Dune’s set photographer climbed desert cliffs to capture Denis Villeneuve’s vision
A set photographer’s job can be daunting.
On a movie shoot, there are hundreds of people trying to make a film, and just one tasked with capturing images from how it actually gets made. That difficulty is compounded by the fact that the photographer is usually pretty low on the director and crew’s priority list during production.
But on the set of his sci-fi epic Dune, director Denis Villeneuve treated set photographer Chiabella James like she was as much a part of the creative process as anyone else, which James told Polygon is a huge part of why the photos from the shoot turned out so stunning and captured the tone of the movie so well. Hundreds of those photos are visible in the gorgeous book Dune Part One: The Photography, recently published by James.
For James, the entire process started with one outstanding meeting with Villeneuve, which she said was “awe-inspiring.”
“I felt like we closed the door to the office, and he opened the door to his world for me,” James told Polygon in an interview over Google Meet. “And listening to Denis talk about what was so important to him, I came away from that meeting really understanding the importance of the landscape.”
But actually capturing those incredible landscapes, like the Wadi Rum desert in Jordan, wasn’t easy. In this case, it meant battling the elements to really capture each and every one of the movie’s elaborate sets and locations.
“You’re hiking up the rock and you think, Yeah, OK, all right, this is gonna be A Day,” James says, mimicking her on-set exhaustion in her voice. “Then you see that the next set is all the way up there. And the only way out there is a climbing rope. And you’re thinking, I don’t know how I’m gonna do that. I’m already melting, and my
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