Where was Dune filmed? Explanations for each major location

It’s hard to imagine where Denis Villeneuve was starting when he first tackled Frank Herbert’s adaptation of Dune that it deserved. The supposedly “unremovable” book lived up to its reputation many times before the French Canadian director came to it. David Lynch’s Dune had many mistakeseven if it has many defenders and Sci-Fi Channel shows will never be able to provide the spectacle necessary for a truly effective adaptation. For now all adaptations of “Dune”. they had their own charms, so none of them ever felt like they fulfilled the cinematic promise of Herbert’s novel.

Finally fulfilling that promise is just one of the reasons Villeneuve’s two Dune films are as impressive. But for the director, deciding where to film this galaxy-spanning epic must have been a dizzying experience. The book is mostly set on the planet Arakis, with brief excursions to the planet Harkanen, Giedi Prime, and the House Atreides homeworld of Caladan. But even if it all took place on the arid desert plains of Arrakis, that would be a difficult enough task in itself. After all, how do you make two nearly three-hour movies seem varied and interesting when so many scenes take place on sand, sand dunes, and more sand?

The way Villeneuve and his team answered this question is fascinating in itself, using many deserts throughout the Middle East as stand-ins for Arrakis. But there was much more to the world-building of Dunes and Dunes: Part Two. Here are all the filming locations used to create the epic grandeur of Villeneuve’s two films.

The Dune begins with the Atreides family still on their home planet of Caladan, a lush oceanic homeland characterized by rolling green hills, vast seas, and frequent rainfall. For now Atreides Castle on Culloden was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s real-life house Fallingwater in Pennsylvania, the outdoor scenes were filmed in and around Norway, making it the perfect location for the green, rain-drenched world of the Atreides.

Production designer Patrice Vermette said Cinematographer that it was important to him that Culloden had a “sense of melancholy” and evoked the Canadian autumn season with “hazy, overcast skies” and “dramatic coastal mountain ranges and cliffs”. Norway became the perfect location for such “melancholy”, with its sparsely populated island of Keen, off the west coast of the country, replacing the scenes where Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides walks alone along the coastline before leaving for Arakis.

Stadlandet was also used for Caladan in Dune. The peninsula separates the Norwegian and North Seas and is located in the west of the country. Elsewhere, the crew also used Drage on the coast of Norway for scenes in the Atreides homeland.

Dune and its sequel were filmed in two real-life deserts that were simultaneously different locations on Arrakis, an unforgiving desert planet that is the sole source of a mysterious and powerful spice that makes interstellar travel possible. The exploration of these various locations resulted in Denis Villeneuve and his team suffering from sand traumaand production designer Patrice Vermette has to carry around bottles of sand to match the grains between each point.

In Jordan, the crew made heavy use of Wadi Rum (Valley of the Moon), a protected area in the south of the country near the border with Saudi Arabia. The area is full of gorges, arches, cliffs and caves, and these rocky features were ideal for the Sitcheu Freemen (small cave-dwelling communities). This real desert has already entered the history of Hollywood long before “Dune”, appeared in the 1962 films Lawrence of Arabia, Ridley Scott’s The Martian, and the Star Wars franchise.

Jordan’s Wadi Araba also became an important location for the Dune films, Vermette said Condé Nast Traveler that both locations were chosen because of “amazing choices in rock formation,” adding: “There’s just a presence, an aura. You feel very, very, very small in the universe when you’re there, and just the sound of the wind between those rocks is just breathtaking.”

While Jordan created a unique and inviting aura, Denis Villeneuve and his team also needed somewhere with impressive sand dunes for the other scenes set on Arakis. Patrice Vermette told Condé Nast Traveler that the film crew “tried to find a place with 360-degree dunes” before narrowing down their choices to Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Morocco. “As soon as we explored the desert in Abu Dhabi, we thought this was the place,” he recalls.

While filming in Abu Dhabi, the Dunes crew stayed at a resort called Qasr Al Sarab, located in the heart of the Hamim desert. This allowed the production to stay very close to the location, capturing the magnificent and expansive landscapes of Abu Dhabi’s Liwa Oasis and the Rub’ al-Khali desert, or desert.

Of course, the pictures were taken on location keeping track off-screen in the Dune movies is a living nightmare for the crew. But the sweeping shots of Abu Dhabi’s dunes were undoubtedly worth it when it came to bringing Arakis to life.

Surprisingly, these were not two large deserts “Dune” crew passes left and right. According to Fade Rauta star Austin Butler, two of Denis Villeneuve’s films were shot on the back lot of Budapest’s Origo Studios, where at one point the temperature reached 110 degrees, causing crew members to pass out from heatstroke.

Fortunately, Origo Studios wasn’t just one giant furnace. This allowed the film crew to shoot several scenes, incl a big stadium fight where Feyd Rauta faced off against several opponents on the Harkanen homeworld, Giedi Prime. Much of this fight was actually filmed in a converted parking lot between sound stages, but Villeneuve and cinematographer Graig Fraser also used video game technology to fill out the scene.

Otherwise, Budapest was used to film many of the interior scenes in the Dune films, as Patrice Vermette explains Cinematographer that Origo Studios was the “home base” of the production. The interior scenes of the Ornithopters were shot in the studio, along with many shots of the Harkonnen attack on the city of Arrakis, Arakin. Vermette also told Condé Nast Traveler that Origo was used to erect several elements of the actual set due to Villeneuve’s determination to avoid green screen:

“Denis’s job was to create as immersive an environment as possible for him and the actors – so we weren’t allowed to use green screen. So we actually used this huge open space between the soundstages at Origo Studio (in Budapest) and we built up to 20 feet of real set pieces—like part of a round room—and then we made the fabric to create the space by setting the lines between the stages made of metal And we just covered the ground with sand – and we had to keep covering because it was the rainy season in Budapest.”

While many of the interior locations were shot on sound stages in Budapest, “Dune: Part Two” was actually shot on location in an Italian nature reserve that previously did not allow film production on location. The emperor’s palace on the planet Kaiten was actually filmed at the Brion Sanctuary, the extravagant burial place of the Brion family (who founded the Italian electronics company Brionvega), located an hour’s drive from Venice. Designed by Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa between 1968 and 1978, the building and its surrounding gardens became the perfect palace for King Christopher Walken, Emperor Shadam Karin IV and Princess Irulan Florence Pugh.

The book “The Art and Soul of Dune: Part Two”, details the Dunes: Part 2 scenario as a “luxurious imperial garden” where Princess Irulan could be introduced. This began “a worldwide search for locations that fit this description but also offered the otherworldly qualities of a planet set in the distant future.” While real locations in Mexico, France, Brazil and Japan were considered, Brion’s shrine and tomb provided everything the script required, with what the book called its “large circular doorways and brutal shapes and textures.”

It should also be noted that in developing many aspects of the world of Dune, Patrice Vermette took a lot of inspiration from Karl Scarpe, the architect of the Brion Sanctuary. The production designer even included a note in the liner notes for the scenes shot at the shrine, mentioning that Scarpa’s work was “an integral part of the first film as she was one of the main aesthetic influences throughout the film.”