Jon Spaihts, Co-writer of 'Dune: Part Two' Talks about the Process of Adapting Such a Challenging Novel

Jon Spaihts began his career with the written word, but made his name with the Hollywood Black List and has come through some of the hottest properties on the big screen as a screenwriter. He’s worked in big franchise worlds ranging from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, co-writing Doctor Strange, to the Alien franchise, turning in a draft of Prometheus, and has been in high demand since. He took home an Academy Award nomination for his work as a co-writer alongside director Denis Villeneuve for Dune: Part One and returned for the elegantly scripted Dune: Part Two which hit screens earlier in 2024.

Spaihts sat down to talk with Script magazine about how they tackled the adaptation and what their guiding lights during the process were.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

SCRIPT Magazine: Looking at a story like Dune and Dune: Part Two and looking at Frank Herbert's novel, exposition is going to be a huge thing. It seems like you manage to walk people very easily into that with both of these screenplays, but it seems like with Dune: Part Two, where you had to catch people up on where Dune: Part One left off, but still move them deeper into the universe, you might have had a harder task. I’m wondering, as a screenwriter, how that got approached from that perspective?

Jon Spaihts: [Dune: Part One] inevitably had the burden of introduction, so we were obliged to familiarize an audience with a very intricately imagined fictional universe and so there are a bunch of scenes in the early part of Part One that are fun, dramatic scenes in their own right, but that also serve as primers. The great challenge there is that while novels in general are much more interior than films, Dune particularly is an exceptionally interior book. As a reader, you spend an enormous amount of time listening to people think and have feelings. You're privy to their streams of consciousness, their streams of thought, which is a deeply un-cinematic way to tell a story. 

[Frank] Herbert also has a practice in Dune of skipping over very important external events, big pieces of action, journeys, and battles, and then filling you in on what happened in flashbacks and recollections after the fact. Many of those recollections are just the memories of people who were there, and you listen to them remembering what happened to them. 

We had to unbend that hairpin in the telling of Dune: Part One. There are scenes on Caladan that essentially do the work of the interior monologues of characters, and we created externalized scenes that let us show the shape of the world and how the Atreides family was ordered to Arrakis and to give up their homeworld of Caladan.

Related: Interview with 'Wicked' Writer Winnie Holzman

In Dune: Part Two, we didn't have the same burden because Part One had done so much of the work, so we were much more free to just tell a story. But we did have an interesting wrinkle in making the transition from the first film to the second. There are two big transitions in the middle of the novel, and they don't line up. One is at the breakpoint between the two films. House Atreides is destroyed. Paul and Jessica are driven into the desert. And that is Paul's transition from the world of the Great Houses, which is where Part One is set, and the world of the Fremen and the Arrakeen desert, which is where Part Two is set.

Paul and Jessica, in the novel, are thrown out to the desert, find their way to the Fremen, and then secure a place among them, and having secured a place among them, we leap into the future. A few years go by, and that's the second obvious break point between the two books. What we had to do was essentially tease apart the passage between them being ejected into the desert and the time jump into the future and figure out what parts naturally belonged in Part One and what parts naturally belonged in Part Two. The thing that really needed to happen in Part One was Paul completing a kind of journey. Dune is the story of coming of age and the conclusion of Paul's journey in Part One is, to a certain extent, becoming a man.

That meant that the knife fight with Jamis, where he has to take a life in hot combat for the first time ever needed to become a crowning piece of that action. And Paul taking the reins of his relationship with Jessica and of his own destiny, and making a decision about how he would proceed into the future, no longer to be guided by his mother's advice or go where he was told, but to decide what he thought his destiny was. Those pieces became the end of Part One.

But to have them go all the way to Tabara and meet the Fremen people, to find out the crisis of Jessica needing to find a place for herself inside the tribe, and her deciding to become a Reverend Mother, and the visions that Paul has as part of that experience. All of that, if it were at the end of Part One, would feel like a fourth act, the beginning of a new story that belongs to the journey in Part Two. 

