I'm sorry Gurney.
Not sorry enough.
What's wrong with Gurney? He's not faking this.
Now, guard yourself for true!
Is this what you seek?
Good... the slow blade penetrates the shield...
...but look down
We'd have joined each other in death. You did seem to finally get the "mood."
I worked for six months
kind of parallel with the main unit but doing
my own things, sometimes
you know, very special, sometimes, you know
very very small
occasionally very very big
but a fair number of special effects, things that
today would be done as a digital optical we
did them for real as mechanical effects, it took a little longer
but we were pretty good at it.
One of the stages we turned into a desert set, but the sand was made with
micro balloons, which is
balloons made of glass, but they are really microscopic to keep the scale
and then we had all these
worms that were model worms that, you know, we had to shoot
very high speed
to make it look, you know it was
at the time groundbreaking.
I thought the worm was horrible
I really did! We had all sorts of sections of it of course
but they also had the enormous..
had the full thing
I thought it was a hideous thing.
It was done, as you know, by Carlo Rambaldi who had done E.T.
and that was a sweet little thing,
the little thing in E.T.
The worm wasn't, there was nothing
affectionate about it at all as far as I could see, nothing at all.
One thing that was so hard was to make those eyes blue.
We had to rotoscope each eye of every of the Fremen
Today that would be so simple.
I remember your gom jabbar, now you remember mine. I can kill with a word.
We tried the contact lenses
and they were horrible
it was really hard the actors because there was a complete contact lens they
looked like one of those 1940
pictures with the giant ants, you know, it didn't look good
The other challenge that we had was that
you know, in book Frank Herbert says that
Arrakis has no blue sky because there was no water
and that seems simple but, you know, that meant that
even when we were outside we could never really
shoot just to see the sky, we always have to make sure that we could take the
sky out and change it.
I devised a thing called the Lightflex
which was a ... its a very straightforward piece
Its like a piece of glass in front of the camera
which you illuminate
you light up the glass so it adds sparkle to the whole thing
and you can control it, and
after Dune I used it on every movie,
but this was the first picture I used it with
I think it added a lot to the look of the picture.
My role was really not so much
the big shots with the real people it was the
moments of a dream that, you know, we were interpreting differently
and often it was very abstract.
The other thing that was really important in the film
was water, I mean the images of water
were very very important to Frank Herbert
and hence to David.
So we would try to find
ways to capture water but in a very abstract way, so all the water
drops in the film
you know, the rings of water and all those things are images that
we created, with our little
second unit.