Dune: Phase Two’s Anti-Gravity Assault Is ‘Height Sci-Fi’ For Cinematographer Greig Fraser [Exclusive]

Within the opening mins of Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two,” Harkonnen hunters are in search of local Fremen warriors at the floor of Arrakis all the way through an eclipse. The hunters temporarily notice the Fremen have referred to as a sandworm to eat them, in order that they have interaction their anti-gravity jet packs and leap off the dunes up onto a excess rock formation to keep away from being eaten. It’s a simple-enough having a look motion — we’ve seen jet packs on screen plenty of times before — however one thing concerning the tangibility of the impact blended with Hans Zimmer’s rating, the barren region location, and the superior orange lights that appears distinct from any alternative a part of the movie led to me to murmur “wow” in my theater seat. Via the week the Harkonnens comprehend it’s a entice and so they’re being picked off one after the other, it’s too overdue.

In honor of nowadays’s loose of the 4K UHD disc of “Dune: Part Two,” I had the vacay of talking with cinematographer Greig Fraser concerning the movie, and I requested him how he completed the glance of this jaw-dropping opening motion series.

“Denis and I were talking about how to open the movie,” Fraser defined. “We talked about doing it at night, we talked about doing it day-for-night, we talked about doing it during the day, and all of those things just didn’t sit well. We just went, ‘This is not —’, I mean, we put ourselves in the audience’s seat and went, ‘OK, we’ve bought the popcorn, we’re drinking the Coca-Cola, come on, you’ve gotta show us what you’ve got, guys.’ We thought, well, if we start the same way that the last one finished, with that look, it felt a little bit, eh, not right.”

“So we were playing with all of those different things, and I found a filter that cuts out a number of light rays,” he persisted. “I’ve been playing with, particularly in Giedi Prime, with infrared and cutting out red, green, and blues, and cutting out different spectrums of light to come up with different looks. That’s effectively what filters do: Filters cut a lot of spectrums of light. But I had a variable filter which took out just enough blue that you could get a little bit of blue in the sky, but it was mostly orange-y or red, and it had the right element of shadow detail. So we chose to use this filter, and we chose to make it deeper and darker as the story went on and as the eclipse became more heavy.”