Director Denis Villeneuve describes Dune as a psychedelic journey, he talks about grounding the film with ‘familiar’ visuals that link with our relationship with nature, and expressing the psychedelic aspect through sound. The approach they took with the sound was that of a documentary, Denis wanted it to sound as though there was a ‘guy with a boom’ on the planet Aracus.
The Worm
Denis integrated postproduction very early into the creative process, he brought the sound team to Budapest where they were shooting the film, this way they were able to feed their ideas together. Villeneuve recalls working on lower budget films and having to rush the sound at the end of production, but now with a bigger budget he is able to make sure the sound has deep enough roots (as he puts it) to stand the test of time. He values having space to experiment, explore and make mistakes. When supervising sound editor and sound designer Theo Green first received the script for the film, he decided to check himself into a hotel in Death Valley where there was a nearby sand dune called Mesquite sand. He did this to get a good idea of the atmosphere of the film, to know what it sounds like to stand in silence and to know what it sounds like to walk up a dune. Green was motivated a lot by some recordings done by their re-recording mixer Doug Hemphill, they were recordings of sand dunes moving, they sing/groan. Green recognised that in order to make that sound the dunes must be resonant like a musical instrument, so Theo planted microphones in the sand to see how human interaction, walking jumping etc, resonated with the sand. This was also useful in the conception of the sound of the worm, Green realised that in order for the worm to swim through the sand as it does visually, the worm would have to vibrate to liquify the sand, this defined the sound of the worm.
Denis described the sound of the worm or ‘worm sign’ as an insect fluttering its wind, something small that doesn’t let on the full scope of the beast. It should be something so contrasted to the worm that only a native would recognise, a visitor would think it was an insect or a bird, its ‘fluttering sand’. Denis emphasised awe as the quality they wanted to portray to the audience, he didn’t want the audience to fear it but see it as a God on the planet. The worm has a strange intelligence and should convey a huge presence, meeting the worm is a spiritual experience.
An aspect of the sound design that informed the visual is something that the designers named ‘The Gunk Gunk’, a series of thumps that can be heard coming from deep within the creature. They defined this as a means of communication, this is why the worm responds to the thumping machines places in the sand by people. After hearing this, Denis Villeneuve decided to take this information to the VFX team, and asked them to animate movement in the epiglottis.
Villeneuve describes the desert environment as introspective experientially, due to the weight of the heat, open plains and silence. This, he says, brings the sound closer to you. Often the loudest sounds in the environment will be your own body, your breath and heartbeat.
The Voice
There is a very important concept in Dune called ‘the voice’. Denis emphasised a theme of channelling ancestry throughout the film, the sound department had to express this concept/theme through ‘the voice’. The idea was that Paul could channel a feminine ancestral power, and so the voice would be a deep female voice, this could be simultaneously or separate from his own voice. The sound department casted lots of gritty female voices, they layered these voices under Timothee Chalemete’s voice. They wanted the projection of the voice to be powerful, for the resonance to be amplified especially in the bass, to the point where the room rattles. They also took an opportunity to use synchronisation as an expression of aptitude, as the protagonist learns to use the voice it is out of synch with him, it comes a few seconds after the words are spoken, whereas the reverend mother’s voice is completely in sync, percussive and immediate. To emphasise the lower frequencies of the voice Theo Green used a technique he learned from Lee Scratch Perry, a pioneer in dub reggae. The technique was to record the audio, and play it back through a very large speaker in a resonant room and record the result, sometimes you can hear a little bit of the room shaking. This, Green says, gives the voice a very tactile sense to the spiritual experience. Giving a tactile sense to the spiritual experience became this sound’s main utilisation, the voice could speak subtext, text and tell a story even when it wasn’t being deployed as ‘the voice’, it became its own entity. Through experimentation the sound department had unlocked a new story telling device for Dennis.
Technology
Denis wanted the technology of this world to be grounded, as real as possible, so it didn’t become a distraction from the story. He wanted the audience to embrace the technology spontaneously. An example was the ‘Ornithopter’, it was based on insects, he wanted the vehicle to function like an insect and look like a military vehicle. The sound, Denis said, should be close to the spirit of a helicopter, in the same family but not the same. The sound team used recordings of beetles and other insects to create a helicopter sound with a natural quality.
Mark Mangini states that we can be more successful in our sound design when we start with natural recordings. He thinks that the reason for this could possibly be that we have a psychoacoustic response telling us that the sound is real, the time arrival to the ear and the acoustic environment in which a sound lives might be a subconscious identifier for reality. Whether this theory is correct or not, I think he is right. The brain responds to natural sounds differently to synthesised sounds, I’ve created synthesisers out of vocal recordings and they are very un-natural as an acoustic sound, but retain an organic natural quality. These natural sound ‘ingredients’ are all in service to quickly and effectively suspend the audiences disbelief. We can present sounds that are decontextualised from what it really is, present them in a new context and your brain doesn’t have to understand what the original sound was it just recognises that its real.