Denis Villeneuve says the "complexity" of 'Dune: Part Two's epic sandworm-riding scene meant that "sometimes" a single shot would take "a week".
In total, the mind-blowing scene took 44 days to shoot, but the director of the sci-fi blockbuster - which starred Timothée Chalamet as Paul Atreides - admitted that if he didn't have the help of his specialist “worm unit", he would still be here now trying to perfect it.
Speaking in conversation with 'Ted Lasso' star Brett Goldstein at the BFI London Film Festival at the weekend, he spilled: "I realised that, the way I wanted to approach this, I didn't want to compromise.
"Most important with visual effects is, how will you shoot it? And I wanted to shoot it with natural light. And I realized it would take months to shoot it. Each shot was very complex. Each shot took sometimes half a day, sometimes a day, sometimes a week for one shot because of the complexity. If I had done it myself, I would still be shooting."
Meanwhile, the filmmaker has admitted he will "miss the collective act of creativity" should their come a day when movies are all made through a computer.
He told filmmaker Joe Wright at a special screening of his second 'Dune' film on Sunday (13.10.24): "I work with tremendous artists. The thing about cinema I love the most is this collective act of creativity, where you try to make poetry … at the end of the day it is cinema, it is storytelling. It is very moving for me to make it together.
"That is why, if ever one day we came up with … you can create a movie just with a computer, maybe it's going to be interesting in some ways, but I will absolutely miss the collective act of creativity, which is so beautifully human."
