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Moviegoers have long awaited the latest reimagining of Dunes to hit the silver screens. Originally scheduled for November 2020, the premiere has been pushed back at least three times and is finally coming to theaters and stream on HBOMax October 22. But set designer Patrice Vermette has been waiting for years for the film – starring Timothée Chalamet, Oscar Isaac, Zendaya, Javier Bardem, etc. – came to fruition, given that he began traveling to research filming locations for Dunes in 2018.
The film, which is mainly set on a desert planet called Arrakis, was shot in four locations: Wadi Rum in Jordan, the desert outside Abu Dhabi, the northwest coast of Norway and the sound stages of ‘Origo Studio in Budapest. “Without these four places, there is no Dunes“says Vermette.
To find out how the crew blended two deserts to create the planet Arrakis, staying at an Anantara resort outside Abu Dhabi, and what sets you can actually visit, we sat down with Vermette himself to chat. of all. Dunes.
Timothée Chalamet and Rebecca Ferguson in Duneswho shot his desert scenes in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.
EverettWhat went into choosing the perfect desert(s) to serve as Arrakis?
We needed to find a desert that wasn’t romantic, beautiful, or postcard-like. It had to be a scary place – the kind of desert where if you get stuck there it’s death for sure. We needed it to have a violence of its own.
We started the process by going through Google, looking at the different deserts around the world. We watched amazing deserts in Chile, Iran, Chad, Yemen, Libya. But I quote countries which are very difficult to access for film production. Corn [the director] Dennis [Villeneuve] made a film called Fires in Jordan and remembered going to Wadi Rum. We read the script and we realized, yes, there are dunes, but there are also a lot of rock formations. And we found that the place that gave us the most amazing rock formation choices was the Wadi Rum and Wadi Araba deserts in Jordan. There’s just a presence there, an aura. You feel very, very, very small in the universe when you’re there, and just the sound of the wind between those rocks is breathtaking.
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