Inside ‘Dune’: The Training Room, Blu-ray Extra Released

In total, the Blu-ray disc will include around an hour of extras. A number of these are new featurettes—like the above—including previously unreleased behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with cast.

Following is the written transcript of “Inside Dune: The Training Room”:

Denis Villeneuve (director): Right at the beginning of the movie, we will see Paul reluctantly training with Gurney Halleck. Gurney tries—a bit like you know you do sometimes with teenagers—to warn him, to wake him up.

Josh Brolin: When you first see Gurney with Paul, it’s more of a professor/teacher thing, where you’re seeing moves. You’re in this place where you’re like, you’re supposed to be ta-ta-ta-ta!

Timothée Chalamet: It’s what we shot first, those were my first three days. On those days, Josh was captain; [he’d] done combat sequences like that and, true to the nature of the scene, he’s the weapon master. So he took the lead.

Villeneuve: Roger Yuan was the choreographer who came up with most of the movement in Dune.

Roger Yuan (fight coordinator): Gurney is coming in kind of playfully and yet wanted to teach this young man; that where he’s going it’s serious. And so the training sequence, it’s a choreographed set of the basic blocks, but which are functional in real-world fighting.

Villeneuve: You have the combination of very fast moves, a bit like a chess player that does several moves in advance to kill the king. It’s the same thing.

Yuan: And once Timothée’s character says “I’m not in the mood”, that’s where it becomes a real fight.

Villeneuve: It’s a cross between martial arts and fencing, where you do a certain amount of movement to distract the opponent, in order to be able to bring the blade inside his shield. So it’s very fast, [fast-paced] close combat. Very precise, using hands—both hands—and knives in order to be able to kill the opponent. It’s a very specific technique that belonged to Dune.

Yuan: The Atriedes system I based on kali, and a specific style of kali: Balintawak, which is very short movements, because their blades are short. So it adapts to that type of weaponry.

Depending on the character and also the actor, that is brought in, I would love to make sure that their specific abilities, physically, are being utilized. What was their background? Even if it’s not martial arts. Do they understand tennis? Do they play soccer? And the training process relates to them in that way first, and then slowly guide them along and go “okay this is how we do it in fight world now.”

Brolin: It took awhile, but learning kata fighting with sticks, filming myself, and then looking at it and actually learning from it. And saying “oh I see, I’m too far forward and I need to standup more.” And things clicking along the way.