The secret sounds of “Dune”
Listen for Rice Krispies and Marianne Faithfull
“Dune” is in the details, and Denis Villeneuve knows nearly all of them. The French Canadian filmmaker grew up obsessed with Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi novel and has spent the past few years of his life adapting that 1965 book into a budding film franchise. The first installment came out in October and the second one will begin shooting later this year, so if there’s anything you want to know about the inner workings of “Dune,” Villeneuve is the man to ask.
But in March in Malibu, Calif., as he regarded a blue cereal box with evident amusement, Villeneuve admitted that one key detail had eluded him until now.
“I’m learning today there were Rice Krispies in ‘Dune,’ ” he said.
We were at Zuma Beach, and Villeneuve’s Oscar-nominated sound editors Mark Mangini and Theo Green were nearby, pouring cereal into the sand. This wasn’t meant to provoke any sea gulls; Mangini and Green wanted to demonstrate the sound-gathering techniques they used to enliven Arrakis, the desert planet where “Dune” hero Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) discovers his destiny.
“One of the most compelling images in the film is when Paul first steps foot onto the planet,” Mangini said. Since the sand on Arrakis is laced with “spice,” a valuable and hallucinogenic substance, the sound designers had to find an audible way to convey that something special was underfoot.
By way of explaining it to me, Mangini ground his work boot into the soft patch of sand that he had dusted with Rice
Krispies. The sand produced a subtle, beguiling crunch, and Villeneuve broke out into a big smile. Though he’d heard it plenty of times in postproduction, he had no idea what the sound designers had concocted to capture that sound.
“One of the things I love about cinema is the cross between NASA kind of technology and gaffer tape,” Villeneuve said. “To use a super-expensive mic to record Rice Krispies — that deeply moves me!”
“Dune” — which won six Oscars at the Academy Awards, for sound and visual effects, among others — is full of those clever,
secret noises, nearly all of which are derived from real life: Of the 3,200 bespoke sounds created for the movie, only four were made solely with electronic equipment and synthesizers. Green noted that with many science-fiction and fantasy films, there is a tendency to indicate futurism by using sounds that we’ve never heard before.
“But it was very much Denis’ vision that this movie should feel every bit as familiar as certain areas of planet Earth,” Green said. “We’re not putting you in a sci-fi movie, we’re putting you in a documentary about people on Arrakis.”
To that end, Green and Mangini made an early expedition into Death Valley to collect natural
noises that could be used later for the film’s sonic palette. “When an audience hears acoustic sound, there’s a subconscious box that gets checked that says, this is real,” Mangini said. But within that reality, Mangini isn’t afraid to push things a bit: While working on “Mad Max: Fury Road,” for which he won an Oscar, Mangini mixed the sounds of dying animals into the crash of the movie’s most formidable vehicle.
For another “Dune” demonstration, he began to bury a small nub of a microphone in the sand. “This is an underwater microphone, a hydrophone,” Mangini explained. “It’s the sort of thing you’d usually drop in the ocean to record a humpback whale, but we found another way to use it.”
In “Dune,” the characters use a staked device called a thumper to rhythmically pound the sand and summon massive sandworms. To get that sound, Mangini and Green buried their hydrophone at different depths in Death Valley, then used a mallet to whack the sand above the buried mic.
“We’d also record it above ground to get the actual sound of the impact,” Mangini said, demonstrating his method for me with a few sharp thwacks into the Zuma Beach sand. “Each one of these hits is the ka-dunk of the thumper, as you see it in the film.”
Green and Mangini worked with Villeneuve on his previous film, “Blade Runner 2049,” and the director brought them both on board as soon as he nabbed the rights to Herbert’s novel, instead of waiting until postproduction, as is more customary.
“I wanted Theo and Mark to have the proper time to investigate and explore and make mistakes,” Villeneuve said. “It’s something I got really traumatized by with my early movies, where you spend years working on a screenplay, then months shooting and editing it, and then right at the end, the sound guy comes and you barely have enough time.”
By hiring his sound designers early and setting them loose, Villeneuve could even take some of their discoveries and weave them into Hans Zimmer’s score, producing a holistic aural experience where the percussive music composition and pervasive sound design can sometimes be mistaken for one another.
“Hans embraced that, he was not afraid of that,” Villeneuve said. “It works because it’s like a band.”
And much like a band, the sounds of “Dune” benefited from some intriguing vocalists. To create the Voice, a persuasive way of speaking that allows Paul and his mother (Rebecca Ferguson) to draw on the power of their female ancestors — a witchy order called the Bene Gesserit — Villeneuve and his sound team cast three older women with smoky, commanding voices, then layered their line readings over those of Chalamet and Ferguson.
One of those women just so happened to be British singer Marianne Faithfull, whose whiskey-soaked voice is one of the most recognizable in rock ’n’ roll. Listen closely when the characters use the Voice and you might just hear the 75-year-old Faithfull hissing, “Kill him!” That bit of casting proved more right on than Villeneuve could have anticipated: Faithfull told the director that in the 1960s, she was fast friends with Charlotte Rampling, who plays the movie’s most fearsome emissary of the Bene Gesserit.
“At 20 years old, in the streets of London?” Villeneuve said. “They were killers!”
While Villeneuve and his sound designers traded stories, I mentioned the Oscars, where “Dune” was nominated in 10 categories. (Mangini and Green are shared their nomination with Mac Ruth, Doug Hemphill and Ron Bartlett.) Five of those races — sound, score, editing, production design, and hair and makeup — were presented with the three short-film categories in the hour before the live show, then edited into the broadcast in some shortened form.
The implication is that those races weren’t interesting enough to compel a casual viewer, which Mangini disproved by leaning into my recorder to mimic a cat’s purr — one of several noises, including a Hungarian beetle’s flapping wings, that were blended together to create sounds for the ornithopter aircraft in “Dune.”
“Sound is one of the tools that still makes the theatrical experience worth going for,” Villeneuve said.
“The only thing I can say about ‘Dune 2,’ ” he continued, “is that it’s as much about sound as about images.”