The Spice Splice: “Dune: Part 2” Editor Joe Walker, ACE on Worldbuilding and Workflows

The love story between Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and Chani (Zendaya) is at the heart of Dune: Part Two. The same set of filmmakers, led by Denis Villeneuve and including cinematographer Greig Fraser, composer Hans Zimmer and editor Joe Walker, ACE continues to tell the complex saga with confidence and boldness.

“Denis once said to me, this film should be less like Lawrence of Arabia and more like Chuck Jones’ Road Runner,” Walker noted to Steve Hullfish in the Art of the Cut podcast. “And in fact, if you look at my cutting room, I’ve got a picture of Road Runner. It’s on the wall.”

Walker is speaking at the 2024 NAB Show at “American Cinema Editors Present: The Cut from Rough to Art,” on Sunday, April 14 at 2:00 PM. Moderated by ACE president Kevin Tent, this interactive workshop will explore the craft of editing, career paths, working with the director, and the editorial storytelling process.

In a film that covers so much narrative ground, flashing forwards and backwards, it’s remarkable how little exposition there is.

“What I think we did well in Part One was disguise how much setting up there was for this second film,” Walker told Daron James at the Motion Picture Association’s The Credits. “It meant many of the characters had limited screen time in the first film, but with Part Two, they are given a little bit more space for the drama to unfold.”

Walker won the Academy Award for the first film, which ended with Paul meeting Chani and going into hiding with the desert people, the Fremen.

“Their relationship was the most important thing to get right in the film. We are leaning into action adventure and dazzling sequences, but if the heart isn’t in the right place, then it’s not going to work. We spent a lot of time taking care of that relationship,” he says.

“It’s interesting to see how Paul must transform from a young adult who, when we first meet him, is a guy dreaming about a girl who doesn’t want to practice with his mother at the breakfast table. But through the course of it, it becomes, first of all, a man, and then this superpower in a way.”

READ MORE: Architect of Arrakis: “Dune: Part Two” Editor Joe Walker on Forging a Ferocious Masterpiece (The Credits)

Indiewire’s Bill Desowitz describes the transformation of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel as “a high-octane Lawrence of Arabia in space: an epic love story and political adventure.” It’s the action that takes center stage in Dune: Part Two, requiring a faster pace, more compression of time and less exposition over the two hours and 46 minutes of runtime.

“We wanted the film to shift as nimbly as possible between the ‘bignormous’ and the intimate, while still devoting time to craft Paul and Chani’s relationship,” Walker told Desowitz.

“In terms of our editing process,” he said, “the most significant focus was on scene positioning. Editing a big ensemble film is like making an Alexander Calder mobile. Lean too heavily on one aspect and the whole thing tilts; spread the storylines too evenly and it’ll damage the impact of the design. It’s a delicate juggling act.”

READ MORE: Sandworms, Gladiator Pits, and Zendaya — How ‘Dune: Part Two’ Balances the Intimate with the ‘Bignormous’ (IndieWire)

Villeneuve conceived of Part One as “the appetizer” with the sequel being the main course, “where everything’s set up, and you can just enjoy a damn good action-adventure story,” Walker explained to Hullfish.

“That’s not to say I don’t appreciate great dialogue, which I really do,” he said. “We spend hours and hours, finessing, improving, trying to get the best clarity. Generally, in this story, clarity is a hyper narrative. Dune is a vast ensemble piece with a complex story and complex backgrounds and Frank Herbert’s almost fractal approach to storytelling [so] we had to have utter clarity and delivery of ideas.”

---

---

---

---

The scene, which introduces the film’s villain, Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), is a standout and not just because it is shot in stark black and white using infrared photography. It’s a gladiatorial fight in a huge arena that is both a display of spectacular power and ambition and a duel between the minds of Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård) and his ruthless nephew.

“What was fun cutting that sequence was creating a world not just visually, but in sound terms, something that doesn’t sound like a 21st Century sports event but has its own unique flavor,” Walker told The Credits. “We spent a long-time developing layers upon layers of different Harkonnen sounds.”

These includes sounds based on the [native New Zealander] Māori Haka chant. The sound team gave Walker stems of all sorts of audio that he could layer into his timeline.

“In the middle of the timeline was the pre-mixed dialogue and spot dialogue,” he told Hullfish. “They recorded at some point, a huge group of heavy metal rockers to kind of amplify the kind of psychotic nature of the crowd.”

The audio was so complex he would turn it off at times and cut the visuals first. “I’ve got 36 sound channels, all staggered and overlaid. If you are adjusting one image, you’re adjusting 36 cuts. So the most efficient way to adjust that kind of sequence is to turn sound off, cut the sequence and then work on the sound to kind of knit it back together again. Sometimes I just want to feel the rhythm of things in my head in silence, and then then you can kind of complement it with the sound.”

The film’s most euphoric sequence is Paul’s triumphant ride of a colossal sandworm. It’s a scene that has been 40 years in the making since Villeneuve first drew storyboards of it as a teenager and required three months on location.

“The very first thing I saw of Dune: Part Two was previs for that scene,” Walker tells IBC365. “It was meticulously worked out and shot by a dedicated unit under the command of producer and second unit director Tanya Lapointe but in the cutting room it was like a jigsaw.

“Denis described the effect he wanted as being a kid on the back of a school bus, the axle bumping,” Walker continues. “There was to be the sense of there being no purchase on the worm. You can’t just lie there because it will throw you off. Then, Denis said, ‘it was like being on a skyscraper — a skyscraper turning.’

“When he used those words, Chris [Christos Voutsinas, additional editor] and I dug into our archive of sounds for girders grinding and massive ships moving to match with the huge strength of this worm coursing through the sand.”

The first cut of the sequence was so cacophonous that it dissipated the overall impact. Then they began to deconstruct it. “When everything is noise, the music’s pounding and people are screaming, there is no shape,” Walker says. “So, we turned off the music in the first part of the scene. As Paul sees the worm and begins to run towards it, we just play sound FX to build the anticipation and anxiety of this unpredictable unstoppable beast.”

To emphasize the major story point of this scene, we hear Dune’s signature tune. “It’s our Bond theme,” Walker says. “We’ve deliberately starved the film of that particular piece of music until the point that Paul stands up on the worm. There is something religious about that moment.”

READ MORE: Behind the Scenes – Dune Part Two (IBC365)

Next, Watch This:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g03RONQeHmM