How did Patrice Vermette design ‘Dune’? He started with two water bottles

Patrice Vermette holds two plastic water bottles up to the webcam. Whatever brand they once were (maybe Glacier Mountain, Kirkland, Evian) was lost to history when the labels were ripped off. Instead, they’re both filled with sand.

Vermette是奥斯卡提名的生产设计师沙丘。He joins me on Zoom at who knows what hour for him, as he’s in Budapest, Hungary, where he’s scouting locations for沙丘2。

As for those bottles of sand: In one hand, he holds a bottle with sand from Abu Dhabi. In the other, a bottle with sand from Jordan, some 1,5o0 miles away.沙丘阿拉基斯的沙漠世界是在这两个地点拍摄的。在侦察世界各地的沙漠之后，Vermette的团队在无数类似的瓶子里装满了类似的瓶子，以确保当电影一起编辑时，颜色可以匹配。

Couldn’t digital movie magic just fix these two colors in postproduction? Perhaps, but that’s not how you make a movie as hauntingly beautiful as沙丘。正如我告诉Vermette的那样，我看到了阿拉伯劳伦斯on a rare 70mm print years ago, with a live organist playing the score. It was epic. Yet, as I watched沙丘在Covid期间，我在电视上流式传输，我承认一个令人不安的事实：沙丘是更美丽的电影。但这就是vermette借用设计将科幻元素扎根的方式 - 同时巧妙地重新构架了一些白人救主本书中的主题是殖民主义，这使它与众不同。和奥斯卡值得。

沙漠是死亡的海洋

In the world of沙丘正如弗兰克·赫伯特（Frank Herbert）的原始小说所概述的那样，保罗·阿特雷德斯（Paul Atreides）（蒂莫西·查拉梅特（TimothéeChalamet））的家族被召唤到阿拉基斯（Arrakis）的沙漠星球，以挖掘出一种看似魔法的香料，称为梅兰吉（Melange）。试图暗杀后，阿特雷德斯（Atreides）离开了相对安全的阿拉肯（Arrakeen）城市，前往弗里曼（Fremen）居住的无尽沙漠，很久以前就学会了如何在沙漠中生存（并避免巨型蠕虫）。

Some of our earliest views of the desert are aerial, with sand dunes that seem to ripple like water without promising a drop.

“这些沙丘没有什么浪漫的；这是一个角色。” Vermette说。“它代表死亡，无论是沙虫的死亡还是高温死亡。”

为了在沙漠中生存，弗里门人生活在“ sietches”中，隐藏在山上的洞穴系统，并在岩石露头周围跳过以避开沙虫。为电影铸造正确的岩石实际上是一个重大挑战。“显然，我们需要拥有沙丘，” Vermette笑着说。“但是，很少有国家提供壮观的岩层来说一个性格。您去约旦，在瓦迪朗姆酒中，那些岩石有时看起来像是写在上面的东西。。。我们觉得有一件奇怪的精神发生，这些岩石只是巨大的。但是缺少一些东西。两者之间缺少沙漠。”

After finding the rocks in Jordan, the production team scoured the globe for the right stretch of sand. Director Denis Villeneuve, whom Vermette has teamed up with on刀片跑步者2049和Arrival，和他一起侦察沙漠。Vermette说：“当我们到达阿布扎比时，我们开车去了沙丘，我们到达了一个高点，我们互相看着对方，说，'好吧，'”“在那个季节，天空被粉刷了。这是超级戏剧性的。这不是美丽的明信片。如果您直接走出去，在几个小时内，您就死了。这就是它需要传达的。”

另外，阿布扎比的沙丘满足了另一个关键要求：它们完美地匹配了约旦。

Building a grand-scale, colonial city

在这个广阔的沙漠的边缘，一个单一的前哨基地，阿拉肯（Arrakeen）城市，这是一个必须充实电影的城市。其低调的沙子建筑旨在传达现实主义，规模和压迫。但最重要的是，它们建立在基本逻辑上，以在这个科幻世界中有意义，据说风的每小时500英里。

“显然，建筑，借着这样的风，您不能直截了当。您必须将所有内容的角度放在一定角度上，因此风扫在这些建筑物上。” Vermette说。“它们是用石头建造的。。。显然，在这些建筑物一直站在那里的数千年中，沙子也掩盖了它们。”

The stone walls of these buildings are several feet thick, which the film reveals casually as doors open and close. “Just like in a cave, you want to keep the little humidity and coolness you have, and you want to protect it,” says Vermette.

