‘Dune 2’ Spent a Month Shooting Deep in Abu Dhabi Desert

‘Dune 2’ Spent a Month Shooting Deep in Abu Dhabi Desert

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For “Dune: Half Two,” Denis Villeneuve delved deep into the Arabian desert and spent virtually a month taking pictures in Abu Dhabi’s Liwa Oasis, which offered a considerable portion of the panorama of the desert planet Arrakis, house to the monstrous sandworms.

Villeneuve praised the placement and companies offered by the Abu Dhabi Movie Fee and UAE-based manufacturing companies firm Epic Movies in a promotional behind-the-scenes video, to which Selection has been given unique entry.

“‘Dune’ is concerning the relationship of people with nature,” Villeneuve says within the promo that additionally options testimonials from Zendaya, Javier Bardem, Rebecca Ferguson and cinematographer Greig Fraser, amongst others.

“It was vital for me to carry that nature to the display screen,” provides the director, in order that the viewers will imagine it “in the event that they really feel that there’s something that feels actual, that feels tactile.”

So after taking pictures for 5 days within the Abu Dhabi desert for “Dune’s” first installment, Villeneuve and your entire solid and crew returned for “Dune: Half Two” and spent 27 days amid Liwa’s towering rolling dunes, a few of that are greater than 600 toes tall, on the sting of Rub’ Al Khali, the world’s largest stretch of uninterrupted desert.

“We had a community of 18 miles of highway main us to completely different places the place we had tents, catering, building cranes, telehandlers and all the pieces,” says government producer Tanya Lapointe.

“It was an enormous endeavor, but it surely was spectacular,” provides Lapointe, who additionally served as second unit director on “Dune: Half Two.”

Legendary Photos additionally benefited from the Abu Dhabi Movie Fee’s (ADFC) beneficiant 30% cashback rebate on manufacturing spend throughout the Emirate.

For onsite manufacturing professionals, “the primary problem for ‘Dune: Half Two’ was the logistics,” line producer Robbie McAree, head of UAE-based Epic Movies — who labored on each “Dune” movies — instructed Selection in an interview on numerous features of the Abu Dhabi portion of the manufacturing.

How difficult was the “Dune: Half Two” shoot out of your perspective?

The primary problem this time round had been the logistics. Denis didn’t need to shoot in the identical places that we had on “Dune: Half One,” so we had been going deeper into the desert, nearer to the Saudi border — it’s such a giant, empty border desert. We’d go discovering new locations as a result of that was certainly one of his major issues: he didn’t need to use the identical location.

How a lot native UAE crew and abilities did you employ?

We used near 300 locally-based crew and contractors on the manufacturing, which is sort of excessive in comparison with roughly 250 worldwide crew who came to visit. So there have been a number of native professionals, which is nice. And even by way of background extras, I believe there have been 500, or near 500, native extras whom we used all through the 27 days. So it was massive by way of native necessities. And we had been capable of work very carefully with not simply the crew and abilities, but in addition with different departments and distributors carefully affiliated with the Abu Dhabi Movie Fee and the Abu Dhabi municipality. We wanted all these bits of help particularly after we had been primarily constructing these roads by way of the desert.

When it comes to lodging, did A-list expertise reminiscent of Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya, really sleep within the desert?

The place we had been filming, clearly it’s near the Qasr Al Sarab Lodge desert resort, which is nice. That was our service level. It’s a tremendous, superb, lodge with nice amenities. So, sure, they had been all there. After all, early on we realized that we had been going to have a problem by way of the quantity of beds. So I form of pitched the thought to the producers — the worldwide producers — of primarily constructing a camp. At first they had been me as if I had three heads. But it surely labored out, and it was an ideal resolution.

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