Niko Tavernise
Feyd-Rautha and the Arena
Lady Margot travels to Giedi Prime, the home of the Harkonnen clan, to witness her mark Feyd-Rautha in action in an arena battle to celebrate his birthday. (The teeny-tiny glasses she watches him through were a props-department find, but West agrees they were “perfect.”)
For Feyd’s ensemble, West looked to the work of H.R. Giger, the artist and designer best known for designing the Xenomorph for Alien. “We wanted him to evoke a kind of Gothic vampire early, early dark medieval feeling, but yet be the future,” she says. “Because of all of his action, when he fights in the arena, I wanted things that moved on him to show his almost balletic but powerful movements that he makes.”
When Feyd goes up against prisoners from House Atreides, one of whom is not drugged and gives him a real fight, he is surrounded by a group of what West calls “picadors,” named for Spanish bullfighters. These guys, however, look far more alien, clothed entirely in black with oversized hats. Villeneuve and his concept artist brought West a stick drawing of their idea for these aides. “I said, ‘I like it, can I expand on it?'” she says. “So I really elongated those [hats]. It’s like a toreador’s hat, but very extreme and spiky. They are almost ghostlike.”
To create the effect of a duel under Giedi Prime’s black sun, Villeneuve and his cinematographer Greig Fraser shot the arena sequence with an infrared camera, which meant West and her team had to get the shade of fabric just right. West tested materials with Fraser to make sure nothing could go awry. “You have to be very careful with infrared,” she said, “because everything was black, of course, but certain black fabrics will photograph white in infrared.”