So we shove those things into the second half of the movie and then the one piece we inherited because we needed to pick up where we left off at the end of Part One, was the need to reorient people that were still in the aftermath of the battle with Jamis, that we were still on our way to siege, that were still hot on the heels of the destruction of House Atreides.

SCRIPT Magazine: Dune: Part Two covers a lot of ground and Paul, as a character, resists his change a lot. When he does change, it feels very dramatic. More so than I think any of the other adaptations of the material have been able to communicate. I'm wondering, as you're charting Paul's course, what was the underlying philosophy as you were putting that down on paper?

Jon Spaihts: There were a couple of things combining there. One is something Denis [Villeneuve] has spoken about often, which is that Frank Herbert himself had some regret about the way the novel Dune was executed. He richly describes the moral tensions under which Paul is laboring over the course of the story, and he's very sympathetic to the plight of the Fremen people, and to the danger of Paul as an imperialist, as a savior figure, as an outsider becoming the master of the Fremen's destiny, but in the end, by allowing Paul to defeat his enemies and consolidate his power at the end of the novel. 

It's easy to read that as a white male savior story in a world filled with important women and brown native people. I think Herbert, looking back at the way the novel was received, had regrets about how some of that was framed and he spoke about that and wrote a whole book about it called Dune Messiah, in which he muddied the waters considerably. 

Denis and I took not just as license but as an imperative to stir that nuanced and muddied vision of this series of events into the action of the first novel as we adapted it. And truly, Paul, from the beginning uses, clear language about this. He is worried about his terrible purpose. From the earliest pages of the book, he can feel the possibility of becoming something awful, of being drawn into terrible events, of becoming a dark force. And he is aware of being a chess piece on a board, being pushed around by external forces, some of which come from the Imperium and some from the Bene Gesserit order, and some from his enemies and the enemies of his father, the Harkonnens, and their allies. He's aware of his quality. He knows that he is good, that he's been raised with the Atreides code, that he is a person of honor, that he means well, and that he loves the people he loves truly. 

Related: The Manipulation of Stories and Specificity of Character with 'Dune: Prophecy' Showrunner Alison Schapker

But he can also feel the potential to become something terrible. And indeed, as his gift awakens in him, there's almost an inevitability of it. Meaning that if you can see the future, if you see possible courses and can choose between them, there is no way to avoid playing God. And as soon as he can see distant eventualities, we see him beginning to choose painful courses in the present that hurt or wrong people around him, because they will achieve some greater good somewhere down the road or even very, very far down the road. 

This is arguably a wickedness. It is certainly playing God. It is his terrible purpose manifesting itself. He knows. He sees that to exercise the powers that are available to him will change him, will darken him, that he cannot avoid being affected by it. But in the end, he sees no way to save the Fremen people, to avenge his house, to thwart his enemies. That does not involve claiming those birthrights. So he does claim them. He accepts the power, knowing that the thing he is accepting is a terrible purpose and that it will make him himself terrible.

SCRIPT Magazine: I want to ask about the collaborative effort of the screenwriting here. What the process was like for Dune: Part One, how it evolved, and did that change as you stepped into Part Two?

Jon Spaihts: There was a real evolution. In Part One, we started more conventionally. There was a kind of script in progress when I came aboard that Denis Villeneuve had built out of work he did with Eric Roth. Eric had written some very large scripts for Part One which I never saw. I saw a document Denis was working on, which was a tight 119 pages and was built out of things that Eric had written and out of things that Denis was writing on his own. But it wasn't there yet, and our timeline was very short. The production machinery was already in motion, and they had commitments.

When I was brought on board, one of the things they asked me was how fast I could get this done. Out of necessity, because of that compressed timeline, I went straight to the book and I anatomized the first half of it [and] made a very fussy spreadsheet of every single scene in it, so that I understood its workings. I charted my course through that, and I did a clean adaptation from the book to the page. 

And then I pivoted back to Denis's document, and there were these big chunks of it where I could feel him directing. I could see the visual invention that he had a way into these scenes and a way he wanted to do them. And I grabbed all that material, and I smooshed it into the document that I had made, and created a hybrid document that had all of that visual filmmaking that Denis was doing. 

