PATRICE VERMETTE, DUNE

The production design for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune naturally took its cues from Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel. “What’s interesting about the book is you can have multiple interpretations because it doesn’t dictate what things should be, but it gives a lot of clues of how things could look,” says production designer Patrice Vermette. “Denis also encouraged us to think about the ecology.”

Take, for example, the city of Arrakeen on Arrakis. “In the book, the wind goes at 850 kilometers an hour. That influenced the design. Everything was at an angle, for the wind to sweep over the buildings. … and the walls are so thick because the book says it’s a planet where there’s so much heat and sun. By making the walls super thick, it creates some coolness inside, just like in a cave.”

He adds that the scale of the city also stems from the book, “which says that it’s the biggest residency ever built by humankind. … also brutalism is a response to that, within the size and the scope and the scale of everything in that city. It’s a response as a colonial entity that took over the planet for the exploitation of a natural resource, the spice. … They built those mega-structures to impose on the local population that ‘here we are, this is us.’ ”

With sand worms in the harsh desert, Vermette notes that the city would have been constructed where there’s protection, and so it was “built in a rock bowl because the sand worms cannot reach it.”

The texture of the sand worm, the production designer says, is based on tree bark and dry mud flats to support the story, as there’s no water. And in the novel, “It was a creature that commanded respect, and it’s almost seen as a deity in the world of the Fremen. So that’s why the first time you see the depiction of the sand worm on the mural, it’s presented with sun coming out of its mouth.

“Instead of putting big teeth on it and making it like a big monster, I was inspired by whales’ teeth,” he adds, reasoning that in the desert, the sand worms might get their nutriments in the sand, as a whale filters phytoplankton from the ocean.

Patrice Vermette (left) took inspiration from whales’ teeth and dry mud flats (above) for Dune’s sandworms. Right: Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides in the Warner Bros. sci-fi epic, directed by Denis Villeneuve.