Maybe no single character made an even bigger impression onscreen in “Dune: Part Two” than the viciously terrifying Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, indelibly embodied by Austin Butler, who simply two years in the past was shaking his hips as Elvis Presley. Butler ditched the guitar and bedazzled tracksuits for a hairless, chiseled physique and piercing stare — a menacing determine that the movie’s director, Denis Villeneuve, rigorously measured.
“In the book, he’s a character with a lot of appetite. An appetite for life, power, lust and for sex,” Villeneuve tells The Envelope. However Frank Herbert’s epically imaginative sci-fi allegory wasn’t the only supply to present the character form. “I also wanted to bring to life a psychopath. Someone who considers other people like objects and acts with absolutely no fear. And someone with one weakness — sexuality — where we would feel the vulnerability. That is something I don’t think is in the book that I brought because I wanted to create more dimension to the character.”
Butler, Villeneuve and Dave Bautista on the set of “Dune: Part Two”
(Niko Tavernise/Niko Tavernise)
Our first introduction to Feyd-Rautha is on his house planet of Giedi Prime as he prepares to struggle the final “three specimens of House Atreides,” a particular present on his birthday from his uncle, Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgård), who slaughtered the household of Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) to regain management over the spice fields of the planet Arrakis.
“Would you like some fresh meat tonight, my darlings?” Feyd whispers to the servants round him, a nod to what’s to return. He runs his tongue down a newly solid blade earlier than slashing the throat of one in every of his pets and stabbing one other to check its sharpness. Flesh-eating servants scurry to slurp the blood spilling under. It’s a show of absolute diabolical pleasure from Feyd, a part of a efficiency Butler discovered early on, which, Villeneuve notes, included re-creating Skarsgård’s accent for Baron as a “way to step into the Harkonnen family” and “create a feeling of familiarity to Baron, who is his mentor figure.”
“As we were going through the makeup tests, Austin was tremendously playful, willing to try things,” Villeneuve says. “At one point, I connected with this kind of spasmodic face and animalistic expression of pleasure coming out of him that’s uncontrollable because he just killed someone. We played with that kind of deviant behavior because it’s not easy to connect with a character that is so far away from us.”
Austin Butler’s Feyd-Rautha is magnetic on the display screen in “Dune: Part Two.”
(Courtesy Warner Bros. Footage/Courtesy Warner Bros. Footage)
When Feyd steps into an infinite area full of a chanting mob longing for bloodshed, a brutalist symphony of visible aesthetics and aural tonality deepens the viciousness of the character. A scorching, black solar shines overhead, voiding the whole lot of coloration — stark imagery photographed by cinematographer Greig Fraser with a digicam modified to report infrared. There’s a malicious swagger to Feyd as he slices by way of the primary two foes earlier than being examined by a 3rd, a second he invitations with pleasure.
In crafting the scene’s suspense, editor Joe Walker mapped out the place the motion and roar of the gang would peak. “We thought the wildest excitement would be when Feyd removes his shield. And then we tried to figure out a way to have a little bit left in reserve to keep building up to the point where he finally kills Lanville [Roger Yuan].” Sound envelops the scene with a steadiness between the chaos of the gang and the galvanizing rating as Walker brings us nearer into the struggle.
“All of the Harkonnen language is made up, and Martin Kwok, who was our supervising dialogue editor, went to town with that. They shot crowds doing different chants, so it became very authentic,” says rerecording mixer Ron Bartlett. “But then we multiplied it by a couple hundred thousand people to fill that stadium,” he provides.
“The other thing, when he walks out he’s like a rock star, so we pulled the crowds back and allowed the score to really walk him out,” notes rerecording mixer Doug Hemphill.
For composer Hans Zimmer, the method was connecting to the small print of the character and scene. “Part of my process is to work closely with the cinematographer, production designer and with the actors, so I don’t write something that’s going to put the actors off their path or feel wrong for that infrared arena sequence. We were all really careful about that,” says Zimmer, who used supplies from Residence Depot to switch devices used for the rating.
“The sound was very important for me because it’s a cultural manifestation of the Harkonnen,” says Villeneuve. “But the crowd is also an important character because of what Feyd becomes in front of them. It’s the birth of the idea that he could be a leader.”
Creating Feyd’s weak point for ladies, Villeneuve credit Butler’s capability to “glide from aggressive and threatening behavior to vulnerability in a very few seconds. … That was something that I was really impressed by, so I need to give a lot of credit to the actor here who gave me those nuances that I was wishing for on the screen.”
A scene between Austin Butler and Lea Seydoux was “the closest in anything I’ve cut to blending performance, shots, sound effects and music in a unified rhythm,” notes editor Joe Walker.
(Niko Tavernise/Warner Bros. Footage)
For a pivotal second the place Feyd meets Girl Margot (Léa Seydoux) in a big hall, solely to coerce her into a close-by room and ultimately impregnate her, the hypnotic scene was an infusion of teamwork. “It’s the closest in anything I’ve cut to blending performance, shots, sound effects and music in a unified rhythm,” notes editor Walker. “And that was always my goal, to find a very rhythmic way to make this sort of symphony play.”
In seeing the character onscreen, Villeneuve says, “There was a presence in the eyes that was frankly very frightening. When I see Austin I’m still not used to seeing him with hair. I’m still having nightmares.”