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SCIFI.COM Member Letomatic asks:
 As a director undertaking such a massive story, how did you use the tools of moviemaking (cinematography, special effects, music, set design, costumes) to tell the story of Dune Messiah / Children of Dune?
 Whoa. What a great question. Dune was massive and I could spend pages and weeks fully replying to this. I could also blab on for all six hours should the DVD have a commentary track. Let me see if I can hit the main topics.
CINEMATOGRAPHY
When I read Children of Dune I saw a glorious world, like Rome in its heyday.
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A sweeping desertscape on Arrakis.
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I wanted to invite the audience into that world by using warm, rich tones. Indoors we used stained glass to filter the light into different colors. Outside, my director of photography, Arthur Reinhart, and I agreed that Dune daylight was orange with red sunsets and yellow sunrises. Of the blue and green moons, we decided the green moon was the dominant source of nocturnal light. Overall, we took a subtle approach to the color scheme because we wanted to maintain a level of realism in the Dune universe.
With regard to the shots, I wanted lots of layers, in the foreground of the frame especially. Foreground adds depth and makes Children of Dune more cinematic and rich. Arthur and I used slow, monumental camera moves to enhance the grand scale, and we framed very precise, loving close-ups of the actors. We decided not to use any hand-held photography in Children of Dune. The jarring nature of it felt out of place in this world.
As most of you know, all of Children of Dune was shot on soundstages in Prague, including its "exterior" scenes. There are a great many small, subtle realities to the way things move outdoors — the way that hair blows, the way fabric moves — so I wanted to make sure something was always moving in every frame of Children of Dune. We used smoke, fabric, wind and even heat ripples to achieve that.
VISUAL EFFECTS
First and foremost, Children of Dune was about its characters.
I believe that, as characters, the sandworms are as important as the humans. I wanted the worms to have authentic personalities so that we would actually empathize with them.
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A sandworm attacks an ornithopter.
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I wanted the audience to feel sadness when the worms are captured, respect and awe when the creatures first show themselves.
I challenged visual-effects company Area 51 to make everything look as realistic as possible. When I first met visual-effects supervisor Ernest Farino and his associates Tim and Michelle, I told them that I wanted Children of Dune to blow away anything that had been on TV before and hold its own against such films as Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
They were up for it and excited to be making the Dune universe come to life again. They did a great job. I feel like they gave me what I wanted, then took everything to the next level. They take great pride and care in the work that they do.
I had eight weeks to prepare for Children of Dune before shooting. Eight weeks to prepare for what is, basically, three movies. If you consider that the Lord of the Rings trilogy had five years of pre-production, two years of shooting and three years of post-production, you'll see we had a lot of work to do in very little time.
One of our first priorities when I got to Prague was to storyboard all the visual effects. This allowed Ernie and his gang the full year to create and work on the elements we needed. I was in contact, through Ernie, with a storyboard artist in Los Angeles, and I also had an artist in Prague with whom I would work during my lunch hour every day. I hope they post some of the storyboards online; they're really cool.
Ernie and I agreed that we didn't want to have people stepping outside the film and simply watching it for its cool visual effects. Sometimes the best effects are the ones that people don't even notice. I really wanted to make sure that, at its core, Children of Dune could work as pure drama and that the visual effects would expand and enhance the experience. Which they do.
SET DESIGN
Production designer Ondrej Nekvasil was on board when I got to Prague. He had worked with producer David Kappes on Anne Frank. Ondrej was extremely creative.
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The throne room of the imperial palace at Arakeen.
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Everything you see in Children of Dune was created for this project, from every fork to every chair. Twelve years had passed in the story since Frank Herbert's Dune, so we went for a simpler design of everyday objects and a much grander scale to the palace. We also used fabrics to soften the sets and make them feel lived-in.
Watching the sets being built was one of the more amazing experiences of my time in Prague. The sets are huge. No stage could house us. We had to convert old tram factories into stages. Each set was bigger than a football field. It took two months to build the streets of Arakeen. That set has so many nooks and great angles. I could have shot there forever and never looked at the same thing twice.
EDITING
What can I say about editor Harry Miller? We were in close contact during the shoot. I gave detailed notes to my script supervisor to pass on to Harry in the United States. That cut down our work considerably.
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The digitally created exterior of the imperial palace at Arakeen.
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By the time I joined the editing process in post-production, many of the hard decisions regarding which takes to use and how to approach the material had already been made.
Harry was the best collaborator I have had on a film to date. Many finished scenes in Children of Dune remain untouched since Harry's first cut. Prior to shooting, Harry gathered all my previous work (movies and episodic work) and plugged into the way I think and how I like to have things cut.
The editing process on Children of Dune was an interesting one. Children of Dune feels like a big movie, yet we needed to break it up for commercials. On the wall of the editing room we kept index cards of every scene, and we played around with the flow of each night's episode as we tried to find the best places to go out to the commercials. Once a script is filmed it really takes on a life of its own. Once you know whose story the film really is, once you get a feel for its pace, things change and move around.
The specifics of what I am talking about will have to wait until the release of the DVD director's cut of Children of Dune. Stay tuned.
MUSIC
I'm not musically inclined. I can't play a lick of anything, but I have a really good ear for what works on film. I needed the music for Children of Dune to link a lot of the key ideas and characters. Giving a cohesive feeling to something so large and that features so many characters was not an easy task. Several themes were required to inform the audience immediately who these people are and what their importance to the story is.
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Brian Tyler, composing the score for Frank Herbert's Children of Dune.
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The music also needed to express each character's individual journey. Alia required her own theme, as did Chani, Paul, the twins and the Atreides family as a whole. We also needed different themes for the major worlds of the saga, from Arrakis to Salusa Secundus and Naraj.
I met composer Brian Tyler three years ago, on a film I directed called Plan B. During that project, we had at one point been working all night and into the next day when Brian turned to me and said, "Greg, we have to take a break so I can go buy a TiVo and record Dune on the SCI FI Channel." So, naturally, when I got the call to direct Children of Dune, Brian was the first person on my mind to join the team. I locked him in right at the start of pre-production so he could spend the better part of that year percolating ideas.
Once my cut was done, Brian had an enormous job ahead of him. We wanted a combination of ancient instrumentation and vocals on a huge, magnificent score — basically, something that had never been heard before. I gave Brian free rein and told him not to look back. Six weeks later he emerged with 173 original cues, which comprised literally thousands of hand-written pages of orchestration.
Brian plays all 83 different percussion instruments himself on the Children of Dune soundtrack. He also performs all the male vocals. And — Brian even wrote the song "Inama Nushif" that you hear in the TCA trailer ... in Fremen. The word "genius" gets overused in this business, but it truly applies to Brian and the work he's done on this film.
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