That storytelling and those scenes and the scaffold that I had lifted straight from the novel was our starting point. It got us greenlit all the way and storming into production, but there was still more work to do.

And so what began then was an iterative process of very tight collaboration. The first time it happened, I flew to Montreal, where Denis lives, and I shacked up in a hotel down the road from his house. He was already working there with department heads and doing early prep work from home. He would come to my hotel suite and we'd sit at the table from nine in the morning until two or three in the afternoon, and we would just talk about the script and talk story, and then he would leave and go have meetings with department heads, and I would start typing. I would type until midnight or one and rewrite all the stuff we just talked about and I would send him my pages and go to sleep. And in the morning he, having read the pages, would come over and we would do it again. In that intensive way, working around the clock, we were able to do a complete revision of a script in 8 or 10 days.

I enjoyed the incredible benefit of that arrangement, which was that I had essentially a telepathic link with my director during that time. Often, when you're working with a director and you're moving into production, you're constantly trying to intuit and to see what your director's going to want, what the vision is that you're trying to serve. And because we were talking so much every day, I knew and it freed me to write quickly and to go fast at the cost of no small amount of sleep. So in ten days in Montreal, we turned the whole draft around and they carried on into production. 

Related: Novelist Turned Showrunner Blake Crouch Dives into the Sci-Fi Realm of 'Dark Matter'

Then the whole production moved to Budapest, where the soundstages were, and carried on with prep, and I ended up doing that twice more in Budapest, where I’d fly out, live in a hotel, and Denis would come to the hotel suite and we'd talk until [the] afternoon and I'd write until night. By the end of these weeks, I would just be starting to slide. So I'd end up writing until three or four in the morning and sending him pages and then sleeping until almost noon. He'd come over and I'd be upside down, but we got it done, and each time we were able to do a full revision of the script together in a fairly short time. That was Part One. 

Then, of course, in post-production, Denis, being a capable writer on his own, made other tweaks on set and in post, which I was occasionally involved in, but often not. He would just do his thing. 

Part Two is different for two main reasons. One is that I think Denis had become much more confident and masterful writer through the work on Part One and he'd simply raised his game and was much happier making pages happen himself. But the other thing was, we'd done that tight roundtable so much on the first movie that I felt we spoke a common tongue, and it was easier for us to work separately and not worry that we had divergent visions because we agreed so deeply on the direction things needed to go.

SCRIPT Magazine: If you were giving advice to anybody adapting a book as dense as Dune, what would that key bit of advice be?

Jon Spaihts: I think you need to be a devout follower of one guide star. You just need to decide what that guide star is. The only way to fit this novel into even two movies was to decide what we were talking about, what story are we really telling? And Denis and I decided very early on that we were telling the story of Paul and Paul and Jessica truly. But, you know, if you must choose one, you're choosing Paul's story and you're going to tell the audience for sure only what they need to know to understand the stakes of Paul's journey, his feelings, his experience, everything that he comes to do along the way. 

And then even Paul's destiny is complex in this story. We decided that of all the pieces of his destiny that mattered, it is the Bene Gesserit thread that is at the heart of the book. He is also what the book calls a Mentat, a hypercalculator. He is a deft political player and military commander because of the education his father gave him, and those things are very important parts of the book, but it is his Bene Gesserit nature and destiny that truly runs through the spine of Dune. And so we explicitly consecrated ourselves to frame that at the heart of the story, having that as the bright guide star. This is Paul Atreides's story. It is the story of his Bene Gesserit destiny that helped us make the hard decisions we had to make along the way.

SCRIPT Magazine: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me. As a fan of the book, for as long as I can remember reading, you guys did it really well.

Jon Spaihts: Well, thank you, I appreciate it. We are both that kind of fan of the book as well. And it's why it mattered so much for us to get it right.

Dune: Part Two is currently streaming on Max.

Bryan Young is a filmmaker, writer, and teacher. His latest short film, The Lost Boys, is currently on the festival circuit and has won numerous awards. You can learn more about him at his website.