Jack Davison speaks of it with obvious pleasure and a certain nostalgia. In November 2022, he photographed the filming of Dune: Part Two in Jordan's Wadi Rum desert, where British director David Lean once shot Lawrence of Arabia. The 34-year-old photographer still can't quite believe he was able to witness the workings of a movie set, let alone such a huge production.

Denis Villeneuve's film is the second part of the adaptation of the saga imagined in the 1960s by American writer Frank Herbert, which has fascinated the Canadian director since childhood. The novelist created a feudal interstellar empire, where several siblings battle for control of a desert planet (named Dune), the sole source of a precious spice essential for space travel.

Herbert's environmental tale has never ceased to fascinate cinema, producing David Lynch's worst film (Dune, 1984), as well as providing George Lucas with the inspiration for Star Wars. If Villeneuve seems to be the only one to have mastered the abundant material so complex to adapt, it is partly because he has managed to retain its essence, sharing the same fascination for the desert as his favorite author.

'Images that escape the commercial machinery'

Davison first met Villeneuve in early 2022, when he was photographing actress Zendaya for the American magazine W. Alongside Timothée Chalamet, she plays one of the main roles in Villeneuve's diptych, which he fully intends to turn into a trilogy. A bond was quickly forged between the photographer and the director. The creator of First Contact (2016) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017) may be, along with Ridley Scott, a master of contemporary science fiction in cinema, but he is surprisingly accessible and attentive. He was the one who allowed the photographer to visit the Jordanian section of the shoot, which also took place in Abu Dhabi and, in a studio in Budapest, Hungary. "People have forgotten what this business is all about," said Davison.

Hollywood studios' growing control over their productions, and the way films are shot in the digital age (in front of a bluescreen, with the scenery added later on the graphics palette), means that on-set photography has lost some of its former prestige. This activity, which documents life on the set and can later be used to promote the film, provides an opportunity to develop a genuinely artistic vision. "Without Villeneuve's help, the studio [Warner] would never have let me work," said Davison. "For me, it was a question of producing images that escaped the commercial machinery. And I thought that, in this desert, there was a great opportunity to be seized."

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