'Dune: Part Two' Director Denis Villenueve Breaks Down the Sandworm Scene
'Dune: Part Two' director Denis Villeneuve breaks down the glorious scene where Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) uses the thumper for the first time to draw a sandworm out from beneath the surface as Chani (Zendaya), Stilgar (Javier Bardem) and the Fremen look on. Denis explains how he built the "most important" scene of the film over the course of 44 days, with the use of various sunlight levels and blending of visual effects to make it feel edgy and real.
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00:00 Hi, I'm Denis Villeneuve, director of Dune Part II, and this is Note on a Scene.
00:24 This scene is a very, very iconic scene in the novel, where Paul Atreides will finally become a Fremen,
00:34 being fully accepted by the tribe by riding a sandworm for the very first time.
00:39 Riding sandworm is something that is part of the Fremen tradition,
00:42 it's something that usually Fremen learn at an earlier age.
00:46 It's one of the scenes where I tried as close as possible to the actual dialogue of the novel.
00:54 I like in that dialogue the fact that we feel strongly that Stilgar became some kind of surrogate father to Paul,
01:13 that Stilgar was like part of the healing process of Paul.
01:18 There's something that I absolutely love about filmmaking, it's things that you write,
01:36 but then the actors bring something even better than I was expecting, which is I was looking for that kind of warmth,
01:45 feeling a bit of humor coming from Stilgar, but the way Timothée reacts to the line makes the scene even better for me.
01:52 So the way Timothée becomes a straight man, the way Stilgar introduced the ways of the desert to Paul,
01:59 there's something about the humor that is conveyed.
02:01 I thought that Timothée brought some kind of touch of humor that I was really pleased by.
02:06 Chakopsa. In part one we were introduced to the Fremen language, there was a bit of it at the end of the movie,
02:16 but in part two the character Paul Atreides and his mother Jessica immerse themselves in the Fremen culture.
02:21 It was very important for me that there would be a permanent use of Chakopsa, the Fremen language,
02:27 and David Peterson, linguist, behind the design of the language in part one,
02:32 made a tremendous amount of work to bring this dialogue to the screen.
02:37 It's a dialogue that is based on the hints of what we have in the book,
02:41 but there was a substantial amount of it that was created for the movie.
02:54 Suela Yacoub is an actress that I was very excited to work with.
02:58 I love actors that feel free in front of the camera, where I feel that there's no limit.
03:03 Shishakli in the novel is a young man, but I wanted to increase femininity in the Fremen tribe.
03:09 Why? Because Frank Herbert insists in his novel to say that there's an equality between men and women,
03:16 that the women are as good fighters as men, and that the responsibility in the tribes are equality, shared.
03:23 But the novel, it is expressed, but doesn't show that.
03:27 When the first novel came out, Frank Herbert was disappointed, the way the book has been perceived.
03:38 He felt that the reader were thinking that Dune was a celebration of polar treaties, but right the opposite.
03:45 His intention was to make a cautionary tale, a warning toward messianic figures,
03:51 and in order to correct that, this perception of the first book, he wrote another book, Dune Messiah.
03:58 It's almost like a tiny book, like an epilogue, where we understand what Paul really means to Frank Herbert.
04:04 What I did is that I transformed Shani's character. I made her more prominent.
04:09 In the book, Shani kind of disappears, dissolves into the shadow of Paul.
04:14 She's in the background. She's a believer.
04:17 There's nothing special, apart from that she's a Paul lover.
04:22 There was a strong opportunity there.
04:24 A character that could help me to have a distance, a critical distance, with polar treaties.
04:29 I love witness, people that are listening in corners,
04:33 or you can just feel their presence without dialogue, and understand what they are going through.
04:39 And Zendaya is incredibly expressive with her eyes.
04:43 And she brought that strength to the character that was required.
04:47 I wanted to see in her the power of the youth,
04:51 and someone that wants to transform her world, that doesn't believe in the old ways of seeing the world.
04:57 And she's a free character.
04:59 Through her eyes, we understand what Paul becomes, and in which direction he goes,
05:04 and which transformed the movie, not into a celebration,
05:07 but as Frank Herbert was wishing, more of a warning.
05:13 The eyes.
05:19 The prep of part two was much more compressed than part one,
05:23 because I wanted the movie to come out as quickly as possible.
05:26 It's not a sequel, it's a second part,
05:28 which was important for us to bring the movie quickly to the world.
05:31 Now, saying this, there's a tremendous amount of R&D as we were doing part one.
