Riding the Sandworms: ‘Dune 2’ Action Scenes Took 44 Days to Shoot and Used Road Runner Cartoons for Inspiration
04.03.2024 - 23:19
/ variety.com
Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor “Desert power.” That’s how Denis Villeneuve teases what’s to come at the end of 2021’s “Dune,” as Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atriedes looks out across the desert in awe as he sees a Fremen person riding a sandworm. And Villeneuve does not disappoint.
The director goes full white-knuckle thrill ride in its sequel, orchestrating a glorious sandworm riding sequence that took 44 days to shoot. It was the most complex thing Villeneuve had ever attempted to do.
It needed to feel edgy, dangerous, exciting and real. It took Villeneuve’s most-trusted collaborators to help him pull off the scene, in which Paul uses the thumper for the first time to draw a sandworm out from beneath the surface and mount the creature as Chani (Zendaya), Stilgar (Javier Bardem) and the Fremen look on.
Production designer Patrice Vermette tells Variety, “We call them ‘Methodology Meetings.’ It’s when Denis has a new storyboard that nobody has seen, and it’s all the heads of department sitting around the table.” He continues, “When we got to the worm-riding sequence, we were like, ‘Wow, okay, how the hell are we going to do that? That’s a big challenge.” Cinematographer Greig Fraser read the script and shared similar sentiments: “I read that and thought, ‘How the heck are we going to do that?’ In the book, Paul rides a sandworm, and if we weren’t careful, it could be an odd concept. So we made sure we were so careful [that] the audience never had a concept suspending their disbelief.” Luckily for Villeneuve, his collaborators thrive on challenges.
Vermette explains the sandworm was a 90-foot-long by 24-foot-wide set piece. Initially, it was tested against the side of a soundstage wall to see how it would all work, and then
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