You kept tabs on Dune from the moment it was announced – what piqued your interest?
Working with great directors is the biggest priority for me. To have a director like Denis, who’s in the prime of his career, working on a project of this size, in addition to the source material being so influential, and then the role within that of Paul Atreides being something so fun to wrestle with – this great, terrible purpose that he feels – it all made Dune the most desirable project to work on.
Paul is a skilled fighter, what training was involved for you?
I was really excited to get into that. I trained with Roger Yuan, starting in LA, a wonderful fight coordinator on the movie. I was shooting in Angoulême in France for the Wes Anderson film. He came there with his stunt team. We’d do these stunt training sessions in the abandoned wine cellar of this hotel, at the bottom of the town. I still have those videos.
Paul is a character with the weight of a world on his shoulders. Could you relate?
There’s wonderful common lessons in the coming of age of Paul, and wrestling with what it is to become an adult in times of global uncertainty. But also what it means to step into your family name. What becomes of Paul, and what’s asked of him, he becomes so much more than that. But I think his beginning circumstances are entirely relatable.
Zendaya’s Chani is only in Part One briefly, but will have a much larger presence in Part Two. Have you talked about what’s to come?
Yes, absolutely. In this chapter of the story, the responsibility was to be anonymous to each other, in some sense, because the characters are meeting, and they’re simply at the onset of their journey. Zendaya is just so amazing in this movie. It was just an awesome thing to go on this journey with her, on the other side of the world.
Has Dune given you a taste for working at this scale in the future?
If it got to be on this creative level, I’d be open to it, but I think I got spoiled working with Denis on this! Thanks to Denis’ directing style, the incredible openness on set, the high level of production design and the limited use of CGI, these were all things that made a movie of this size feel like such a beautiful, intimate experience.