05:36 We knew the vocabulary, we knew the design,
05:39 there was something, we were on solid ground.
05:41 But there's still some technical advancement that were made.
05:45 And as in part one, the eyes were done hand by hand,
05:50 this time the software were designed so the AI was like a way to help us
05:55 to bring the level of realism that I wanted the eyes of part two
05:59 to have much more precise than what was made in part one.
06:03 I'm dying, Haka.
06:06 Quiet.
06:08 I'm madly in love with a shot like that.
06:21 When I was drawing storyboards sometime with Samudeki,
06:24 we were just doing a line with a tiny dot.
06:27 It's just like there's something about the purity,
06:30 and it's probably linked with my childhood,
06:33 where I was raised with an horizon with nothing around,
06:36 but it's like there's something here about bringing back the human
06:40 as its right scale in the landscape, like an ant in contact with the immensity,
06:45 with the meditative impact of the desert that I think is very powerful.
06:50 Lower.
06:53 [thud]
06:55 The sound here that has been done,
07:07 I asked Richard King to go back in the desert
07:10 and to make sure that we will hear that specific sound
07:14 of the hissing of the sand that sounds almost like a strange singing.
07:18 I was very pleased with the sound, the crew, that were able to bring back
07:21 that specific sound that we were hearing all the time in the desert.
07:25 [thud]
07:30 That is something that happens in the novel,
07:44 but what happens after
07:48 is what the movie is bringing to life.
07:51 Here in the book, it's written that Paul rides the worm.
08:01 It's very evasive about how a human being could jump on such a beast.
08:07 I knew it would be a central scene,
08:09 probably one of the most important scenes of the movie,
08:11 and I knew that if this scene was a success, I would have a movie.
08:16 [thud]
08:18 There's some description, of course, in the book,
08:21 the maker hooks and the tamper.
08:23 How precisely to bring that to the screen was like,
08:26 I had to figure that out and to create a kind of seminar for my crew
08:29 where I taught them how to ride a sandworm,
08:32 and I explained to them how we will bring that to the screen.
08:36 When I did so, there was a silence around the table
08:39 because what I was asking for was to bring a level of realism
08:42 that would require a tremendous amount of time.
08:45 I wanted to shoot everything in real sunlight.
08:48 That was the key for the VFX.
08:50 [speaking in foreign language]
09:07 [thunder rumbling]
09:10 [whispering]
09:17 This shot where we see Paul walking,
09:23 I really love the tension that is brought by stillness,
09:27 being in front of a still landscape.
09:30 There's something here, to be honest,
09:33 that was inspired by Jaws,
09:35 the idea that what you don't see is more frightening.
09:38 It's knowing that there's something underneath that might come soon.
09:41 It's a lesson that I learned a long time ago from Spielberg.
09:45 So the idea here is pretty simple.
09:47 A Fremen, in order to jump, to ride a worm,
09:50 will put a tamper at the lower side of the dune,
09:53 stand on top, and wait for the worm to catch
09:56 and get like that, and will eventually jump.
10:01 But of course, it's the first time that Paul is riding a sandworm,
10:04 so I had to find the right equilibrium, the right balance,
10:07 to show his skills, and at the same time,
10:10 how difficult it is and how he risks his life.
10:14 Having been in this desert in part one,
10:16 I knew that there was those kinds of crater
10:19 between sand dunes, those kind of vast, flat space,
10:23 and I thought that a Fremen will use that flat space
10:27 in order to be able to calculate the trajectory of the sand dunes.
10:31 I was pleased to find the right one with the right sun position
10:34 because we didn't use any artificial light in the desert
10:37 shooting part two like we did in part one.
10:40 It's like it brings a level of high realism
10:44 and a feeling of a strong tactile sensation
10:48 that you feel with the nature that I was looking for.
10:51 [wind blowing]
11:02 Again, I tried to shoot as much as possible on camera,
11:05 meaning that the VFX would be blended
11:07 inside the reality of the landscape.
11:10 [wind blowing]
11:15 What I can say about this moment is
11:18 that I was absolutely pleased with the sound design.
11:22 It was important for me that the worm will not express itself
11:26 like some kind of ancient dinosaur or some kind of monster,
11:29 but that the sound that it will emulate
11:32 will be inspired by the friction of such a beast
11:36 against the rock and the sand.
11:38 You will feel almost like it's a bending building
11:41 against the wind or something.
