Danny Jarabek
Few franchises demand production design on the scale of Dune. The HBO Max prequel series, Dune: Prophecy expands on this massive worldbuilding with staggering ambition, and at the center of its visual identity is production designer Tom Meyer. Meyer and his team built worlds that have unique identities across different planets and those that inhabit them while also maintaining an intimate sense of tactility in every detail.
In conversation with Awards Radar, Meyer unpacks the collaborative relationship between his art department and visual effects, the computational methods behind the series’ architecture, and the philosophical frameworks guiding its aesthetic. From Greco-Roman columns reimagined through 3D modeling, to the ways inherited stone and wood evoke history in a sci-fi landscape, the design of Dune: Prophecy is a monumental achievement of production design.
Read our full conversation with production designer Tom Meyer below.
Hi, this is Danny Jarabek here with Awards Radar, and I’m very excited to have with me today, Tom Meyer, production designer for the HBO series Dune: Prophecy. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. I really appreciate it. I’m excited to hear more about this show. Congratulations on your recent Emmy nomination for it as well alongside a few other members of the crew.
Tom: Yeah, thank you, Danny. Thank you. I’m really excited for the recognition for the show and for the crew. The more than 1200 people that worked on the show just in my department alone, costumes, visual effects, and music. It’s really been a great experience, and I’m over the moon about the whole opportunity we’ve had to explore this world.
Well, I hope to explore that with you a little bit here today because it’s an immense world. It’s the world of Dune, one of the most prolific worlds ever put to text and now screen. Where did you start when you came to this project with the research process of immersing yourself in the world of Dune?
Tom: Well, that’s a great question, Danny. I mean, it is immense. If you think about it in terms of the touchstone that it is, it can be overwhelming. But ultimately, it’s a story, and it’s an epic story. So I start the same place I would normally start: you start with the characters. You start to break down what those relationships are between the characters. If you can identify them, the world is going to fill in around them. Before the ink was even dry on the contract, even before I had been formally offered the job, I called my researcher who I’ve worked with for years. I said, “I might have this job. Are you game?” She jumped right in. We started reading the books. I had started reading Sisterhood of Dune, but I realized actually there’s a trilogy before that trilogy, so we realized we had about six books to read. I wanted to go back and touch on the original Dune as well. This series was based on the first two trilogies that Brian Herbert had written starting with the Dune: The Butlerian Jihad, about 5,000 pages in total. So we created a two-person book club. We were reading and listening to audio at high speed and talking every night because we had a schedule to get through the books quickly in just a couple of months. The canon of Dune is important. You don’t want to go on a road trip without a good map, right? Because you don’t know where you’ll end up. But if you study the map and know where you’re going, you can deviate onto a side road because you have the confidence. Even if you don’t know where that dirt path goes, you know you’re headed in the right direction. By reading 5,000 pages and understanding the characters and their relationships, we even made our own genealogy chart of all the different families in the Dune universe, then added in new characters the writers created to link stories together. That gave us a solid foundation so we could cantilever into abstraction or creativity. Because ultimately we’re not making a documentary—we’re blending a lot of books to tell the essence of the story and make it entertaining. So we’re trying to push these things together. Again, in order to do that, you had to have the confidence. So when we were talking about Valya Harkonnen or Tula Harkonnen or the planet Lankiveil that they were banished to, all these things, you know where you’re going. You know who the Venports are. You know what their role is in supporting the Sisterhood and their transition from the Rossak planet to the new Wallach IX planet. So now I’m going super geeky. Why do I do all that stuff? Because you need to pull that history along with you. When you’re designing a space, you’re not just building a world, you’re framing it. Sometimes that frame has to be epic and big, literally galactic, where you’re seeing planets, moons, flora, fauna. But it also has to be able to frame two people or even one person, epic and intimate at the same time. We created research papers for each planet or character, helping us identify the different clans and separate them from one another, since the story takes place on four different planets with clans vying, warring, and sometimes loving each other. Mostly warring. You don’t want the audience to get confused. Everything needs its own identity.
There’s this incredible quality of the series that differentiates it from the recent Denis Villeneuve adaptations, which take place mostly on Arrakis. Here you really explore the wider Dune world and multiple planets with unique identities. You mentioned some of them: Wallach IX and Salusa Secundus, for example. How did you work to differentiate these worlds and the respective houses that inhabit them?
