Dune is an epic science fiction novel by Frank Herbert, that is one of the best-selling books ever. It is arguably the template for which all science fiction that came after it, particularly George Lucas’ iconic sci-fi fantasy films owe a great debt of gratitude towards Herbert’s works, so much so that he considered suing.
Dune was long considered impossible to film and led to many aborted productions, most notably, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s version which came close in the mid-1970s. Auteur, Ridley Scott was hired by producer Dino De Laurentis at one point, which dragged on for years, resulting in the failed 1984 version by the amazing filmmaker David Lynch. The film was a notorious box office bomb and was disowned by its director [it’s not a bad movie – Ed]. Fast forward to 2021 when Dune: Part One, directed by the brilliant Denis Villeneuve, was released to great fanfare, great reviews, box office and it was the winner of 6 Academy Awards.
Dune: Part Two was released on March 1st, 2024, and is one of the most celebrated films of the year, starring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Charlotte Rampling, and Javier Bardem. Many in the sci-fi community feel this is the adaptation that finally got it right and is a creative and technical marvel that filmgoers will unravel for years to come. Universal acclaim, huge box office, and a frontrunner for several awards including best editing for the amazingly talented Joe Walker, who won the Oscar for the first film. Walker recently spoke to Immersive via Zoom about this astounding achievement.
[This conversation has been edited for context and length]
Tell me about your working relationship with Denis Villeneuve, like how you first came in contact with him and how that went through to the present day.
I’d seen Incendies, a French language film shot in Montreal and the Middle East. I’d seen it in London before I left to move to the States and I remember thinking, I really want to work with this filmmaker.
So when the opportunity came to work on Sicario, we met and got on well and there was a moment when you are working with a new director… You have to break through that and say it’s safe to disagree. Early in the path, I remember him saying to me in this very disarming way, he said, Joe, “I don’t want to offend you, but I think we share the same sensibility.”
I feel very in tune with his filmmaking and his style. His particular passions embrace all the visual and the auditory and the musical and the performance of course, upfront and paramount. I know it’s a great marriage and I never take it for granted that we will keep working together. I’m not the only editor in the world, but I’m always extraordinarily grateful when I get that call.
It was great meeting you earlier in the year at NAB. Having seen your Avid workflow, please let me know your organizational secrets. There were so many layers, how do you keep it all together?
I will say that the timeline in the latest stages of a cut on a film like Dune: Part Two, is like Sudoku Hard – to know how to make one simple change and a simple change of swapping out a shot or swapping out a performance that may be shorter or longer. It’s quite a deal. But me and Denis have a kind of quite an interesting approach sometimes despite how much time we invest in the sound and the music.
I build the sound into the cut very early to try and find the tempo of things and to try and kind of get a rhythmic approach to films. If nothing else, I hope people will realize how rhythmic they are. And the rhythm isn’t just a sound thing, it’s a performance thing, it’s dialogue and it’s the timing of cuts and against dialogue. All of these things are sort of part of the tenor of the conversation in this room. But sometimes we will go lo-fi and just turn the speakers off.
Do any specific scenes come to mind?
There’s a beautiful scene between Chani and Paul where they meet in the desert and Paul is going through one of the tests of the Fremen and trying to survive in the desert overnight. And there was the most fantastic sequence between them. It was a magical performance and a very loose piece of filmmaking.
It’s not something that was story-boarded and planned. It was grabbed most beautifully and it caught this moment of flirtation between them and that one, I knew what the dialogue was and I knew what they were saying, which was she was explaining water traps, but it was cut mute, it was cut with the sound off.
What was it like collaborating with Cinematographer, Greig Fraser again?
Greig is a master… and he’s a very hyperactive DP. He’s somebody who can be monitoring the second unit while he’s shooting the first unit – literally during a shot. He did a great degree of planning. Denis was keen to film in the real desert and of course, there are huge logistical problems to do with the heat and the access to these places. In Dune Part One he went with a very small skeleton crew and the filmmaking was very, it was endearingly low scale sometimes. Here in Part Two there’s sequences where Production Designer, Patrice Vermette is building roads with Greig’s input.
What did that entail…
I don’t know too much about the technology. I know that there were plans to see what the shadow would be on the dune behind the character at this time of day so they could plan their schedule according to the available light. It’s kind of a remarkable piece of frenetic energy from the camera department and the First AD to kind of make that happen.
I just sit there in awe, I just receive it. I don’t even go on set, I’m in the studio, but I don’t like to tread on set and kind of spoil my vision of what they’re giving me. I can respond to only what I’m receiving and I think I’m the first audience member for the film.
Thinking back to the original Frank Herbert novel, the whole story was inspired by him on an acid trip watching Lawrence of Arabia.