11:43 [wind blowing]
11:45 The sound of a lake, a frozen lake in winter in Canada,
11:50 where you have like those eerie, incredible singing sounds
11:54 that I feel absolutely surreal,
11:56 and I wanted to convey that kind of where nature
11:59 goes in a direction with the sound
12:01 that is absolutely unpredictable,
12:03 that feels very grounded in the reality of the image,
12:06 but feels still as there's a connection with the surreal.
12:10 Richard King absolutely nailed that.
12:12 [wind blowing]
12:15 The idea was to convey the idea that Paul missed it.
12:19 The worm is not exactly where Paul intended it to be.
12:23 There's like a gap between his position and the worm,
12:27 and that were to increase the fact that he's learning.
12:30 He's about to miss his Uber, technically.
12:33 [wind blowing]
12:35 All these shots have been made in the real landscape.
12:38 I insisted that there would be no CG element here
12:42 apart from, of course, the worm.
12:44 [wind blowing]
12:47 I wanted to create that feeling when you're beside a waterfall,
12:51 the relationship in the subconscious
12:54 that it brings with death.
12:56 [wind blowing]
12:58 This first part of the sequin has been shot
13:00 in the desert in Abu Dhabi.
13:02 The problem we were facing is that
13:04 Greg Fraser and I wanted the worm to come in on the sunny side
13:09 and get out on the shadow side.
13:10 Sounds ridiculous, but there's not a lot of sand dunes
13:12 because of the wind pattern in Abu Dhabi.
13:15 The abrupt side of the sand dune don't face the right side
13:18 in the right way, so we had to create our own sand dune
13:22 in order to do that specific shot.
13:24 There was sand dune that were created
13:26 according to the right sunlight.
13:27 This is real until here, of course.
13:29 The idea here is that men made sand dune,
13:31 and there is, after that, an extension
13:35 where the worm is getting out.
13:38 [wind blowing]
13:43 [man shouting]
13:46 It is by far one of the most difficult shots I've done.
13:49 The idea is to have a stuntman running on a specific sand dune
13:53 and at a perfect sunlight that will disappear,
13:57 collapse in the sand dune.
13:58 So in order to do so, what we did is that we created a sand dune
14:02 where there were like three massive cylinders,
14:07 giant cylinders.
14:08 Each cylinder was pulled by a truck.
14:14 And the stunt was running this way,
14:17 and the idea was to have at the perfect timing,
14:20 we had to pull those tubes under the sand dune
14:23 in order for the sand dune to collapse.
14:25 And the stunt needed to be perfectly,
14:28 to land perfectly at the right spot at the right time.
14:30 And that we could only shoot early mornings
14:33 because of the direction of the sunlight.
14:35 And it sounds easy, but those trucks were massive trucks.
14:38 And in order to find the proper speed
14:40 over the course of many days,
14:42 in order to arrive at the perfect timing that I was looking for,
14:45 where we have actually saw a human being running
14:47 and seeing the world collapsing under his feet,
14:50 which I think is absolutely nightmarish event.
14:55 And that I was trying to do with as much realism as possible.
15:00 When the trucks move forward one after the other,
15:04 and after they were moving in a certain order,
15:08 they were not moving all in the same time,
15:11 but with a split second each other,
15:13 so the collapse was progressive.
15:15 Once the tube were gone,
15:17 the stuntman was landing on mattress
15:20 that were hidden under the sand.
15:23 How did we do that?
15:42 Quite simple in theory, but it was difficult in practice
15:45 because I wanted again to shoot that all under natural light.
15:48 I asked my production designer
15:50 to create a gigantic platform.
15:53 At Reproduction, we try to build the biggest platform possible
15:57 with the sandworm skin.
15:59 This platform will be on a gimbal.
16:03 It's a machine that allows us to move the platform
16:09 in one way or the other.
16:12 The platform can modulate like that at different speed.
16:16 It's something that is used in action sequences in an airplane
16:20 or sometimes for car accidents or things like that.
16:23 But this time, it was like a specific one
16:25 that could move quite faster,
16:27 and it required a lot of engineering from Gerd Neff,
16:31 which is one of the best in the business regarding special effects.
16:35 The way we did that is that we had like what they call the dog collar,
16:39 and the gimbal was like here.
16:42 And this was oriented according to sunlight.
16:46 We were shooting each shot at a specific moment of the day
16:49 when the sun was specifically in the right direction.
16:52 Each shot needed a specific programming in the platform
16:56 to convey different moments of the worm ride.
16:59 That was like one of the approaches.
17:01 The other one was on the building of the soundstage,
17:03 we put the platform at different angles like that
17:06 when the character is falling.
