Top architects have long tried to imagine what the built world of the future will look like. It’s unlikely, however, that they’ve dreamt as far ahead as production designer Patrice Vermette had to for his work on the new movie Dune. Based on the first half of the 1965 book by Frank Herbert and directed by Blade Runner 2049’s Denis Villeneuve, the film tells an epic story set 20,000 years in the future and spanning multiple planets.
One might assume a film like this would rely heavily on special effects, but Villeneuve actually directed the team to physically create as much of the world as they possibly could. “Denis’s approach is always to have most immersive sets as possible,” Vermette tells AD. To do this, they returned to the massive soundstage and backlot of Origo Studios in Budapest, where Villeneuve had shot Blade Runner.
Here, they created the grand but spartan interiors of palaces on three different planets: Caladan, the home planet of protagonist Paul Atreides (Timotheé Chalamet) and his parents, Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac) and Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson); Arrakis, the desert home of a people known as the Fremen, where the Atreides family relocates when they are given control of the mining of a valuable natural resource there called Spice; and Giedi Prime, the home of the evil House of Harkonnen.
Vermette returned to the book to look for clues about what the various residences might look like, and decided that the natural environments on each planet should most greatly inform the designs. In the city of Arrakeen on the planet Arrakis (known to the natives as Dune), for example, the buildings are quite angular, so that the 750-kilometer-per-hour winds described in the book can glide over them. They are made of thick stone and feature light wells instead of large windows as a response to the extreme heat.
A variety of architectural styles influenced the look of Arrakeen, including WWII bunkers, Mesopotamian ziggurats, Egyptian and Aztec pyramids, Brazilian architecture, brutalism, and even the Italian 1960s and ’70s design collective Superstudio. Still, Vermette was determined to make Dune look like nothing seen before. During the seven months he spent on concept work, he’d show everything to his then 16-year-old son and ask if it reminded him of any movies or video games. “If he would say, ‘Well…,’ I said, ‘Okay, let’s change that.’”
One element it was especially important to get right was the ornithopters, the helicopter-like vehicles the characters use to get around. “They needed to look real enough that you’d believe that it would be safe to fly in those things, and real enough that it would stand the winds,” Vermette says. Two ornithopters were actually built for the film; only the flapping, dragonfly-like wings were added using special effects in post-production.
“[We made sure all the] landing gear moved properly. There’s nothing magical about it,” Vermette says. Seeing the devices fly away from a giant special-effects sand worm threatening to swallow them whole is a highlight of the film, and although the monsters were man-made, the harsh landscape they rise up out of was not.
The exterior shots in Dune were filmed on location in multiple corners of the globe. Norway “was a response to what Caladan needed to be. It’s a planet of water,” Vermette says. Abu Dhabi provided the white skies and large, foreboding sand dunes the team was looking for for Arrakis. “It’s the mother of all deserts,” Vermette says. Wadi Rum, Jordan, was also perfect for the rocky landscape, and additional scenes were filmed in an area on the border of Jordan and Israel that had previously only been used for military exercises. “It is absolutely virgin sand,” location manager Nick Oliver said. “No on has been walking on it. The dunes are just left to wash across the desert and are constantly changing.” This made filming tricky, but also provided the breathtaking shots that are the best parts of the movie.
