Where Was Dune Filmed? Every Major Location, Explained

It’s hard to imagine where Denis Villeneuve began when he first took on the task of giving Frank Herbert’s “Dune” the big screen adaptation it deserved. The supposedly “unfilmable” book had lived up to that reputation multiple times before the French Canadian filmmaker came to it. David Lynch’s “Dune” had plenty wrong with it, even while it retains many defenders, and the Sci-Fi Channel shows were never going to be able to provide the spectacle required for a truly effective adaptation. While all the “Dune” adaptations had their charms, then, none really ever felt like they’d fulfilled the cinematic promise of Herbert’s novel.

Finally following through on that promise is just one of the reasons Villeneuve’s two “Dune” movies are as impressive as they are. But for the director, simply deciding where to shoot this galaxy-spanning epic must have been a vertiginous experience. The book mostly takes place on the planet Arrakis, with brief excursions to the Harkonnen planet, Giedi Prime, and House Atreides’ homeworld of Caladan. But even if the whole thing took place on the arid desert plains of Arrakis, that would have been enough of a challenge in and of itself. After all, how do you make two almost three-hour long movies feel diverse and interesting when a vast amount of scenes take place on sand, sand dunes, and more sand?

The way Villeneueve and his team answered this question is fascinating in and of itself, using multiple deserts throughout the Middle East as stand-ins for Arrakis. But there was so much more to crafting the world of “Dune” and “Dune: Part Two.” Here are all the filming locations that were used to conjure the epic majesty of Villeneuve’s two films.

“Dune” begins with the Atreides family still on their planet of Caladan, a lush oceanic homeworld characterized by green hills, vast seas, and frequent rainfall. While the Atreides’ castle on Caladan was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s real-world Fallingwater house in Pennsylvania, the outdoor scenes were filmed in and around Norway, which provided the perfect stand-in for the Atreides’ verdant, rain-swept world.

Production designer Patrice Vermette told Moviemaker that it was important to him for Caladan to possess “a feeling of melancholia” and resemble the Canadian autumn season with “misty, overcast skies” and “dramatic coastal mountain ranges and cliffs.” Norway provided the perfect location for such “melancholia,” with its sparsely-populated Kinn Island, off the west coast of the country, standing in for scenes where Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides is seen walking along alone along a coastline prior to leaving for Arrakis.

Stadlandet was also used for Caladan in “Dune.” The peninsula divides the Norwegian and North Sea and sits on the west of the country. Elsewhere, the crew also used Drage, on the coast of Norway, for scenes on the Atreides’ homeworld.

“Dune” and its sequel shot in two real deserts, which doubled as various locations on Arrakis — an unforgiving desert planet that’s the only source of the mysterious and powerful spice that makes interstellar travel possible. Scouting these various locations left Denis Villeneuve and his crew sand-traumatized, with production designer Patrice Vermette having to carry around bottles of sand to ensure the grains matched between each spot.

In Jordan, the crew made extensive use of Wadi Rum (Valley of the Moon), a protected area in the south of the country near the border with Saudi Arabia. The area is full of gorges, arches, cliffs, and caverns and these rocky features were perfect for the Fremen’s sietches (small communities residing in caves). This real-life desert had already made Hollywood history long before “Dune,” appearing in 1962’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” Ridley Scott’s “The Martian,” and the “Star Wars” franchise. 

Jordan’s Wadi Araba also became an important locale for the “Dune” films, with Vermette revealing to Condé Nast Traveler that both locations were chosen because of the “amazing choices in rock formation,” adding: “There’s just a presence there, an aura. You feel very, very, very small in the universe when you’re there, and just the sound of the wind between those rocks is just breathtaking.”

While Jordan provided a unique and alluring aura, Denis Villeneuve and his crew also needed somewhere with impressive sand dunes for other scenes set on Arrakis. Patrice Vermette told Condé Nast Traveler the crew were “trying to find a place that had 360 degrees of dunes,” before narrowing their choices down to Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Morocco. “As soon as we scouted the desert in Abu Dhabi, we were like, this is the place,” he recalled.

While shooting in Abu Dhabi, the “Dune” crew stayed in a resort called Qasr Al Sarab, which is situated right in the heart of the Hamim desert. This allowed the production to stay extremely close to where they were shooting, capturing the stunning and expansive scenery of Abu Dhabi’s Liwa Oasis and the Rub’ al Khali, or Empty Quarter desert.

Of course, shooting on location made keeping footprints out of frame in the “Dune” movies a living nightmare for the crew. But the sweeping shots of the Abu Dhabi dunes were surely worth it when it came to bringing Arrakis to life.

Surprisingly enough, it wasn’t the two major deserts that had the “Dune” crew passing out left and right. Denis Villenueve’s two films shot on Budapest’s Origo Studios’ backlot, where at one point the temperature hit 110 degrees, causing crew members to pass out from heat stroke according to Feyd Rautha star Austin Butler.

Thankfully, Origo Studios wasn’t just one giant oven. It allowed the crew to shoot multiple scenes, including the big stadium fight where Feyd Rautha faced off against multiple opponents on the Harkonnen homeworld Giedi Prime. Much of this fight was actually shot on a converted parking area between sound stages, but Villeneuve and cinematographer Greig Fraser also made use of video game tech to fill out that particular scene.

Otherwise, Budapest was used to shoot many of the interior scenes in the “Dune” movies, with Patrice Vermette telling Moviemaker that Origo Studios was the production’s “main base.” Scenes from the interior of Ornithopters were shot at the studios, as well many shots of the Harkonnen attack on Arrakis’ city, Arrakeen. Vermette also revealed to Condé Nast Traveler that Origo was used to erect multiple real set elements, due to Villeneuve’s determination to avoid green screen:

“The brief from Denis was to give him and the actors as much of an immersive environment as possible — so we weren’t allowed to use green screen. So we actually used this huge open space in between the sound stages at Origo Studio [in Budapest], and we built up to 20 feet of real set elements — like part of the circular room — and then had fabric to create the space. We created the shadows over the space by rigging lines between the stages out of metal wire. And we just covered the ground completely with sand — and had to keep covering it up because it was the rainy season in Budapest.”

While many interior locations were shot on sound stages in Budapest, “Dune: Part Two” did shoot on location in an Italian sanctuary, which had previously never allowed a movie production on-site. The Emperor’s palace on the planet of Kaitain was actually filmed in the Brion Sanctuary, an extravagant burial site for the Brion family (who founded Italian electronics company Brionvega) located an hour away from Venice. Designed by Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa between 1968 and 1978, the structure and its surrounding gardens provided the perfect palace for Christopher Walken’s Padishah Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV and Florence Pugh’s Princess Irulan.

The book “The Art and Soul of Dune: Part Two,” details how the “Dune: Part Two” script described a “lush Imperial garden,'” where Princess Irulan could be introduced. This set off a “worldwide search for locations that would fit this description but also offer the otherworldly qualities of a planet set in the distant future.” While real-life locations in Mexico, France, Brazil, and Japan were considered, the Brion Sanctuary and tomb provided everything the script called for, with what the book referred to as its “large circular doorways and brutalist shapes and texture.”

It’s also worth noting that when designing many aspects of the “Dune” world, Patrice Vermette drew a lot of inspiration from Carlo Scarpa, the architect behind the Brion Sanctuary. The production designer even included a note on the call sheet for the scenes shot at the sanctuary which mentioned how Scarpa’s work was “integral to the first movie, as it was one of the main aesthetic influences throughout the film.”