Villeneuve framed people inside these buildings as tiny characters within vast spaces. “It’s the human scale in the desert, the vastness of the desert,” says Vermette. The effect is that, even when indoors, Arrakis is a humbling world, of which people are but a small part. This required building sets with extraordinary height.

Vermette说：“我们建造了一部分，最多24英尺，有时30英尺。”然后，Vermette用弹性的沙子织物填满了套装的天花板，否则将其开放。效果是演员不仅在绿屏上表演。它们是在没有明显终结的大量沉浸式套装上拍摄的。作为奖励，砂面织物在整合后期生产效果方面效果很好，因为所有反射的光都是砂色。演员不是绿色屏幕溢出的绿色面貌。

至于这座城市的建筑观点，瞥见天际线显示了金字塔风格的Ziggurats，他们的细节暗示了美索不达米亚语和中美洲文化，以及1950年代的大量brutalismto keep the sun out. It reads like a bunch of sacred motifs tossed into a blender by a white person who didn’t care about appropriation. And that’s, actually, the point. The Atreides family, like generations before, had landed on the planet planning to mine it dry, paying little to no regard to local culture.

“All these references [refer to] people who established that city as a colonial entity, there to exploit the local population. So it’s an architectural message, as well, to the local population,” says Vermette. “They built something huge to show power, to [say], ‘Don’t mess with us,’ just like in the old Soviet Union days,在政权的所有荣耀中建立了最大的纪念碑。”

但是背后的知识沙丘伟大的城市并没有结束。正如Vermette所解释的那样，当地工党将建造其建筑物和广阔的宫殿。而且这种剥削会鄙视，您可以在屏幕上看到。

“在宫殿内，在保罗的卧室里，我用床种了一些潜意识的玩法。在他的床上，有一块巨大的石头可以随时粉碎他。” Vermette说。“你在这样的床上睡不好。”

Along the same lines, Fremen would have been the tradesmen hired to decorate the palace’s walls. These gold foil murals are stunning to behold, especially one, which captures a great sandworm. “The sandworm is depicted like divinity, like a god that commands respect,” says Vermette. The same animal that the colonial powers fear is the one that the local people worship.

Nailing the sandworm

But of all the challenges of沙丘, it was that sandworm that proved the most significant to get just right. (Okay, the film’s dragonfly-inspired ornithopters may have been a close second.) These monsters and deities burrow under the surface, and stretch hundreds of feet long. They swallow industrial mining equipment whole. And yet, they are also ridden by the Fremen like trains through the desert.

Sandworms are a daunting set piece in your mind’s eye while reading one of the books, but they really don’t make much sense. How do they move? What do they eat? These are gigantic apex predators in a world devoid of life.

在继续海洋隐喻的情况下，Vermette开始思考像鲸鱼这样的蠕虫：巨型过滤器喂食器，他们可能会在沙滩上游泳，同时在途中咀嚼香料和其他营养物质。声音振动 -developed in conjunction with the sound design team—might help displace the sand for them to swim through. And much of the time, the top of the worm could simply poke out of the sand a bit, much like a whale fin out of the water. This solved a practical problem of the沙丘书籍：弗雷门夫不需要穿越25或50英尺即可骑蠕虫（如大卫·林奇（David Lynch）的电影改编中）。他们或多或少可以挂上它并踩踏。

As for the film’s big reveals, when a full worm breeches out of the sand to eat a spice harvester, or when it appears in front of Paul Atreides with its toothy, filtering mouth agape—those moments required a sizable study of how animals chew and swallow. But ultimately, that work paid off onscreen because沙丘的沙虫似乎是自然的真正力量。最终，该执行是体验的关键，感觉就像是别的。这是沙丘, a world many of us have read about but none has seen rendered so perfectly before.

“有太多的作品（例如），‘不，不。好吧，我们从未尝试过，所以不要尝试。让我们去做已经被证明可以正常工作的东西'” Vermette说。“这很有趣，因为[沙丘]是一个我们可以尝试的项目。”