"What The Heck Is That": Dune 2's Black & White Planet Initially Scared Warner Bros.
"What The Heck Is That": Dune 2's Black & White Planet Initially Scared Warner Bros.
"...we followed the heart, not the head..."
Though one of the more visually standout moments in the sequel, cinematographer Greig Fraser reveals that Dune: Part Two's black and white planet initially scared Warner Bros. Adapting the second half of Frank Herbert's sci-fi epic novel, the movie introduced the ruthless Harkonnen warrior Feyd-Rautha with a sequence set on his home planet of Giede Prime, in which he's seen battling Roger Yuan's Lieutenant Lanville in a gladiator arena. Unlike the rest of the movie, Fraser and director Denis Villeneuve set the entire sequence in black-and-white, giving a striking introduction to Feyd-Rautha in the sequel.
During a recent interview with Screen Rant for the movie's home release, Greig Fraser reflected on the creation process of Dune: Part Two's black and white planet sequence. When asked what the biggest challenge was in the Giede Prime scene, the cinematographer recalled that it was the initial pushback from Warner Bros. over this appearance, namely as it was the first one the team shot on stage and left the studio asking about potential changes, only for Fraser and Villeneuve to stick to their guns and "followed the heart, not the head". Check out what Fraser explained below:
Greig Fraser: For us, that was the first shoot that we were doing onstage, that was the first thing we were going to be shooting for the main photography. So, we did a bit of pre-shooting in Italy with Florence and Charlotte, we had done a couple of days pre-shooting, but this is the first real shoot that we were gonna be doing onstage that was going to be shown to the studio. It was a bit of a bold step that we decided to shoot in this format, because the worry was that, effectively, people who were not there would watch this footage and go, "What the heck is that?"
Suddenly, we're on phone calls going, "Can we fix that? Can we fix it in post? Can we add color? How do we resolve this?" But we made a choice and just went, "Well, we've made a choice. It's black and white, no color, we can't make it color. There's no way back. We've made a choice, and we're going one way." So that, for me, was probably the biggest — I wouldn't say challenge, the biggest consideration, where we had no way home.
All those choices that you make on a movie, you can kind of braid your way out of it, you can resolve it back color wise, or you can cut your way out of it. This left us exposed, figuratively and literally, where there's no way we could change this later if we decided that was a bad idea. So, we just went for it.
I am [glad we stuck to our guns], too. I am too, because there was a period of time where maybe we weren't going to do that. Instincts are a funny thing, because your heart says something, and then your brain says something else, and our brains both were going, "We shouldn't be doing this," but our hearts were like, "We got to do this." So yes, I think you're right, we followed the heart, not the head.
And it really worked well - when it cuts to B&W it's striking and what they did with it is visually stunning.
It really did. The fireworks effect was a really nice touch.
Not just "black and white", wasn't it infrared film?
Fraser shot the Giedi Prime scenes on an Alexa LF, a digital camera that Fraser and his team modified by playing with its filters until it could only see infrared. “It doesn’t see any visible light,” Fraser says. “The sun puts out a lot of infrared, as we know. That’s what creates life on this planet, the heat from the sun and the infrared. What it does too is it creates a really amazing effect on skin tone.”
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When inside or in the shade, characters are lit by artificial light, Fraser explains. To achieve transitions, such as when Léa Seydoux’s Lady Margot Fenring emerges from the shade into the sun during the gladiator fight, Fraser had to shoot on a 3D rig.
“We had a 3D rig, which normally is used to make 3D films, but on one camera was a color camera, and the other camera was the infrared camera,” Fraser says. “And so we made sure we had lights that put out infrared for the infrared camera, and we had lights that the infrared camera couldn’t see, which were LEDs that put out visible light but don’t have infrared light. We had to have two different types of light sources on set that each camera could see separately and see differently.”
A lot of extra work and planning but it paid off.
Thats so cool
That makes the scene for me. "Just" black and white would have communicated certain things, but it wouldn't have been the intentional uncanny valley that starting from IR was. These two movies aren't perfect, but like LOTR, they may be very nearly the best possible adaptations that will appeal to a large audience.
I also love that they used some science with a small bit of handwavium to make it work, the black sun's light being shifted more into the infrared spectrum and affecting the visuals as well as what life was left on their planet.