In another timeline — in which Hollywood’s major studio honchos didn’t play hardball with writers and performers — Dune: Part Two would have come out around Thanksgiving. Instead it’s arriving in a few weeks from now. But that’s not all: There’s also a fancy new behind-the-scenes book en route. And guess what? It has poems by supporting player Josh Brolin.
Per Variety, the actor, who plays House Atreides weapons master Gurney Halleck, teamed up with cinematographer Greg Fraser for the coffee table book Dune: Exposures. Out on February 13, it boasts off-the-cuff photos from the shoot, shot by Fraser, accompanied by writing from Brolin.
“The writing is very different, tonally,” Brolin said. “Sometimes it’s tongue-in-cheek, sometimes it’s descriptive, sometimes it’s a dialogue and sometimes it’s a poem.”
One selection shared with Variety pairs a close-up of star Timothée Chalamet and his giant, floppy hair with a reflective ode by Brolin:
Your face is etched by adolescence.
Your cheekbones jump toward
what are youth-laden eyes that slide down
a prominent nose and onto lips of a certain poetry.And the way you hold my gaze
makes me fear my own age.because something in me tells me
you are going to offer me something and,
for now,
I’m not sure
it’s going to be
something
I want anymore.
Perhaps you weren’t expecting meditations on aging to be in a Dune coffee book, and yet here we are. One fan of Brolin’s writing is Fraser.
“When I read those words next to one of those images, it grows, it makes something more than what those images are by themselves,” Fraser told Variety. “And when there are words by themselves with no images, then it allows the next image to have context.”
Brolin shared another sample with Variety:
Brolin doesn’t have a favorite passage but says, “I love haikus.” He reads a passage from the book, “‘Lie down in the light, as fictional characters watch you from afar.’ I love that because it’s pointing out the fact that this is not real, but there’s nothing more real. The light is real, lying down is real, the sand is real, the experience is real, and yet, it’s this great contrasting thing.”
So there you go! Dune: Exposures is out on February 13 while Dune: Part Two hits theaters on March 1.
(Via Variety)