“I’m choosing the scene introducing Feyd [played by Austin Butler] in the gladiator arena, in front of his uncle Baron Harkonnen [Stellan Skarsgård] and thousands of adoring fans.
It was very important to Denis that the exterior of Gedi Prime had very different feel from Arrakis. His brilliant initial idea was that the sun in Gedi Prime doesn’t emit the same color waves that it does on Arrakis, thus helping propel the story forward about why the Harkonnen look the way they do: very pale, hairless, et cetera. It was almost like it emits an ‘anti-light,’ as is exhibited in the corridor scene later where the fireworks feel like they work in a negative,” Fraser said.
“Denis talked to me initially about this being black-and-white, and we agreed that whilst black-and-white is appropriate for the story, it could potentially look a little bit like older movies. So I asked him to give me a couple of days to test a technique that I’ve been playing with for the last decade–since my days as student photographer in Melbourne, and then subsequently on Zero Dark Thirty.
The idea was to harness a spectrum of light that film cameras and digital cameras are designed not to see.
That spectrum is infrared. We’ve all seen infrared security cameras and infrared lights that glow that very faint red light, but what we may not know is that when we’re outside on a sunny day, we are surrounded by infrared. Our eyes have not evolved well enough to be able to see that spectrum of light, despite some animals being able to see it.
“The benefit of us being able to shoot with our normal cameras but modify them to be able to see only infrared (and no visible light) it gives a dream-like but incredibly harsh quality to these characters, who already, from a design perspective, are unusual and abnormal. Ultimately, we were able to get some incredibly unexpected results, with skin tone becoming almost translucent.
There is an introduction of the Bene Gesserit sisters in their viewing box where they start walking from artificial light; they’re in black robes, but as they transition into the sunlight, their costumes go white. This unexpected result is what occurred in our early tests with Feyd, so the costume department needed to backtrack and make sure that all of their materials were giving the desired tones.
“Denis and I did definitely ask ourselves, ‘Is this something we were certain we wanted?’ Because there was no going back from this technique once we committed. It’s one thing to shoot black-and-white, but it is another thing entirely to shoot your introduction of a key character in your story in a way that has not been done before ever in film. We both agreed that, emotionally, it was 100 percent correct and we were both blown away by the tests. Therefore, any doubt or insecurity that we had that this was potentially not the correct way to introduce Feyd was very quickly put by the wayside.”
Oscar Movies: Dune: Part Two–Best Picture Nominee, including Cinematography
“Dune: Part Two”
Scene: Feyd in Gladiator Arena
“I’m choosing the scene introducing Feyd [played by Austin Butler] in the gladiator arena, in front of his uncle Baron Harkonnen [Stellan Skarsgård] and thousands of adoring fans.
It was very important to Denis that the exterior of Gedi Prime had very different feel from Arrakis. His brilliant initial idea was that the sun in Gedi Prime doesn’t emit the same color waves that it does on Arrakis, thus helping propel the story forward about why the Harkonnen look the way they do: very pale, hairless, et cetera. It was almost like it emits an ‘anti-light,’ as is exhibited in the corridor scene later where the fireworks feel like they work in a negative,” Fraser said.
“The benefit of us being able to shoot with our normal cameras but modify them to be able to see only infrared (and no visible light) it gives a dream-like but incredibly harsh quality to these characters, who already, from a design perspective, are unusual and abnormal. Ultimately, we were able to get some incredibly unexpected results, with skin tone becoming almost translucent.
There is an introduction of the Bene Gesserit sisters in their viewing box where they start walking from artificial light; they’re in black robes, but as they transition into the sunlight, their costumes go white. This unexpected result is what occurred in our early tests with Feyd, so the costume department needed to backtrack and make sure that all of their materials were giving the desired tones.