was done in the first part.

I'm madly in love with a shot like that when I was drawing the storyboard at some point with siki they were just making a line with a little dot it's like there's something about purity and it's probably related to my childhood when I grew up with a horizon with nothing around, but it's like there's something here about how to get the human being back properly. scale in the landscape as an end in contact with the immensity with the meditative impact of the desert that I think is very powerful the sound here that uh uh has been made is I ask Richard King to return to the desert and make sure that we hear that sound specific to the sound of sand that sounds almost like a strange chant.

I was very pleased with the sound of the equipment that was able to bring back that specific sound that we heard all the time. the desert that is something that happens in the novel but what happens next is what the movies bring to life here in the book it is written that everyone rides the worm is very evasive about how a human being could jump on such a beast. I knew it. It would be a pivotal scene, probably one of the most important scenes in the movie, and I knew that if this scene was a success I would have a movie.

There's a description, of course, in the book The Maker HS and the tumer on how precisely to bring that to the screen said uh, I had to figure that out and create a kind of seminar for my team where I taught them how to write warm sand and explained to them how we would bring that to the screen when I did, so there was a silence around the table, uh, because what I was asking was to bring a level of realism that would require an enormous amount of time. I wanted to film everything in real sunlight, that was the key to the visual effects.

Well, this shot where we see. Paul walking I really love the tension generated by stillness when facing a still landscape. To be honest, there's something here that was inspired by Jaws. The idea that what you don't see is scarier, is knowing that there is something underneath. That might be coming soon is a lesson I learned a long time ago from Spielberg, so the idea here is that it's pretty simple: a man to jump and ride a worm will place a tumper on the bottom bottom of the Dune stand at the top. top and Wait for the worm to catch and get like this and eventually it will jump, but of course it's Paul's first time riding in warm sand so I had to find the right balance, the right balance to show his skills and, at the same time, how to do it. difficult it is and how he risked his life having been in this desert in the first part.

I knew there was that kind of crater between sand

dune

s, that kind of vast flat space and I thought that a freman would use that flat space to be able to calculate the trajectory of the sand

dune

s. I was pleased to find the right one with the right position of the Sun because we didn't use any artificial lights in the desert filming uh, the second part like we did in the first part, it's like it brings a level of visual realism and a feeling of a strong tactile sensation you feel with nature I was looking for again.

I tried to shoot as much as possible with the camera, meaning that the visual effects would blend within the reality of the landscaping. What I can say about this moment is that I was absolutely satisfied with the sound design. It was important to me that the worm didn't express itself like some kind of ancient dinosaur or some kind of monster, but the sound that it would. emulate will be inspired by the friction of such a beast against rock and sand, you'll feel almost like it's a building bending against the wind or something, the sound of a frozen lake in winter in Canada, where you have things like that.

A creepy, incredible singing sound that I find absolutely surreal and I wanted to convey that kind of direction where nature is going in a direction with a sound that is absolutely unpredictable and that feels very grounded in the reality of the image, but that It feels like you still have a connection. with The Surreal Richard King absolutely got it right that the idea was to convey the idea that Paul missed the worm it's not exactly where Paul intended it to be there's like a gap between his position and the worm and that's to augment the fact that he's upon learning that he is about to lose his Uber, technically all of these shots have been taken in the real landscape.

I insisted that there won't be any CG elements here other than, of course, the worm. I wanted to create that feeling when you're next to a waterfall, the relationship. that in the subconscious that comes with death, this first part of this was shot in the desert of Abu Dhabi, the problem we were facing is that, Greg Frer and I wanted the worm to enter on the sunny side and come out. on the dark side it sounds ridiculous but there isn't much sand because of the wind pattern in Abu Dhabi the steep side of the Sandune doesn't face the right side the right way so we had to create our own Sandune to be able to take that shot specific, there were rays that were created according to the correct sunlight, this is real up to here, of course, the idea is that men made Sandune and, after that, there is a fixed extension where the worm comes out which is, by far one of the most difficult takes.

