Movies - TV
How Timothée Chalamet & Austin Butler’s Dune 2 Duel Came Together
By JEREMY SMITH
According to "The Art and Soul of Dune: Part Two," the set for the duel between Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen (Austin Butler) took 22 weeks to build.
The fight is as pivotal in the film as it is in the book, but Villeneuve eliminated one of the key elements of the battle from the novel to give the sequence an extra charge.
In Frank Herbert's "Dune," Feyd gives himself a lethal advantage by poisoning his blade. One knick of his skin with Feyd's blade would mean certain death for Paul.
Villeneuve understood this, and evened the playing field. "It needs to feel dangerous," he said, "As though Paul has met his equal." In the movie, Feyd forgoes the poison.
As for the fight choreography, the actors eagerly threw themselves into their combat training and when it came time to shoot the sequence on set, they got a little carried away.
Supervising stunt coordinator Lee Morrison said, "At the speed they were fighting, we had to tell them to slow down because we couldn't read what was happening in the fight."