the early television speaker technology was closer in design to a telephone: built to maximize vocal range over other things. But in Cinema we’re a lot more free. This was mixed in Dolby Atmos, native. So sound was always a very key strategy.

I think TV is so dialogue-driven because in the early days, you couldn’t really have very cinematic images. You’re just looking at a small screen. What are you gonna do? You gotta tell me the story with talking.

our aim in Dune, which is a vast ensemble piece with a complex story and complex backgrounds and Frank Herbert’s almost fractal approach to storytelling, we had to have utter clarity and delivery of ideas.

There’s been some recent discussion about burdensome amounts of dialogue in film because of the influence of Television. From my background in Britain, it’s probably something I recognize more as the heritage of Radio and Theater rather than Television.

What’s the pace, the overall pace of a film? When I say pace, I don’t just mean how fast the cuts are. I mean what is moving you, underneath? What is the big drive in the story and how do we cross-cut those? If you cut off the flow too soon, it’s just an age old editing conundrum.  In TV often – Mad Men for example is constantly doing the Chinese plate trick of going between different story strands, keeping each plate spinning, and that works in TV because of the medium.

in a feature film where you want a strong feeling of drive, it’s sometimes a better idea to kind of combine stories or to let them flow. I’m basically playing with Paul’s story, the Harkonnen story, and on Jessica laying “the Way." Irulan’s diaries always gave us an opportunity to clarify their progress. And to that end, Denis shot a beautiful amount of material of the diary room.

There wer so many more angles than we needed because he knew that we might need to improvise one [a diary scene] and we did.