Q: You are concluding your adaptation of Frank Herbert’s original novel. As you look back at both of these Dune films, what’s something that you learned making Dune Part One that was instrumental in the way that you approached making Dune Part Two?

Denis Villeneuve: Everything was instrumental, but I kept joking with my film crew that Part One was like a massive rehearsal to do Dune Part Two. When we started the process, we felt confident, we knew the alphabet, knew the world, the romance was being defined, everything. But [Dune 2] was a much more ambitious project. It was a beast.

There were a lot of challenges and I really pushed my crew. It’s interesting to be a great pioneer about how everything we had to develop — it was a massive challenge. I stuck to the idea that I wanted to shoot with natural light, which is not in the real desert and was not easy for the crew.

Q: Let’s go to the desert and talk a bit about sand, not necessarily how much sand you had in your shoes at the end of them getting banged — though surely it was a substantial amount. You shot Dune Part Two primarily in the deserts of Abu Dhabi. Talk about what you learned about sand, what was something unexpected that you discovered about it, both in staging the big sequences, but also with the very personal, intimate sequences, not just on sand, but within the desert landscape?

Denis Villeneuve: At first, I discovered that I was out of shape. No, but it’s exhausting to work in those conditions, and it’s like, to state the obvious, we were shooting in a real environment.

There was a certain period of time, specifically on Part Two [that we had to shoot]. For Part One, we had access to shade, but with Part Two, we spent weeks in the deep desert, and there’s a part of the day, two hours between 11:30 and 1:30, where your brain starts to boil like a bowl of soup. Everybody becomes a bit stupid, including myself and the crew. I knew at that time that I had to make sure that we had the right amount of water, not to be so ambitious at this time, because it was too warm.

Shooting in the sand is like shooting in the snow. You have to deal with ridiculous challenges, like footsteps, it required a lot of discipline within the crew, because the way we shot it, we began using natural light, which meant that we had to choose a specific spot in the desert that was perfect for certain close-ups.

And for the wide shots, we chose another set of dunes according to the sun positions, and to make sure that those would stay pristine. We had to own the desert. Technically, we had to make sure that the crew respected [the conditions] — and those are huge crews. If you have more and more people to take care of, it becomes like a little army.

The shooting of Part Two was different from Part One, in that there were more action scenes in the desert. In order to maximize our schedule, we used a device, a software, that was great, because it was capturing all the environments virtually, like the opening sequence, when we step by that fight, and the reality happens in maybe 16 different locations, let’s say, we have to, because we do a shot, and to do the reverse, to have the right sun position, we have to move the whole crew to a different spot, and to have the perfect timing for it.

On November 3rd, at 9:45, if you want to put Rebecca Ferguson with a rock smashing at Arrakis, we had to be there at 9:45 to have the perfect sun position. all the schedules were designed this way, I thought it was interesting to see that the computer we were using print like that, the sun patterns. It made our shoot an incredible puzzle for my first AD, but very efficient for cinematography.

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Q: Towards the end of the year, a lot of people were sharing their favorite shots from the film on social media. Most of the shots were from Part Two, but there was one shot in particular, a lot of people kept sharing, the shot of the Harkonnen soldiers, walking off the cliff and floating. You have this like deep burnt red behind them. How did you execute a shot like that?

Denis Villeneuve: The idea in the book is this idea that you might be master of gravity, that they can then use a suspensor system, for lighting, or for vehicles, or also for, you can have portable postman system that allows you to defy gravity, but there’s no mention of how to move with those systems. I love the idea that like in dreams, you fly in scuba diving, the whole idea was to do scuba diving in the desert, defying gravity, and those are images came as I was writing the screenplay, and it was something exciting about it for me.

It reminded me of the movies I loved from the ’70s, the old sci-fi movies, and the way to do this was to do it as much as possible on camera. We had an immersive, fantastic stunt coordinator that created those rigs, with wire rigs, where we were actually having stunts flying on cliffs, with those, and the rest is a bit of CGI, but it’s quite, I was quite excited by the result of it.

It captured that idea of strangeness that I was looking for, that you feel you are with an alien technology. Most importantly, I was in love with the idea that we feel that the Harkonnen soldiers are foreigners, alien to this world. The Harkonnens don’t adapt, they just colonize, but never adapt to the environment where they are. that’s their main weaknesses, and I tried to express that in this first sequence.

Q: You spoke a bit about sunlight, the way you used light, not just on Arrakis, but also with the black sun of the Harkonnens. Did you have a general approach? With the opening sequence, it felt like it was at sunset. Then you had that big stage sequence where they’re fighting the [spice mining] machine. They’re running underneath the shadows of the wings coming down from the ship. Did you know, as you were writing [this sequence], what time of day you wanted these to be shot? What was your general approach?

