Written by Josh Brolin

Photography by Greig Fraser

Titan, out now

Artists from both sides of the camera, cinematographer Greig Fraser and actor Josh Brolin team up to try to capture the unique feeling of making the two extraordinary movies.

This high end art book asks a lot of you, both in terms of price and approach. It’s a beautiful book, precisely built and printed in the same way the colossal movies were but its success lies in how personal it is. Fraser, a remarkable cinematographer, is just as gifted with a stills camera and this collection gives us a sense of the places and people behind the movies. There’s a clear skew towards Dune part 1 here (Brolin at one point references never being on set when Batista was there. They have scenes together in Part 2) but there’s still more than enough from the second movie to satisfy the curious. Fraser’s candids are especially good, catching Brolin and Chalamet laughing in the desert shade, Florence Pugh dervishing her away around the set like a regal tornado and Zendaya’s relentless calm. He also gets us a real sense of the size and scale of the movie and the locations. The figures are perpetually tiny dots on vast landscapes. The endeavour is always vast. The personal moments at the core of it all the louder for that. There are some lovely dots to connect too. After a recent interview where Zendaya mentioned Villeneuve told her to do ‘sci-fi shit’ with the buttons of the props, that note is photographed, scrawled on a post-it out of shot. Arrakis is vast and intimidating. But always built by people.

Brolin’s prose is where those people snap into focus. There’s something of Hemingway to his lean, sparse prose and something more of Gurney Halleck, the unflappable Atreides Warmaster and the veteran character actor meeting somewhere out on the dunes. Brolin is as talented a writer as he is an actor, using negative space and prose structured like verse as comfortably as anecdotes. We get snapshots of his fondness for his castmates (Brolin and Javier Bardem in particular are clearly inseparable) and the good-natured horror he feels at being a ‘veteran’. But we also get moments that hit with the precision and weight of a sandstorm. The exhaustion and elation, the euphoria and horror of making art out in the wild caught again and again. This in particular stays with me:

sand, sink, step, slog, burn,

onwardly we are pulled toward

the experiment

Verdict: This experiment is a success. Unique, heartfelt, beautiful and an excellent companion to the movie. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart