“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.
My Oscar Book:
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.
