Timothée Chalamet on wearing stillsuits, feeling exhausted making Dune

The upcoming Dune movie from director Denis Villeneuve is set to hit theaters in December of this year, barring coronavirus shenanigans. And we hope it does, because between Villeneuve’s reputation for thoughtful sci-fi (Arrival, Blade Runner 2049 ), Frank Herbert’s incredible source material, and the stupid-amazing cast, we are seriously excited for it.

One of those cast members is Academy Award nominee Timothée Chalamet, who plays main character Paul Atreides. Paul is the scion of a royal house that’s taken over management of the desert planet of Arrakis, aka Dune. Without giving too much away, he faces some challenges, and eventually finds the need to go into the desert with his mother and live among the planet’s native inhabitants, the Fremen.

If you’re going to survive in the desert, you need a stillsuit, an outfit that absorbs the body’s sweat and urine, filtering out the impurities, and creates drinkable water that is then drawn from a tube attached to the face. Yeah, it’s a little gross, but when you’re living on a planet where water is more precious than gold, you do what you have to do.

For his part, Chalamet found working in these conditions pretty difficult. “I remember going out of my room at 2 a.m., and it being probably 100 degrees. The shooting temperature was sometimes 120 degrees,” Chalamet told Vanity Fair. “They put a cap on it out there, if it gets too hot. I forget what the exact number is, but you can’t keep working. In a really grounded way, it was helpful to be in the stillsuits and to be at that level of exhaustion.”

Much of Dune was filmed in the deserts around Abu Dhabi, which (checks temperature on Google) are hot. Hopefully that effort will show on the screen when Dune hits (fingers crossed) on December 18.

And if all goes well, Chalamet and company will be going back for at least one more movie, since Villeneuve is intend on splitting up Herbert’s sci-fi classic into two parts, even if we’ve been promised that the first film will stand on its own. “I would not agree to make this adaptation of the book with one single movie,” he said. “The world is too complex. It’s a world that takes its power in details.”

"No matter what you believe, Earth is changing, and we will have to adapt. That’s why I think that Dune, this book, was written in the 20th century. It was a distant portrait of the reality of the oil and the capitalism and the exploitation—the overexploitation—of Earth. Today, things are just worse. It’s a coming-of-age story, but also a call for action for the youth…It’s a book that tackles politics, religion, ecology, spirituality—and with a lot of characters. I think that’s why it’s so difficult. Honestly, it’s by far the most difficult thing I’ve done in my life."

You gotta appreciate someone who swings for the fences.

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h/t CinemaBlend