Steven Spielberg can’t cease serious about Timothée Chalamet atop a sandworm in Denis Villeneuve‘s “Dune: Half Two.”
The director praised Villeneuve throughout an installment of the DGA’s “Director’s Reduce” podcast, the place Spielberg welcomed Villeneuve to the membership of filmmakers who’re the “builders of worlds” onscreen.
“It’s an honor for me to sit down right here and speak to you. Let me begin by saying there are filmmakers who’re the builders of worlds. It’s not a protracted listing and we all know who a variety of them are,” Spielberg mentioned. “Beginning with [Georges] Méliès and Disney and Kubrick, George Lucas. Ray Harryhausen, I embrace in that listing. [Frederico] Fellini constructed his personal worlds. Tim Burton. Clearly Wes Anderson, Peter Jackson, James Cameron, Christopher Nolan, Ridley Scott, Guillermo del Toro. The listing goes on but it surely’s not that lengthy of a listing, and I deeply, fervently consider that you’re certainly one of its latest members.”
Why was Spielberg so significantly compelled to anoint Villeneuve into this sacred membership? Effectively, it seems Villeneuve’s imaginative and prescient for the sequence the place hero Paul (Chalamet) rides a sandworm propelled his filmography over the edge, per Spielberg.
“This can be a desert-loving story, however for such a desert-loving movie there may be such a craving for water on this film. For all of the sand you will have on this movie, it’s actually about water. The sacred waters which are craving for inexperienced meadows and the blue water of life. You movie the desert to resemble an ocean, a sea,” Spielberg mentioned. “The sandworms have been like sea serpents. And that scene browsing the sandworms is without doubt one of the best issues I’ve ever seen. Ever! However you made the desert appear like a liquid.”
Villeneuve beforehand instructed IndieWire’s Anne Thompson that the sandworm scene was “not straightforward” to shoot.
“All the things that we shot within the deep desert was not straightforward as a result of I needed a degree of realism that required us to create large constructions or shadow makers to be able to make the sunshine plausible,” Villeneuve mentioned. “The characters and all of the motion sequences required an amazing quantity of prep, and logistics to guard the crew from the warmth and to guard the stunts. The one scene that I didn’t need to compromise in any respect was the worm experience. It technically required a variety of time and analysis and growth. That was by far probably the most advanced issues I’ve ever accomplished.”
Manufacturing constructed 18 miles of eco-friendly roads within the Jordan desert to move movie gear and construct basecamps. Villeneuve credited Oscar-winning cinematographer Greig Fraser for choosing which sand dunes to seize within the futuristic sci-fi space-set movie.
“You’re surrounded by 1000’s of sand dunes. And why are you selecting that particular one that’s two miles within the desert? It’s all in regards to the form, and it needed to match Greig’s specification for gentle,” Villeneuve mentioned. “It’s like a puzzle to search out the appropriate location even within the ocean of sand dunes. Nature is particular, and it took us some time to search out all the appropriate places.”