Dune/Star Wars DP compares the two huge sci-fi franchises!

June 4th 2020, 3:30pm

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Greig Fraser is a prolific director of photography (or DP) who has worked on a lot of high-profile films lately, including ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY and episodes of THE MANDALORIAN. He's also been tapped to work on Denis Villeneuve's highly-anticipated sci-fi epic DUNE. Here's what Fraser had to say about the two titan sci-fi franchises, in an exclusive interview with Collider:

It was quite fun because I had to forget a lot of Star Wars when I was making Dune. It wasn’t hard, though. Denis and I spoke clearly about how the film should look and should feel, and the formats and this and that, so it was not hard to swerve and change lanes. There were some similarities like the deserts. I mean listen, ultimately I’m positive George Lucas was inspired by Dune when he made Star Wars. I don’t know if that’s sacrilegious to talk about, but there are a lot of similarities in some areas, so you could tell he was definitely influenced by that. So I had to be careful doing both [Dune and The Mandalorian] and not to repeat myself. Also not just for the sake of the movie, but for fun. I hate to do the same thing twice.

He also went on to praise Villeneuve, saying

I can tell you that Denis is a master and a lovely human being who is passionate and wild and sensitive and loving. What I love about Denis is French-Canadians and Australians tend to have a lot of similarities in that we can get a bit passionately aggressive when we need to be. The French-Canadians can be very, very passionate about life and things, so I found getting on with him really well on that, and also Patrice [Vermette] the production designer. I think we all had the same thing of, if something wasn’t good, it’d be like, ‘That’s bullshit!’ and Patrice would be like, ‘Yeah, that’s shit!’ They wouldn’t pull punches, which I found awesome, and we had the same relationship.

Meanwhile, DUNE is still expected to hit theaters December 18th. We'll keep you updated if there are any changes.

So what do you guys think? Do you prefer the look of DUNE (of what little we've seen so far) or STAR WARS? Either way, sound off below!