‘Dune: Part Two’ production designer and set decorator say their biggest challenge was not what you might think
When considering the biggest challenges on “Dune: Part Two,” set decorator Shane Vieau mentions Baron Harkonnen “in his chair and his breathing apparatus because that was all done physically, they were not VFX, and so bringing those three components together and having them move as they did in their environments was extremely challenging because each one of these pieces moved independently.” But there was another component that he and production designer Patrice Vermette worked hard on that might not seem so difficult to the casual viewer: the stilltents. Watch our exclusive video interview with them above.
Continuing the story that began with “Dune: Part One” (2021), the second film follows Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) as he fights back against the Harkonnen clan with the help of the Fremen, while a prophecy looms about his eventual ascension to power leading to catastrophe. The stilltents are specialized for sleeping on the brutal desert planet of Arrakis. “On ‘Part One,’ there were some still tents,” says Vermette, but on ‘Part Two’ I was not super happy with the design and I asked [director Denis Villeneuve] the permission to have a second try to rethink the stilltent. And that created a bit of a challenge to my friend Shane over here.”
“It definitely was one of those pieces that, when you look at it on screen, it feels very simple,” adds Vieau. “But the reality is to get light through this fabric, it turned into about four to six months of development. Lots of fabrics were developed.” They ended up with a “five-ply” material: “It was silk that was silk-screened plus another layer of acetate, laser-cut leather to give you the organic shape of the leaf … It was extremely complicated, and the engineering on it took a lot of people to get that right.”
So the complexities of designing and decorating “Dune” were both large and small. “What looks super simple can be a bit of a headache,” explains Vermette. “But I was super happy in the end, and everybody was.”