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	Dune

JH: Well, I wrote a story treatment first, a very long and extensive outline that then became the basis for the scripts. All told it was about six months.

SPACE.com: So after six months the writer delivered the script to the director. What happened after that?

JH: The director sat around and waited for the money guys to make up their minds.

Then we went off to Europe and we started casting and pre-producing the thing. The first thing that I had to do was pull around me a group of artists that I felt could help push me up the hill.

I was very fortunate to find people like [Director of Photography] Vittorio Storaro and [Production Designer] Miljen "Kreka" Kljakovic and [Costume Designer] Theodor Pistek who are all Academy Award winners. They are just world-class artists, who also happened to love this book.

That’s another thing that’s very important. All of them had known the book. All of them had loved the book and so each of us was bringing to it a real, true, genuine affection for the material. We were not trying to reinvent the wheel. We were trying to pull out from the book all of the beauty and richness that’s already there.

Once I had guys like that with me I knew that we had a real shot at something special. Then it was a matter of deciding well, what kind of a style are we gonna impose on this? How can we make this accessible and at the same time really unique and different?

I had scouted North Africa and Europe looking for places to do this. I made the decision that I really wanted this to have a highly stylized, almost operatic tone and to simply go down into the deserts of Morocco or Tunisia wasn’t good enough. First of all there were the practical considerations of dealing with the weather and the daylight shooting in flat overhead light, which would have been primarily our light source the entire time we were there, unable to really kind of take advantage of the wonderful textures, that we now have with Vittorio’s lighting.

I would have been limited to the existing locations, I never would have been able to create the wonderful unique sets that we have and we would have been dealing with the vagaries of weather and the really tight schedule. So we opted for going to Prague and working on the biggest soundstages. Even they weren’t enough, so we took over a bunch of warehouses and Vittorio and Kreka worked together with this photographic system that Vittorio has used on several other films called Translites.

Essentially what they are huge theatrical backdrops. But, instead of being painted they’re created on the computer so we were able to take paintings, photographs, drawings, anything we wanted to, merge them in an artistic way on the computer and then create these mammoth, and I’m talking everywhere from 300' by 100' tall backdrops that can be lit in many different ways to create environments that you can’t find anywhere else.

The entire Sietch Tabr environment, where the Water of Life ceremonies take place, where Chani brings Paul and Jessica, that is on the biggest soundstage in Europe and I’d say 60 percent of that set is covered by this huge Translite, which gives you all mountain and cave vistas. The rest of it is this mammoth, extraordinary set that Kreka built. The combination of this gave us this incredibly stylized look, not only for the Fremen sietches, but for the Imperial Palace, the Harkonnen Palace that I really couldn’t have found anywhere. Nor could I have lit it in the way Storaro is well known [for] and brilliantly capable of doing.

SPACE.com: Are these physical backdrops or are these rear projections?

JH: No, no, they are actual backdrops on the set. I was adamant that this would not be a greenscreen show. We created these backdrops and then built them into real sets.

SPACE.com: How long was production?

JH: We had 80 days of principal photography and another 50 of second unit photography plus additional photography back here for special effects. So it was about a 130-day shoot.

SPACE.com: That’s very fast. In that time, Mission Impossible II did one sequence.

JH: [LAUGHS] I’m dealing with a television budget and a television schedule but, when you have artists that are that committed, as I did, then you can do it. That was another reason why we chose the style that we did.

SPACE.com: I gotta tell you every penny you got is on the screen.

JH: Well, thank you. I appreciate that. That was important to us and it’s true -- we put all the money on the screen. I had great producers; David Kappes was a wizard with how he helped manage the money. My executive producers Richard Rubenstein and Mitchell Galin were incredibly supportive of the way I wanted to spend the money. We started off by guesstimating that we would have about 200 effects shots in this movie. We ended up with over 500.

SPACE.com: How do you build a budget that cheap and keep it from running away from you?

