#Dune Director Denis Villeneuve On How You Design A Sandworm

With the sandworms, Villeneuve also said it was very important for him that we would “feel a strong presence like when you’re beside a whale or a huge horse. Some kind of weird sense that there’s an intelligence there that you cannot relate with but that there’s a presence.”

Overall, the experience of designing the sandworms was “a blast” for him and his crew.

“It’s a process,” he continued: 

“that came with a lot of thinking, a lot of dreaming, meditation, a lot of sketches, tons upon thousands of sketches and trying to find the right one. Patrice was definitely a big help because at the end of the day that’s one more element I didn’t mention, which is it has to look like a god. It has to have the presence of something that will evoke the presence of something that [has] like … a sacred quality to it. So the idea that [the] mouth moves like an eye was very important.”

When they watch “Dune,” moviegoers won’t just be staring into the eyes of gods, however. They’ll also be meeting the antagonistic Sardauker and Harkonnen, the latter of whom are embroiled in a feud with Timothée Chalamet and Oscar Isaac’s House Atreides.