I've made the idea of ​​having a specialist running in a specific arena in which a perfect sunlight that will disappear will collapse into the sun, so to do that what we did was create an arena where there were like three huge ones. cylinders giant cylinders each cylinder will be pulled by a truck and the trick was done this way and the idea was to have at the perfect moment that we had to throw those tubes under the Sandune to send Jun to the collapse and the trick needed to be perfect to land perfectly in the right place at the right time and that we could only photograph early in the morning due to the direction of the sunlight and it sounds easy, but those trucks were huge runways and to find the right speed over the course of many days to get to the perfect moment that I was looking for, where we actually saw a human being running and watching the world collapse beneath their feet, which I think is an absolutely nightmarish event and what I was trying to do with uh. as much ISM as possible when the trucks move forward one after another and after they moved in a certain order, they did not all move at the same time, but within a fraction of a second of each other, so the collapse was progressive once. the tube was gone and the stuntman was landing on a mattress, uh, that was hidden under the sand, how did we do it?

It's pretty simple in theory, but it was difficult in practice because I wanted to reshoot all that and under natural light I asked. My production designer to create a gigantic plant form reproduction. We tried to build the largest platform possible with the warm sand skin. This platform will be on a gimbal. It is a machine that allows us to move the platform in one way or another. The platform can. Modulating like this at different speeds is something that is used in action sequences on a plane or at some point in car accidents or things like that, but this time it was like a specific one that could move much faster and required a lot of engineering from a Ger Neer, which is one of the best in the business, uh, as far as special effects, the way we did it is we had what they call the dog color and the gimbal was like here and this was oriented according to the light of the sun we were in.

By taking each shot at a specific time of day when the sun was specifically in the right direction, each shot needed specific programming on the rig to stream different moments of the rworm which was like one approaching the other to the In The Building. sound stage we put the platform at different angles, so when the character falls, we also had a platform that was vertical so with the gimbal that was used to close the ear, where I wanted the character to lose contact. with the platform as if it were him, the platform was falling, so do it, the platform goes from this to this angle so that the character falls into the worm and it's like a game with gravity that I was very excited to do, but it required My team worked many days to find the right speed and the right angle.

I wanted to make sure that driving in hot sand was as nervous as it was real, it would look dangerous but also a kind of sense of heroism and despite his clumsiness, that Paul will finally manage to be one with the desert, that this idea that men have the ability to be in total harmony with the desert and that it's like humans finding the right balance and being in one is very important. Moment In the book and it is apivotal moment in the film when we designed sorm's skin in the first part for patri velet, my production design and i was important that the sun and the worm feel prehistoric, that's how the whole design of the worm will be. in direct relation, which is the environment a bit like the Wiow novel was written and that could be explained from this biology how it feeds, how it evolves, how it lives in such harsh conditions and, technically, it is a beast that leaves lives under the sand in a tremendous meal and it's like we're trying to create the most believable thing possible is that it still has that kind of divine quality that is so important to the human psyche.

In the book we understand that a human can mount a worm by exposing a sensitive part of his skin there, the worm as if it were scales. uh uh and when you lift one of them you expose the sensitive skin the worm trying to protect itself uh it will stay on the surface I felt like it wasn't enough I needed something to express to the audience that uh that feeling of vulnerability and I come with This idea from Vance is part of this breathing system that once exposed, uh, you will understand that it is the worm that feels vulnerable.

This swim, the platform was surrounded by massive fans. We were throwing an incredible amount of dust over the dust trick that was used in that sequence. So that you really want to feel like the character is going through waves of sand and disappearing into the dust and feel like you have to master the elements, the solar ring action involves a lot of violence and danger. from my favorite moment in the film where I wanted to bring some heroism but also a feeling of a sacred moment that from the human perspective this will be a unique moment that will fulfill one of the elements of the prophecy where a child will be able to tame a giant arena warm, one of the greatest ever seen, a child from the other world could have a relationship with chai UD and I wanted that to be conveyed in the music, that feeling that something very Special is happening something almost sacred from the perspective of man to To convey that speed, the plates were closed with helicopters, but the character is actually closed with a long spear and a team that goes at high speed to feel that instability in the character. like it's happening, there's a precise change where we see what will happen from Paul being celebrated by the man because he obviously he was successful, but we'll see.

From Shenise's perspective, the man will go from celebration to adoration when I decided to make this adaptation of the novel. The first artist I approached to help me do it was a Zimmer ANS, he is like me, a big fan of the novel ANS, give me a warning: is it a good idea to address your childhood dreams? What are we referring to? failing, you cannot bring to the screen the full potential of the teenager's dream, there was a lot of wisdom in that and frankly I agree with him that that was the challenge, the specificity of this project was to try to go back in time and bring those images to the surface and now that both films are complete it takes me a long time to digest this experience.

I will say that there are some sequences like this one, the worm, which is very, very close to the Other dreams are quite different because of the adaptation process. It will take me a while to digest them to make peace with that.