GLOBAL WORMING
PUBLISHED AT THE HEIGHT of the Cold War in 1965 and set thousands of years in the future, it’s fair to say Frank Herbert’s interplanetary epic Dune – later followed by another five Herbert-penned novels – is a mammoth undertaking. It tells the story of feuding noble families and the power struggle to control the vast, inhospitable desert world of Arrakis, source of “the spice” – a valuable drug-like substance that enables interstellar travel, increased life expectancy and superior intellects.
It’s a story that’s resonated with millions of people over the decades, but for one teenager deciding whether he was going to become a filmmaker or biologist, it would shape a career. Academy Award nominee Denis Villeneuve has finally fulfilled his lifelong dream to make his version of Dune for the big screen.
“The movie is a love letter to the book,” he states. “I would say it all started from the book. It’s like the book was the Bible. The book stayed with me, was my companion. I read this book decades ago… I was a young teenager, and it stayed with me through the years.”
“Denis did storyboards for Dune when he was 13 years old,” production designer Patrice Vermette reveals. “Those storyboards have been found in his dad’s desk recently.” Those, however, weren’t the starting points when Vermette was put in charge of bringing the visual environment to life and “giving Denis a playground” – even down to the type of dust used.
“Mood, architecture, ziggurat architecture, bunkers,” he lists. “We started very broad. I started assembling reference imagery of things that the book and the script resonated with me in my mind. We assembled mood boards for each planet, each ship, small drawings, small sketches.”
Things moved pretty quickly with Villeneuve, he says. “This is our fifth movie together. We collaborate super well. “He wanted to have, as much as possible, immersive environments for sets. We scouted multiple countries before pinpointing Jordan and Abu Dhabi.”
“I remember thinking to myself the first time I went there that if ever I did a movie like Dune, that this is where I would film it,” Villeneuve says of Jordan. “There’s something about the light there, there’s something about the soul of the country that I think we have captured on camera. I haven’t found that same kind of emotion anywhere else. There’s something pretty dramatic about those landscapes that were really suitable for Dune. In fact I really think that nature is the true main character of Dune.”
In the time since the future director stored away his vision of Herbert’s novel, there have been several attempts to fully realise the property. But he says he would never look to previous live-action versions of Dune in preparation for his movie.
“The thing is, I compared to the book,” he explains simply. “That’s the way I dream about this movie. The design, the thinking, the making of this movie always had its roots in the book. It’s not my job as a filmmaker to compare myself to other movies, I