17:08 We had also one platform that was like vertical like that
17:11 with the gimbal that was used for the shot you're seeing here
17:15 where I wanted the character to lose contact with the platform
17:20 like if the platform was falling.
17:22 In order to do so, the platform goes from this to this angle,
17:26 so the character will fall into the worm.
17:28 And it's like a game with gravity that I was very excited to do,
17:33 but that required my crew to work many days
17:37 in order to find the right speed and the right angle.
17:41 [MUSIC PLAYING]
17:44 [ROARING]
18:13 I wanted to make sure that the sandworm riding
18:16 will be as edgy, as real.
18:19 It will look dangerous, but also some kind of feeling of heroism.
18:25 And despite its clumsiness, that Paul will succeed
18:28 finally being one with the desert.
18:31 That's this idea that Fremen have the ability
18:35 to be in total harmony with the desert.
18:39 And that it's like humans finding the right balance and being in one.
18:45 It's a very important moment in the book,
18:48 and it's a fundamental moment in the movie.
18:51 [RUMBLING]
18:53 When we designed the sandworm skin in part one,
18:57 for Patrice Vellemette, my production designer, and I,
18:59 it was important that the sandworm will feel prehistoric,
19:02 like that all the design of the worm will be in direct relationship
19:06 with its environment, a bit like the way the novel was written.
19:11 That you could explain from its biology,
19:15 how it feeds, how it evolves, how it lives under such harsh conditions.
19:21 And it's a beast, technically, that lives under the sand
19:24 at tremendous heat.
19:26 And it's like we try to create the most believable being as possible,
19:32 still having that kind of godlike quality to it
19:35 that is so important for the Fremen psyche.
19:38 In the book, we understand that a Fremen can ride a worm
19:42 by exposing a sensitive part of its skin.
19:45 The worm has some scales, and when you lift one of them,
19:51 you expose sensitive skin.
19:53 The worm, trying to protect itself, will stay at the surface.
19:57 I felt that it was not enough.
19:59 I needed something to express to the audience that vulnerability.
20:03 I come with this idea of Vance, part of this breathing system,
20:06 that once exposed, you will understand that the worm feels vulnerable this way.
20:13 The platform was surrounded by massive fans.
20:23 We were throwing an insane amount of dust on the stunt.
20:28 Tons of dust were used in that sequence.
20:32 I wanted to feel that the character is going through waves of sand
20:38 and disappears into the dust, and to feel that he has to master the elements.
20:44 The action of sand riding involves a lot of violence and danger.
20:50 [Sounds of a storm]
20:54 One of my favorite moments in the movie,
21:09 where I wanted to bring some heroism, but also a feeling of a sacred moment,
21:14 that from the Fremen perspective, this will be one moment
21:19 that will fulfill one of the elements of the prophecy,
21:22 where a boy will be able to tame a giant sandworm.
21:27 One of the biggest ever seen.
21:28 A boy from the other world will be able to be in relationship with Shai-Ulud.
21:32 I wanted that to be conveyed in the music,
21:36 that feeling that something very special is happening,
21:39 something almost sacred from the Fremen perspective.
21:42 [Sounds of a storm]
21:45 In order to convey that speed, the plates were shot with helicopters,
21:50 but the character is shot with a long lens and a rig that goes at high speed
21:55 in order to feel that instability on the character as if he was passing by.
22:00 [Sounds of a storm]
22:03 [Music]
22:06 There's like a precise shift where we see that it will go from Paul being celebrated
22:20 by the Fremen because he succeeded, obviously,
22:23 but we will see from Shani's perspective,
22:25 the Fremen will go from celebration to adoration.
22:28 When I decided to make this adaptation of the novel,
22:33 the first artist that I approached to help me to do so was Hans Zimmer.
22:37 Hans is, like me, a massive fan of the novel.
22:40 Hans gave me a warning.
22:42 He said, "Is it a good idea to tackle your childhood dreams?
22:45 Are we meant to fail?
22:47 You cannot bring to the screen the full potential of the dream of the teenager."
22:51 There was a lot of wisdom in that, and I kind of frankly agree with him.
22:56 That was the challenge.
22:58 That was the specificity of this project, was to try to go back in time
23:03 and bring back those images to the surface.
23:06 And now that both movies are completed, it takes me a lot of time
23:10 to digest this experience.
23:12 I will say that there are some sequences, like this one, the worm ride,
23:15 that is very, very close to the dream.
23:19 Others are quite different because of the process of the adaptation.
23:23 It will take me a while to digest them, to make peace with that.
23:27 [ Silence ]