Released last February, Dune: Part Two is already making a name for itself. as one of the great cinema moments of the year 2024. It must be said that Denis Villeneuve proposed a perfectly mastered large-scale entertainment. We can cite as an example this totally crazy and unique sequence in the landscape of entertainment cinema, which was nevertheless almost cut. during editing by Warner.
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Dune 2: deserved success
On February 28, Denis Villeneuve offered his fans the second part of Dune. Always taken with him by Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya (among others) this blockbuster stands out as one of the big cinema pieces of 2024. An epic, exciting, but also intimate adventure which tells the story of the evolution of an ambiguous hero: Paul Atreides.
The feature film received largely positive feedback from the press and spectators and grossed a lot of money. more than 708 million dollars at the international box office. Logically, Warner should produce a third part, but we do not yet officially know if Denis Villeneuve will come back, even if the Canadian filmmaker seems to be ;be willing to come back a third time.
A crazy sequence that almost got cut
One of the great moments of Dune 2 occurs when Denis Villeneuve decides to set his camera on the planet of strong>Harkonnen. It notably sets up a superb confrontation in a Gladiator-style arena which opposes the terrible Freyd-Rautha Harkonnen, superbly played ; by Austin Butler, àgrave; three Fremen warriors. This sequence takes place in a completely new aesthetic. To materialize the planet of the Harkonnens, Denis Villeneuve uses a kind of splendid black and white, mixed with &àgrave; a magnificent infrared, somewhere between Schindler's List and Sin City. In reality, this unprecedented aesthetic was created. created by cinematographer Greig Fraser, who had already used this technique, on a smaller scale, in Rogue One and in Zero Dark Thirty. Well this totally mind-blowing scene was almost removed. editing by Warner.
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Recently, Greig Fraser rightly explained: at the microphone of ScreenRant, that this sequence generally worried the producers. The latter simply did not understand what they were seeing and feared that the public would remain doubtful:
It was courageous to shoot in this format, because the worry was, indeed, that people were going to see the images, and say to themselves: “What the hell?”. Suddenly, we had calls saying: “Can we fix this? Can we adjust this in post-production? Can we add color?”. But we had made a choice and we just responded: “We made a choice. It's in black and white, not in color, we can't do that with color. We can't “We can't go back. We made this choice.” çThat, for me, çthat was probably the biggest challenge, the biggest reflection, where we couldn't go back.
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A totally crazy sequence, which it was! difficult to do keep. The director of photography for The Batman continues to say:
All the choices we make on a film, we can more or less find a way to go back, we can find a way to remove it during editing, to modify the colors. This scene left us feeling fragile, literally and figuratively, because there was no way to change it forever. posteriori. If it had been A bad idea, nothing could have been changed. But I'm glad we stuck together. Because there was a moment whenù Maybe we weren't going to do it. Instinct is funny, because your heart tells you something, your brain tells you something else, and our logic tells us, “We shouldn't do this.” But we decided to listen to our instinct: “We have to do it”. So yes, we listened to the heart, not the head.
Currently working on The Batman 2, Greig Fraser should also, logically, return to; photography for Dune 3. In any case, fingers crossed!