I always say Dune: Part Two is for people who love Lawrence of Arabia, but think the only thing that missing is a giant sandworm, right? I mean it’s very funny. At one point my assistant Chris, and I were talking with Denis and we were doing the worm ride sequence and Denis said Lawrence of Arabia is of course the desert masterpiece, but maybe here we should be thinking more about Roadrunner. And we had this fantastic Chuck Jones picture of Wile E Coyote in the corner of the room. It’s long faded and gone, but it was trying to reflect a little bit of that, that we wanted to lean into the action.
There’s the original text and then there is the world-building of these films…
In this film, it’s all about the benefit of Part One, it set up so many of the worlds and the rules of engagement and some quite esoteric thoughts about how the universe works now. It meant that in Part Two it freed us to lean into this sort of intimate human landscape within this vast landscape that is very much part of Frank Herbert’s vision. We could abbreviate in Part Two and not have to oversell things that we’d already sold in Part One.
Anything specific?
Paul’s inner visions and to know what’s going on in his mind and his developing skills to predict. That was a big preoccupation in the edit of Part One, but in Part Two you could be super efficient and very epigrammatic about it. A good example is that there’s a moment where with his hand Paul explains that having taken the water of life, he can see multiple planes, multiple paths, and he could see one narrow corridor of possibility.
There are brief visual cues of foreshadowing…
I just had a second long shot that prefigures what you see later the resolution of the knife fight between Feyd-Rautha and Paul. So it is so beautiful to be that brief and to be that efficient in a long-established idea. We could lean into the action in Part Two and make it the most terrifying kick-ass tense battle.
The second film is more action-packed, delivering on the promise of the first film… I would love to watch both films back to back to get the full experience…
It should work totally because we basically end up walking into the sunset and then you have a vision of Alia Atreides in the womb and the next scene it’s maybe a few hours later. That was one of the remarkable things I think is how good the continuity is in the films…
Please break down the Gladiator scene in the film, it’s quite striking…
I’ve got to tell you that was the very first scene that was shot. That in itself is an incredibly ballsy thing for a filmmaker to do. Denis picked that as the first thing, and there may have been reasons to do with scheduling or whatever, but for the very first thing for the studio to see Austin Butler as an Infra-red psychopath arriving in an arena with the doors opening was pretty much the first shot I think I got.
That must have felt exciting and challenging at the same time…
Denis told me it cannot sound like a 21st-century sporting event. It was early in the shoot and he’d been developing Harkonnen behaviors that were different. It’s an insect culture. They don’t applaud, for example. What is the sound of 20,000 people in a gladiatorial arena where you can’t do that?
We started developing sounds and then we brought in Dave Whitehead and Martin Kwok over in New Zealand to work with us on the scene to build up the sounds. They came up with all this fantastic stuff like the banging, the foot-stomping, and then this Haka chant, which was just unbelievable, they were so great at developing this, working with the Harkonnen language, and the linguists on this film.
How long did it take to cut this specific scene?
A year later we were still working on it… trying to find a roadmap in the cut of saying where are the peaks of the sequence. It’s not just a sound thing, it’s an editorial and a performance thing of saying that the transformation of Feyd-Rautha is what this is all about. It’s a shadow challenge, mirroring the journey that we went on with Paul.
It has such unique energy to it the way Feyd-Rautha comes in contact with real danger, possibly for the first time…
All that was mapped out and developed and of course we had to kind of know how agitated the crowd should be at certain points for them to be able to do the VFX work. To create an arena that worked – this amazing triangular design of Patrice’s that the VFX got to develop, to make sure that eye lines were perfect. It was the very first scene to cut, and yet probably one of the last to finish.
I’m very curious about the way it was filmed and edited because of that sort of drained color look, it doesn’t look like black and white, but it’s like, what is that? What did they do there? It’s so interesting.
The infrared cameras had that very special look. There are some special shots where you can go from color to infrared as well. I think the story we’re telling is that Giedi Prime has its own black sun that drains color away. It’s an artificial world, no organic matter anywhere.
The idea with the infrared was that in certain key shots, you start with color and then you cross fade two different chip responses to the same light. It’s very clever work by Greig and the production team. Of course, all the costumes have to be adapted because you’re trying to get true blacks where you want them, things were specially designed to fit the infrared technology rather than the other way around.
It’s a brilliant sequence. This has been a massive undertaking. You’ve been working on this project for years, Part One and Part Two, and you won an Oscar for the first one. What’s it like being on the other end of this now?
I’m just thrilled to be working with this group of people. If I died tomorrow, I’d die with a big smile on my face that I got to work with a director who I respect so much. The team, we are like a band. It’s like being in the Rolling Stones.