JH: Well, as I said, you have to surround yourself with people who share the vision of where you want to go. When you hire somebody like Storaro you’re going to get production value way beyond what you might get just by hiring anybody for the same amount of money. When you hire Miljen Kljakovic you’re gonna get a genius imagination who will take a one room set and by the time he’s finished designing it, even if it’s made up of Styrofoam it’s gonna look like something that you can’t image.

In this particular case, we had a number [$20 million] that made sense economically. It was a business decision dictated by business considerations for the medium we’re in, which is television. A number higher than that doesn’t make economic sense for the SCI FI Channel and for our international partners. So, we had to kind of work backwards from that.

Next page: all about aesthetics and those tantalizing sequels

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SPACE.com: The look and the aesthetic is very distinctive. How did you develop that?

JH: As I said, I did a lot of scouting. It became obvious to me that given the practical considerations of time and schedule, it would be impossible to create the level of elegance that I wanted. So, I had to regroup and think about how I could do it in a more theatrical style.

After Vittorio read my script and wanted to do it, we started talking about this Translite system that he had been using in the past. It offered the opportunity to create a unique environment. It’s a hyperbolized world we’re in there.

That’s not my style anyway. I like working in metaphor and allegory and I think visually it’s the same.

SPACE.com: There’s a big Italian influence in both the Lynch production and in yours, not only behind the camera but also in the aesthetics.

JH: Yeah, I think that’s fair. It hearkens back to the intrigues of Roman Empire, to our concept of the Borgias or Machiavelli.

SPACE.com: Let’s talk about the production, actual shooting. Where were the nightmare stories?

JH: You know, I’m gonna disappoint you, because there really were no nightmares. There were never any blowups on the set. First of all, I don’t allow it, I will not have any screamers working for me.

SPACE.com: Do you have them shot?

JH: They are disposed of in ways you don’t want to know about.

I prefer a collaborative set. Technically there were many, many difficulties. It seems funny now, but, an actor, a Czech actor hired to do one of the very small roles, decided after lunch he really didn’t want to work anymore. It was time for his close-up, but he had left. But, we really never encountered any major disasters.

SPACE.com: Will there be a director’s cut?

JH: Yes, there is one now. There are three cuts as a matter of fact. There is the U.S. television broadcast version, which you’ll see on SCI FI. There is the international television version that was made for our foreign partners, where we aren’t quite as constrained by censorship. That’s about a half an hour longer. And, then there is a director’s cut, which hopefully will come out on DVD at some point and will have just a few minutes more.

SPACE.com: When will this miniseries be out in the stores?

JH: It will be released on home video [and DVD] by Artisan Entertainment after the first of the year.

SPACE.com: Now, there’s a discussion about taking the other books and doing them either as a TV series or as a continuing set of miniseries.

JH: Yes, I’m already engaged in writing another six-hour miniseries for the SCI FI Channel. We will probably take the next two books, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, and combine them into one six-hour miniseries.

SPACE.com: Are you looking to continue all the way through to the latest [Brian Herbert] books and beyond?

JH: Well, sure, I mean there are five more books and I would love to see this thing play out. I think it’s one of the great epic sagas in literature and I think it would be wonderful to see it translated, if we can maintain the audience’s interest and the same level of production value.

SPACE.com: What’s the timeline for that?

JH: We’ll be writing it this coming year, hopefully be in production sometime before the end of the year and then it’ll be on the air in 2002.

SPACE.com: Are your actors signed for a sequel?

JH: Yes.

SPACE.com: So, everyone’s coming back?

JH: Well, everyone that’s alive and germane to the story. In fact, I should amend that because there are one or two that aren’t alive who do come back, if you know the story. And they’ll be there.

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SPACE.com: You’re not gonna leave Dune ever?

JH: Well, I -- no, I’m gonna take little side trips. I’ve got actually several things going on. I’m writing Line Up, a screenplay for Will Smith’s company at the moment. I’m developing an Internet sort of thriller-horror series, [an] animated series called John Harrison’s Skin. I had my first foray into writing for animation this past year. I wrote a movie for Disney called Dinosaur and it prompted me to think about that medium in a different way.