Sharon Duncan Brewster on Dune, Frank Herbert, and the Way He Wrote Powerful Women

With director Denis Villeneuve’s Dune now playing around the world and streaming for free on HBO Max, I recently got to speak with Sharon Duncan Brewster about making the incredible movie. As most of you know, Dune is based on the hugely influential sci-fi novel of the same name by Frank Herbert. In the film, we follow Timothée Chalamet’s Paul Atreides, whose family inherits custody over the planet Arrakis (or the titular “Dune“), an unforgiving desert world that also hosts the only source of something known as melange, or “spice,“ the most valuable material in the known universe. Meanwhile, a plot is brewing against the Atreides from a rival family known as the Harkonnens, and the fate of Dune is eventually at stake, but Paul himself might be at the center of a long-foretold prophecy even he doesn’t understand yet. The film also stars Oscar Isaac as Paul’s father Duke Leto Atreides, Zendaya as Chani, Rebecca Ferguson as Paul’s mother Lady Jessica, Josh Brolin as G