Denis Villeneuve reveals the Dune scene it hurt him to cut

Dune, which came out in theaters and on HBO Max this past weekend, is a long movie: two hours and 35 minutes, to be exact. And it only adapts half of Frank Herbert’s classic sci-fi novel. You’d figure with that much space, director Denis Villeneuve could fit in pretty much everything from the novel, right?

But you’d be wrong. “Even as I was shooting, sometimes I was changing elements or trying to make sure to find the most efficient and cinematic way to express complex ideas to make them as accessible as possible,” Villeneuve told SyFy Wire.

That meant some things had to be cut, including one that seemed to pain the director. “It’s Gurney Halleck’s baliset,” Villeneuve said sadly, referring to a sci-fi instrument played by House Atreides retainer Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin). “It’s something that I shot. It’s something that exists. Josh [Brolin] was awesome, but I couldn’t, for several reasons, put it in Part I.”

That’s a shame, because Gurney Halleck’s baliset gives him dimension. He’s a hardened warrior who lives to fight Harkonnens on behalf of House Atreides…but he’s also a sensitive musician who strums a mean baliset. Maybe Gurney would have stood out more if this scene had remained in the final cut.

Important Dune scene cut: “[W]e’ll save that for Part II”

Brolin confirmed that this scene did indeed end up on the cutting room floor. “We did the singing scene with the baliset and Hans (Zimmer) had written a really nice piece,” he said. “It was kind of like Lou Reed meets Tom Waits meets me. We did it well and we didn’t have a lot of time to do it. It was kind of off the cuff, because we knew we were going to do it at some point.”

Villeneuve himself called Brolin to say that the scene had been cut, and it sounds like it was impossible to be mad at him for it. “When he called me, he was nervous and extremely apologetic,” Brolin remembered. “I know him well enough to know it was actually true. And listen, I trust him… I don’t think that scene belonged in there, especially in the momentum of the movie. I was imagining where that scene could be and it would be tonally, completely off.”

For such a long movie, I was actually surprised how much stuff from the novel didn’t make it in. We didn’t get the party scene at the Duke’s estate in Arrakeen, we didn’t get the subplot where Lady Jessica is suspected of being a mole in Duke Leto’s own household, and of course, we didn’t get  Gurney Halleck playing his baliset.

Of course, some of that could change down the line. “So we’ll save that for Part II,” Brolin mused about his cut scene. Let’s hope.

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