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What’s Real and What’s Not in Dune: Part Two’s Biggest Action Scenes
Cinematographer Greig Fraser breaks down the “magic tricks” that made sandworm riding, bazooka attacks, and gladiator fights look convincing.
Australian cinematographer Greig Fraser has become one of the go-to directors of photography for productions with immense action and/or visual effects, including Zero Dark Thirty, Killing Them Softly, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, The Creator, The Batman, and the TV series The Mandalorian, which gave him lots of experience framing and lighting desert vistas full of strange machines and creatures. Analog and digital are stacked like the layers of a cake throughout Dune ’s production, which seamlessly merged physical sets and soundstages (at Origo Studios in Budapest, Hungary) and CGI backdrops and effects with actual desert locations (in Abu Dhabi and Jordan) to create panoramas of people, machines, space, fire, and sand. In an early action scene, Paul is protecting Chani (Zendaya) beneath a spice harvester as she fires a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher at Harkonnen soldiers while trying to avoid getting picked off by enemies circling them in an ornithopter, a dragonfly-like aerial vehicle.
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