Patrice Vermette told /Film back in 2021 that he wanted the worlds of “Dune” to “feel old and to feel real.” As such, he and his team made sure the environments were full of “cracked walls,” “chipped corners,” and “moisture or moss” on the walls. It seems a lot of this approach came from Denis Villenueve, who didn’t want outside interpretations contaminating his vision of Herbert’s novel. Instead, the director instructed his colleagues to always reference the original book itself, rather than drawing from any other work based on the text.
For “Dune: Part Two,” Vermette and company no doubt continued to adhere to this philosophy, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t look elsewhere for inspiration. Florence Pugh, who plays Princess Irulan in the sequel, spoke to Entertainment Weekly ahead of the film’s release and revealed that she’d conversed with a designer about one set in particular. The Emperor’s tent or “Hutment” is a base of operations for the deceitful Padishah Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV (played by Christopher Walken in “Dune: Part Two”) during his time on Arrakis, and is made up of several interlocking levels. Pugh specifically mentioned this set in her EW interview, explaining:
“That final scene in the emperor’s tent. One of the set designers was saying that they based it on a Rolex watch, like, on the way that the links went like this [interlocks hands] and then it was like, ‘Wow that makes so much sense that the richest tent in the world is based off a big Rolex, like, this is amazing.'”
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