Dune: Part Two’s climactic showdown sees Paul Atreides, Timothée Chalamet’s messianic hero, cross blades with Austin Butler’s pallid Harkonnen, Feyd-Rautha, as the sun rises over the desert. Director Denis Villeneuve breaks down the vicious confrontation.
There’s something about knife-fights in particular that’s very frightening. And real knife-fights are very short. The shorter, the more dangerous. Battles in cinema often become fight porn — they’re too long, and it doesn’t mean anything, so they lose your attention. I try to create fights that are short, strong bursts of violence so you never lose the intensity. You want to be as economical as possible and just feel the brutality.
I wanted this battle to happen at the end of the night so you’d have the birth of a new world with a new dawn. Plus, I love those skies when the sun is reddish and you have that morning atmosphere. The bright orange sun brings something very dramatic, silhouetting the scene, and I asked Patrice Vermette, my production designer, to make a set with a huge opening that allows us to see it and to stay in contact with the desert.
We follow the emotional journey of each of the characters through this scene. There’s Paul’s mother [Rebecca Ferguson] watching her son fight. You have Gurney [Josh Brolin], Paul’s trainer, watching his oldest friend close to death. And for the Fremen, their religious figure, the Mahdi, is facing death. For Irulan [Florence Pugh], her father could lose the throne or be killed. For everybody, the stakes cannot be higher.
But the secret to this is Chani [Zendaya]. The whole movie was written so we could land on that scene and understand that Chani feels politically betrayed by Paul. We follow Paul through the fight, but we are always close to Chani’s perspective, which is tremendously important because we need to understand here at the end of the movie that this story is not a celebration of Paul Atreides. It’s a warning against people that use religion as a political tool. Jon Spaihts and I wrote this screenplay to be faithful to Frank Herbert’s initial desire, which was to make it a cautionary tale.
What makes the fight interesting is that Paul and Feyd-Rautha are a mirror of each other. Both at the top of their game. The difference is Paul is exhausted. He’s just come from a huge fight and then this arrogant, fresh, strong, young fighter comes out and defies him. I wanted to feel the difference in energy between both characters and to make sure that we fear for Paul’s safety. Paul fights for survival — he knows that if he wins, he will win the empire, the Fremen will survive, and he will be able to get power. But Feyd-Rautha is vicious and more of a playboy. He’s doing this for pleasure, to humiliate Paul. In the book, Feyd is a bit more of a coward and he uses tricks, but I like the fact that Feyd, despite all his viciousness, still has a moral code, and honour is important to him.
The fight itself shows the clash of two cultures: Feyd uses the Harkonnen technique, Paul the Atreides technique cross-mixed with the Fremen. The more the fight evolves, the more Paul starts to fight like a Fremen in order to survive. Towards the end, he’s using techniques that Jamis [Babs Olusanmokun] used against him in the first film. Roger Yuan, the choreographer, uses combat as a language and I love that.
At this point, Paul is the incarnation of the Kwisatz Haderach. He has The Sight and sees different paths into the future. He sees that he has to get very close to death. He needs his opponent to feel safe and to get very close to him. And at the moment when his opponent thinks Paul is about to die, that’s the window where he knows he will have the chance to kill him. That moment, where he stabs Feyd, is an echo of the fight with Gurney in the first film. The fights all mirror each other and have little echoes or footnotes from one fight to the other, so it’s like a puzzle that gets its resolution at the end here. Roger Yuan is a poet.
Timothy and Austin trained for this fight for months because I wanted real speed to it. The only thing I had to design myself was where Paul would fall after being stabbed. I wanted him to be very close to Chani and far away from the Emperor. Once he kills Feyd-Rautha, I wanted us to feel that proximity with Chani as his last temptation of Christ — the last moment where Paul could have said, ‘You know what? F*** it!’ and gone back to Chani. I wanted to see in her eyes that this is their last chance. She opens her heart and says to him, ‘Please stay with me. Don’t do this.’ But Paul knows that the only way he can protect his people is to cross this room and leave her behind.
Honestly, every time I watch the movie and their eyes meet in that silent exchange, at the precise moment when he stands up and removes the knife… The way Paul looks at Chani breaks my heart. Timothée did an amazing job there. And then he crosses the room, and as he walks, he leaves his vulnerability behind and becomes a titan. He becomes a figure that is larger than life. He becomes Paul Muad’Dib.