Denis Villeneuve: Light is, of course, our ally in naturalism, and our ally in, if we had shot the whole movie at noon, it would have been like a blend. I was trying to create contrast. I was trying to create a dynamic contrast in the movie with a color palette of different time of day, different than the movie, with an eclipse, something unexpected that will shake the audience right at the beginning, aesthetically, and create vivid colors that will soon disappear, dissolve, and go back to the Arrakis we knew.

Each sequence was written according to a specific time of the day to sustain a dynamic effect, and each sequence will have its own identity, and to create a sense of aesthetic propulsion of an epiphyseal.

Q: It felt like those deep oranges, and those deep grains were really important to you as well.

Denis Villeneuve: Right. I love to work with cinematographers that aren’t afraid to burn the boat right at the start. We shot with filters, we did a tremendous amount of research with filters, so we shot with those filters at first to create that look that will emulate the idea that they are fighting under an eclipse. The Fremen will attack when the eclipse is at its darkest moment, the idea was that the Fremen use nature as their ally. What is crazy is that, of course, I wrote that in my office in Montreal.

When we came to Germany, we shot the actual sequence, there was an actual real eclipse appearing on the day of shooting. That was mind-blowing. When the eclipse happened, it was a partial eclipse, not total, but still, it’s quite a coincidence. I stopped the shoot, and we put all the cameras we had on it. The real eclipse is in the movie, actually, and that was when I knew the gods of cinema were with me! [audience applauses]

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Q: The languages, not just of the Harkonnen, but of the Fremen as well, are so authentically woven into the film. What was your general approach to the languages in terms of creating them, and when you decided to weave them into the narrative?

Denis Villeneuve: The main languages are part of the book. It’s a very important part of it, one of the beauty of the book is different cultures, and specifically the Fremen culture, how it is explained and explored. The Fremen culture and its language, there are a lot of hints of that language in the book. We hired a linguist, David Peterson, who developed the language. It’s all syntax, grammar, logic, poetry.

For example, when Chani says to Stilgar, “You are insane,” in Chakobsa, she says, “You drink sand.” That’s an expression of insanity for a Fremen — to drink sand. The language was very sophisticated like that, and each actor who went with the Fremen, [had to learn] Chakobsa, to pronounce each word and sentence. There was a translation, so what Timothee Chalamet does is [speak it].

In the end, each Fremen tribe knows exactly what he’s saying, it’s not gibberish. They’re real words that mean something real. He can have roots, and he puts his intentions and emotions in the right place. We interpret that language, and it really moved me to see the amount of commitment each actor had to really learn the language.

We had a dialect coach on set who was there to make sure that the pronunciation would be right. I thought about that earlier in the press tour. It gave some crazy moments where I was super happy with the shot, and Fabien, the language coach, came on set, and said, “Actually, the pronunciation of [some specific word] was not exactly correct, we should do another take.” I said, “come on, dude, it’s a fake language [audience laughing].”

I actually adore all the crew and actors, they took that seriously. We did the same with the Harkonnen language, but it’s a little less elaborated, to be honest, but the idea that we could both chant, we could both chant in the arena, it’s all about culture, culture clash, and different visions of the world expressed through language.

Q: You mentioned the arena, that’s another glowing moment in the film, and it shakes you out of being on Arrakis when we go there. Talk about setting up that arena sequence, and what it was like to film that. Also, talk about Austin Butler — what did you see in him that convinced you that he can play, not just a psychopath, but a psychopath that has a vulnerability to him he’s trying desperately not to expose.

Denis Villeneuve: There’s a lot of cues about what the arena looked like in the book, that idea of a wide set, triangular arena with the shape of the doors, but one thing I love about the book is how Frank Herbert is studying the impact of the environment on people, how it defines, how your ecosystem defines your culture, your religion, your habits, your behaviors, your poetry, et cetera, and there’s a lot there.

When you look at the desert, you understand the Fremen, you know about the Fremen, the correlation between the environment and their culture. But for the Harkonnen, there weren’t a lot of hints that their planet destroyed the environment, that it’s an industrial planet, so I said, what would be the clue that my toolbox [could use to] express?

I thought about light, when I was writing, I thought of the idea of what if there’s some light that was killing the colors instead of repeating them. It would be like an arch, sunlight that would be black and white without nuance, a fascist world where everything is in binaries and looks the same, and then there was the idea of black and white. Of course, my cinematographer loved the idea.

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