How Patrice Vermette built the Oscar-nominated world of Dune

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 is the Oscar-nominated production designer on Dune. He joins me on Zoom at who knows what hour for him, as he’s in Budapest, Hungary, where he’s scouting locations for Dune 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. Dune‘s desert world of Arrakis was filmed over these two locations. And Vermette’s team filled countless similar bottles with sand, after scouting deserts from around the world, to ensure that the color would match when the film was edited together.

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 Dune. As I tell Vermette, I saw Lawrence of Arabia on a rare 70mm print years ago, with a live organist playing the score. It was epic. Yet, as I watched Dune streaming on my TV during COVID, I admitted an uncomfortable truth: Dune is the more beautiful movie. But it’s how Vermette leveraged design to ground the sci-fi elements—while subtly reframing some of the white savior themes in the book as colonialism—that makes it special. And Oscar worthy.

The desert is an ocean of death

In the world of Dune, as outlined in Frank Herbert’s original novels, the family of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) is summoned to the desert planet of Arrakis to mine a seemingly magical spice known as melange. After an attempted assassination, Atreides departs the relatively safe city of Arrakeen for the endless desert inhabited by Fremen, native people who long ago learned how to survive in the desert (and avoid the giant worms).

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

“There’s nothing romantic about these sand dunes; it’s a character,” says Vermette. “It represents death, whether it’s death by a sandworm, or it’s death by the heat.”

To survive in the desert, the Fremen live in “sietches,” cave systems hidden within the mountains, and skip their way around rock outcrops to avoid the sandworms. Casting the right rocks for the film was actually a major challenge. “We needed to have, obviously, dunes,” says Vermette with a laugh. “But there are very few countries that offer spectacular rock formations that speak of a character. You go to Jordan, and in Wadi Rum, those rocks, sometimes, they look like something’s written on them. . . .We felt there was a strangely spiritual thing happening, and these rocks are just massive. But there was something missing. There was the desert missing between.”

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 Blade Runner 2049 and Arrival, scouted the deserts with him. “When we arrived in Abu Dhabi, we drove in the sand dunes, and we arrived at a high point, and we looked at each other and said, ‘Okay,'” says Vermette. “And the sky was whitewashed through that season. It was super dramatic. It’s not the beautiful postcard. If you walk straight out, within a couple of hours, you’re dead. And that’s what it needed to convey.”

Plus, the dunes of Abu Dhabi met one other key requirement: They matched Jordan’s perfectly.

Building a grand-scale, colonial city

At the edge of this vast desert lives a single outpost, the city of Arrakeen—a city that had to be fleshed out for the film. Its low-profile, sand-colored buildings are designed to convey realism, scale, and oppression. But most of all, they are built upon foundational logic to make sense within this sci-fi world, where winds supposedly reach 500 miles per hour.

“Obviously, the architecture, with winds like that, you cannot have anything straight. You have to put everything at an angle, so the wind sweeps over those buildings,” says Vermette. “They’re built out of stone . . . and obviously over the thousands of years that these buildings have been standing there, the sand has also encrusted them.”

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.

“We built parts of the sets, up to 24 feet, sometimes 30 feet,” says Vermette. Then Vermette filled the sets’ ceilings and otherwise open walls with stretchy, sand-colored fabric. The effect was that actors weren’t merely performing on green screen. They were filmed on voluminous, immersive sets that had no obvious end. As a bonus, the sand-colored fabric worked well for integrating postproduction effects, because all reflected light was sand-colored. Actors weren’t green-faced from the spill of green screens.

As for the city’s architectural point of view, a glance at the skyline shows pyramid-style ziggurats, their details hinting at Mesopotamian and Mesoamerican cultures, along with plenty of 1950s brutalism to 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, which built the biggest monuments in all the glory of the regime.”

But the lore behind Dune‘s great city doesn’t end there. Because, as Vermette explains, local labor would have built its buildings and its vast palace. And that exploitation would have bred contempt, which you can see onscreen.

“Within the palace, in Paul’s bedroom, I planted a little subliminal play with his bed. Above his bed, there’s this massive stone that could crush him any time,” says Vermette. “You don’t sleep well in a bed like that.”

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 Dune, 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.

Carrying on with the ocean metaphor, Vermette began thinking of the worms like whales: giant filter feeders, who might swim through the sand while munching on scraps of spice and other nutrients along the way. Sonic vibrations—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 Dune books: a Fremen wouldn’t need to traverse 25 or 50 feet to get on top of the worm to ride it (as in David Lynch’s film adaptation). They could more or less hook it and step on.

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 Dune‘s sandworm appears as a real force of nature. And ultimately, that execution is key to an experience, which feels like nothing else. This is Dune, a world many of us have read about but none has seen rendered so perfectly before.

“There are so many productions [that say], ‘No, no. Well, we’ve never tried that, so let’s not try it. Let’s go with something that’s already been proven to work,'” says Vermette. “It was fun because [Dune] was a project where we were allowed to try.”