Patrice Vermette Reveals Dune 3’s 55-Ton Spaceship — SkimNews
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- Dune: Part Three opens Dec. 18 as the third and final Dune installment, with Timothee Chalamet returning as Paul Atreides 17 years after Part Two; the story follows Paul as emperor and draws on Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah.
- Variety honored Vermette with its Creative Impact Award at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, where he detailed the production-design work behind the film.
- Patrice Vermette said one spaceship in the opening battle weighed 55 tons and had to be built underground and buried; only one was built for 360-degree interior and exterior views, while a crane came every two days to lift it and pumps removed the scene’s water.
- Denis Villeneuve gave Vermette one directive for the film—“not to repeat sets”—and the pair’s motto became: “Let’s challenge each other. Let’s make it different.”
- Giedi Prime was inspired by industrial septic tanks, while Vermette also built Atreides Castle and Arrakis’s Imperial Nexus Laboratory; his design rule was that every fantasy-world object needed a reason to exist and a grounding in reality.
- Greig Fraser and the other department heads collaborated with Vermette to stage the Imperial Nexus Laboratory without cheating sunlight, making the sequence a cross-department logistics exercise rather than a design solved in isolation.
- Enemy became Villeneuve and Vermette’s first feature collaboration in 2013, after Dallas Buyer’s Club was pushed by a year and Villeneuve sent Vermette a text that, he said, “changed my life.”
Why it matters: For Villeneuve and Vermette, the Dec. 18 finale’s scale rests on practical coordination: one 55-ton ship, a crane every two days and pumps for a rain sequence. Their explicit rule against repeating sets makes distinct design across Giedi Prime, Atreides Castle and the Imperial Nexus Laboratory a production goal.
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