Even though Dune: Part Two is a continuation of the story told in the first Dune, the sound had to stand on its own, says supervising sound editor Richard King, nominated for an Oscar for the film.
That’s not to say that no elements of the sound used in the first part carried over to the second. What really worked for director Denis Villeneuve, says King, were the sounds of the thumpers (used to summon the sandworms) and the ornithopters (the helicopters), so those were reused in Part Two. But King didn’t inherit a library of sounds.
“This is a different film, and much more of this film takes place on Arrakis than Part One,” King says. “Denis wanted that world elaborated upon, but there’s new machinery, new weapons, and the worms are much more than they were in the first, so a sonic sense of the worms had to be created.”
The worms don’t vocalize, per se, says King. Instead, sounds were created by their interaction with the earth. “I just imagined these giant, skyscraper-size animals driving through the desert at highway speeds and what that would sound like,” says King. “It was really fun to create these massive soundscapes using lots of sand grinding but also grinding metal and anything to match the scale of the photography and visual effects.”
One of the film’s most cinematic moments (and also one of its most complex scenes to shoot, taking 44 days) involved Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) riding a sandworm. It took the entire production team to collaborate on the sequence, including King and his sound department.
“I wanted to make the audience feel like what that experience might be like,” explains King. “The fun of my job is putting myself vicariously in these situations. We knew it had to be super impactful and achieve the scale that Denis wanted. But it also needed to have dynamics. So we needed to have moments of relative calm and then a blast of sand as the worm appears.”
The worm materializes in the distance with a large boom (“Imagine hearing a volcano exploding 100 miles away; that would really convey the scale of that event”) and the noise becomes more and more intense as it draws closer. King used the sounds of rockets, trains, explosions and grinding metal to convey the enormity of the moment.
In Part Two, the action also travels to the Harkonnen planet, Giedi Prime. In one scene, Austin Butler’s Feyd-Rautha fights an Atreides warrior in an epic arena, shot beautifully using infrared lighting. For the arena, they used a loop group, and King hired numerous actors for the chant sounds. Additionally, ADR supervisor Martin Kwok found heavy metal and punk singers who he says “could be very uninhibited in their vocalizations. Imagine this planet of raving, bloodthirsty lunatics, so they couldn’t be cheering — they had to be screaming like madmen.”
“That scene was interesting to mix because there also had to be lulls. Doug Hemphill, the effects mixer, made a very bold choice,” he says of the moment when Feyd-Rautha whispers, “You fought well, Atreides,” to the fallen soldier. “He chose to take out the crowds of that moment and make a little bubble around Feyd-Rautha and his victim, creating a moment where it’s just the two of them and it’s almost like you’re in his head. Then he stabs his victim, and then the crowd comes roaring back.”
The film was filled with challenges, says King, but the most difficult task was creating all the varieties of wind in the desert. “It really became like composing music because every scene, we see people’s clothes flapping and we see a degree of sand blowing in the wind.”
King and his team sent a recordist to the Sahara Desert for a couple of weeks to gather a library of winds from “dead calm to violent sandstorms. We had fun creating sounds for the couple of night scenes where there’s no wind, creating odd animal [sounds]. Sounds like reptiles or birds, but modifying them to make them sound spooky and otherworldly.”
This story first appeared in a February stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.