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A sound engineer throws sand to demonstrate how sounds were made for the movie “Dune,” in California’s Death Valley National Park on March 8, 2022. (Peter Fisher/The New York Times)
“Duna” is made up of details and Denis Villeneuve knows almost all of them. The French-Canadian filmmaker grew up obsessed with Frank Herbert’s best-selling sci-fi novel and has spent the last few years of his life adapting that 1965 book into a fledgling film franchise. The first installment was released in October and the second will start shooting later this year, so if there’s anything you want to know regarding the inner workings of “Duna”, you have to ask Villeneuve.
However, last week in Malibu, California, while looking amusedly at a blue cereal box, Villeneuve admitted that he had missed a key detail so far.
“I just found out that the Rice Krispies made an appearance on ‘Duna,’” he said.
We were out on Zuma Beach on one of those balmy March followingnoons New York readers would surely prefer I didn’t delve into, and Villeneuve’s Oscar-nominated sound editors Mark Mangini and Theo Green were nearby, pouring cereal into the sand. They didn’t do it to feed the seagulls; Mangini and Green wanted to showcase the sound-gathering techniques they used to set Arrakis, the desert planet where “Dune” hero Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) discovers his fate.
“One of the most striking images in the film is when Paul first sets foot on the planet,” explained Mangini. As the sand of Arrakis is infused with “spice”, a valuable and hallucinogenic substance, the sound designers had to find an audible way to convey that there was something special under their feet.
To explain it to me, Mangini buried his work boot in an area of soft sand where he had sprinkled Rice Krispies. The sand made a subtle, seductive crunch, and Villeneuve smiled broadly. Although he had heard it many times in post production, he had no idea what the sound designers had come up with to capture that sound.
“One of the things I love regarding film is the crossover between NASA-type technology and duct tape,” Villeneuve said. “Using a very expensive microphone to record Rice Krispies, that really moves me!”
“Duna” is full of those clever and secret sounds, almost all of which come from real life: Of the 3,200 sounds created exclusively for the film, only four were made with nothing but electronic equipment and synthesizers. Green pointed out that in many science fiction and fantasy films there is a tendency to indicate futurism with sounds that we have never heard before.
“But Denis’s vision was for this film to feel as familiar as certain parts of planet Earth,” Green noted. “We are not putting you in a science fiction movie, but in a documentary regarding the inhabitants of Arrakis.”
To achieve this, Green and Mangini made an initial expedition to Death Valley to collect natural sounds that might later be used for the film’s sound palette. “When an audience hears a sound, there’s a subconscious box that gets checked and says, this is realMangini said, but within that reality, Mangini isn’t afraid to push things to the limit: While working on “Mad Max: Fury Road,” for which he won an Oscar, Mangini mixed the sounds of dying animals into the most fantastic car crash of the movie.
For another “Duna” demo, he started burying a small microphone in the sand. “This is an underwater microphone, a hydrophone,” Mangini explained. “It’s the kind of thing that is usually submerged in the ocean to record a humpback whale, but we found another way to use it.”
In “Dune,” the characters use a device called a “thumper” to beat the sand rhythmically and summon huge sandworms. To get that sound, Mangini and Green buried their hydrophone at different depths in Death Valley, then used a sledgehammer to hit the sand above the buried microphone.
“We also recorded it above ground to get the real impact sound,” Mangini said, demonstrating his method for me with a few hard slams in the sand on Zuma Beach. “Each one of these blows is the ta-tun of the ‘thumper’, as seen in the film”.
Green and Mangini worked with Villeneuve on his previous film, “Blade Runner 2049,” and the director brought them both on board as soon as he secured the rights to Herbert’s novel, rather than wait until post-production, as is more common.
“I wanted Theo and Mark to have the time to investigate and explore and make mistakes,” Villeneuve said. “It’s something that traumatized me a lot with my first films, where you spend years working on a script, then months shooting and editing, and right at the end the sound technician comes and you barely have enough time.”
By hiring his sound designers in advance and giving them free rein, Villeneuve was even able to take some of his discoveries and integrate them into Hans Zimmer’s score, resulting in a holistic listening experience where percussive music composition and design omnipresent sound can sometimes be confused with each other.
“Hans accepted it, he wasn’t afraid of it,” Villeneuve said. “It works because it’s like a band.”
Like a band, the sounds of “Duna” benefited from some interesting vocalists. To create the Voice, a persuasive way of speaking that allows Paul and his mother (Rebecca Ferguson) to draw on the power of their female ancestors (a sisterhood of witches called the Bene Gesserit), Villeneuve and his sound team chose three women. older with deep, commanding voices, and then layered their dialogue on top of Chalamet and Ferguson’s.
One of those women turned out to be British singer Marianne Faithfull, whose raspy voice is one of the most recognizable in rock and roll. Listen carefully when the characters use the Voice and you may hear the 75-year-old Faithfull mutter, “Kill him!” This choice turned out to be more apt than Villeneuve might have anticipated: Faithfull told the director that in the 1960s she was good friends with Charlotte Rampling, who plays the most fearsome emissary of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood.
“Were they walking the streets of London at the age of 20?” Villeneuve asked. “They were killers!”
As Villeneuve and his sound designers traded stories, I mentioned the Oscars, where “Duna” is nominated in ten categories. (Mangini and Green share their nomination with Mac Ruth, Doug Hemphill and Ron Bartlett.) Five of those categories (sound, soundtrack, editing, production design, and makeup and hair) will be presented alongside the three short film categories in the hour leading up to the live show, then edited into a short montage that will be incorporated into the broadcast.
The reason is that those categories don’t excite enough interest in the casual viewer, something Mangini countered by leaning into my tape recorder to mimic a cat’s purr, one of several sounds, including the wings of a Hungarian beetle, mixed to create the sonic identity of the ornithopter plane in “Duna”.
“I think that’s pretty interesting for television,” he said.
Villeneuve agreed: “Sound is one of the tools that still makes going to the movies worthwhile,” and it’s the first thing on his mind as he completes the script for the sequel, which promises to take Paul into an even deeper realm of sound. eccentric: “The only thing I can say regarding ‘Duna 2,'” Villeneuve concluded, “is that it’s as much regarding the sound as it is regarding the visuals.”
