Fear is the mind-killer,” intones Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides in Dune. The hero must use his mind toovercome his fear. It’s a central theme of Frank Herbert’s novel and one that also resonated with Joe Walker, ACE, who is taking on another hallowed science-fiction film after guiding Blade Runner 2049 with director Denis Villeneuve. “Projects that excite me are also projects that frighten me,” he says. “If you’ve nothing to lose, then why do it? It’s hard to make any film, let alone one as visually complex as Denis envisioned with Dune. It had better be something where if we get it right, we set in motion something very special.”

The 1965 novel is filled with myth making on the scale of Lord of the Rings. Like Tolkien’s epic it’s about the battle for power over the empire among warring clans and divided families. It’s a coming-of-age story. It’s a political allegory set thousands of years in thefuture. It has a strong environmental message about the inhospitable desert planet of Arrakis and the preservation of scarce resources.

These ideas and more make the book malleable to interpretation and also famously tricky to conceive on screen. “I loved the book but it’s a daunting prospect,” Walker says. “Not just its scale, but Herbert’s style which is to peer inside the mind of every participant. In film we tend to relish strong identification with one central character so it’s challenging to translate. But Herbert’s crazy inventiveness, his deeply human themes and his strong environmental perspective are all beautifully embraced in this adaptation.” Tackling Dune has been an ambition of Villeneuve’s for some time. His version written with Eric Roth is produced for Warner Bros. with a cast including Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin and Stellan Skarsgård. Rather than attempt to fit everything in the novel into one film, Dune is divided into two parts with a filmed sequel tackling the second half the book currently in pre-production.

In 2019 when Walker joined the production on location at Origo Film Studios in Budapest (familiar as the same studio base for Blade Runner 2049) Villeneuve with production designer Patrice Vermette and storyboard artist Sam Hudecki had developed the film’s visual concepts.

Walker’s first task was to work on a couple of previs sequences and liaise with the VFX team at DNEG. Sometimes that meant filming Villeneuve with an iPhone illustrating by gestures his conception for the ‘Carryall,’ which is an aircraft used to transport spice mining and hunting equipment. “Showing even a [basic] iPhone video can convey an idea better than a briefing document,” he says. “Dune is a huge world and the book can afford to spend many chapters setting it all up. In a film you’ve got to grab the audience in the first reel.

You can’t become a library of how the whole Dune Universe works. It’s hugely complicated with different factions and extraordinary concepts like Melange (the valuable spice which conveys superhuman powers) and Mentats (a human computer). Our aim in the opening scenes is to mete out the exposition of the story without ramming it down people’s throats.” What was most important for the audience to understand were the dynamics of the story’s key characters. None more so than Paul who is a combination of many elements. Explains Walker, “He bears the lineage of his mother Jessica (Ferguson) representing the Bene Gesserit, a mystical, powerful, shadowy organization and his father’s (Isaac) lineage of leadership and responsibility and influence within the larger empire. Paul also has Mentat abilities and looks up to Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa).”

To Walker, the key to conveying the drama was to convey these factional attachments and emotions and to find the film’s rhythm. He picks out an early scene as a model of their approach.  “The Gom Jabbar sequence was for me an opportunity to dig into rhythm in a massive way,” he says. Gom Jabbar causes blinding pain as part of an assessment of a person’s ability to control mind over matter. In the scene, Charlotte Rampling’s Reverend Mother Mohiam – a mother superior figure – takes Paul into a room. Paul is told by his mother to do whatever ” she says. Reverend Mother tells him to place his hand inside a box. The moment he does so she puts a needle to his neck, telling him that if he removes his hand it will be his instant death.

The experience awakens the ‘Kwisatz Haderach’ inside of him. This is a mythical entity that combines the ability to predict the future (a skill of the space navigator) with the ability to dig deep into the past (which is a skill of the Bene Gesserit). Walker explains, “We’re intercutting a young man facing a sadistic witch, while his mother is helpless to do anything about his suffering. At the same time, we develop an inner landscape for

Paul’s mind, to see what is being awoken inside. It’s something we kept tinkering with right up to the last day, some 20 months later.” The key to the scene was found in a chant that Hans Zimmer had recorded with singer Loire Cotler. It became one of the
film’s emblematic sounds. “Only after six months with the scene did we begin to ‘cut’ inside his mind. For us, Loire’s chant came to represent the Kwisatz Haderach, a little fire ignited in his mind. And it soon became an anchor throughout the whole film.”

Walker also says the way he cut the scene is “a little homage”to Hank Corwin, ACE (Vice). “I love his style. His ballsiness is a great influence on me,” he says. Walker began his career as a composer and continues to place great emphasis on sound as part of his process.

“Dune is rhythmic to a crazy degree. The way I cut is always driven by sound and sound editors Theo Green and Mark Mangini worked closely with me to help find the rhythm. You can’t get the sound of a sandworm off the peg. There is no Shai-Hulud sound effect in a commercial library!”

The worm chase, for example, is all shot from the back of a dune buggy with a jib arm. Not much on location that a sound mixer could capture. Walker says Green would help develop the pacing of the scene by creating temp sound effects for the characters’ desperate running and breathing, all the time honing the sound of the worm decimating vast amounts of sand. “That process of tossing ideas back and forth between us carried on all the way through the edit.”

Location work including shoots on the dunes of the UAE, the Wadi Rum valley in Jordan and in Norway. Walker says filming on location, as opposed to a virtual soundstage, lent the material a grittiness and scale unachievable with virtual sets. “Even the dryness of the desert air the actors were breathing helped the authenticity of their performance,” he says. “The sets in Hungary were vast.

Patrice really nailed the oppressive weight of the palace structures. You feel the burden of stone above you.” This is Walker’s fourth collaboration with Villeneuve. It’s a working relationship that’s become friendship. Walker says their families spent a recent Christmas together. “I am a huge fan of what he is doing and I am there to help him realize his ideas,” Walker says. “Denis is writing Dune 2 and he says he can hear my voice in his head saying, ‘I’d cut that bit,’ or, ‘I’d keep that in,’ which I get a kick out of. What’s great about working with Denis is that he celebrates things that work and doesn’t carry on aimlessly trying to find something different.

When he’s got what he wants he protects it.” A case in point is the final scene, a fight between Jamis and Paul, which has barely been altered from the day after Walker cut it. “Every other sequence can get worked to oblivion but it just gives me enormous pride that this one we got right from the outset. I might offer him a different version just for comparison but he’ll say, ‘No way do I want to change it.’ Denis just makes you feel your work is very valued.”