Tom: The books give you a great guide. Wallach IX is the refugee planet for the Sisterhood after they were banished following a failed attempt on the Corrino Emperor. That planet had beautiful descriptions in the books. It was irradiated from the wars with the machines, barren, with obsidian-like collapse from thermonuclear bombardments. We found a rock quarry to build the Sisterhood spaceport, with a massive spaceship portal and landing site. That gave it a monochromatic palette. The rest we built on stage or backlot, but we wanted epic exteriors where possible. Salusa Secundus, the capital where the leader of the 10,000 noble planets rules, was always described as the most Earth-like. I wanted it to be the opposite of Arrakis. On Arrakis, Chani can’t imagine a rainstorm or sea of water. On Salusa Secundus, water is everywhere, so it’s more Mediterranean. Lankiveil is the frozen planet, and so on. The important thing is in the Dune universe, Earth exists. Humans are human, not aliens. Shakespeare exists, Greek mythology exists, Roman-Greco architecture exists. That gives you a touchstone of commonality—people walk through doors, sit on furniture, eat and drink to sustain themselves. What it looks like can be different. Science fiction doesn’t mean slick and alien; it’s more of a state of mind or period. For Dune, we aimed for “primitive futurism.” Computers are outlawed, so everything is analog. You don’t see screens everywhere. That gave us a neo-Gothic, minimalist Gothic, or Zen Gothic style. It created a beauty and authenticity where through primitivism and minimalism you get a direct line to the character, without distractions.
You also mentioned locations in Budapest alongside immense built sets. How did you negotiate which settings to shoot on location versus which you built?
Tom: Two things. It was important to everyone—the studio, the showrunners, the creative team—that this world felt grounded and real. It needed accessibility, not artifice. We weren’t going to build a floor with a blue screen and create everything digitally. We wanted tactile quality. In the spirit of the books’ anti-computer ethos, we leaned into classical filmmaking: giant sets, practical builds, and using CG with beautiful visual effects which are also nominated to extend what we couldn’t build, not substitute. So we were working in a hand-in-hand teamwork approach. The art department you ran was a full three-dimensional department with amazing artists across concept, art direction, and modeling. All those environments, like the Sisterhood and the planet, were fully modeled — the entire campus with all its buildings. We didn’t just say, “We’ll do this and let them figure it out in post.” We figured it all out. We designed it, pre-vised it, and gave visual effects assets they could up-res, improve, and expand from. They had a strong foundation, so when we started shooting, everybody knew what the world was. When the actors walked on set, they weren’t imagining it — they saw it. Then they could go interior, focus on their performance, listen to their fellow actors, respond to lines, and not worry about eye lines or what they were supposed to be looking at. The entire palace was built, the courtyards were four stories tall, the spaceport was there, the overhangs were there, the ships were parked, the entrances were complete. The important parts were all physically there. I can’t make a full ship, of course — I did the front of the ship, but not the full length. Visual effects handled that, which was the beauty of the partnership. That’s why it worked so well. When we wanted to go big, reframe, and step back, there was enough grit on the canvas — enough tooth — that the audience never had to fall into an uncanny valley between real and not real. Even when doing extensions, we had enough middle and background elements to blur the line. It was a true partnership in that respect.
You’ve mentioned the Machine War a few times, and I’m curious about how you referenced it. It’s the opening of the series, a defining event for so many characters, relationships, and worlds. How did you balance it as something from the past while keeping it a defining feature of the present and future as well?
Tom: I love that question because it was very considered. In the palace, for instance, we asked: what does a Corinthian column look like in 10,000 years? How does an architrave or bas-relief develop? We used classical Greco-Roman proportions and ideas, stretching or blending them, but keeping the structure and composition. We used stone and materials that felt real, with an oil-rubbed quality that develops sheen from centuries of touch. But the design of those columns was computational. We modeled them in ZBrush and Blender, using CNC and 3D printing, then casting with molds. Computational means mathematical and methodical, so you look at it and wonder, “How did they make that?” The throne room columns are massive and pixelated, and we left the machining marks visible. You see the hand of the machine. We didn’t want to gloss or smooth it too much. That roughness makes it believable. For the Sisterhood, their inherited industrial buildings used repeated blocks of geometric shapes. I thought about sci-fi panels — glossy, slick, metallic with tick lines and cut lines — and stripped that down to primitive geometry. The audience intuitively knows sci-fi design language, but we made it out of stone instead of metal. That flips the expectation. It’s not fantasy with fluted columns and twirls; it’s still science fiction, but a measured, analytical futurism built from old materials like stone and wood. That gives accessibility, commonality, history, and weight. It ties back to character. In the palace, I wanted it to look rich, like an emperor lives there. In the scene where he is crowned, sun beams through above him like a laurel crown. Architecture bolsters character.
It’s an incredible process, and I’m grateful to hear more about it. I’ve always been a big Dune fan, and I was thrilled this project came to fruition. Thanks so much for your time, Tom. Best of luck moving forward. I’m excited for season two, and congratulations on all the recognition for you and your team.
Tom: I really appreciate it, Danny. It means a lot to me and the team. I’ve enjoyed sharing the work so many people put into making this happen. I’m glad you’re excited for the next season — we’re working on it now, and I think it will blow people’s socks off.
I hope I get the chance to talk to you again next time around.
Tom Meyer: Absolutely. That would be my pleasure and I hope my good fortune too.
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