IGN’s Path to Dune continues this week with director/co-writer Denis Villeneuve’s exclusive breakdown of the Gom Jabbar test scene, which you can watch in either the player above or via the embed below.
The scene, which takes place early in Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi novel, sees Timothée Chalamet’s protagonist Paul Atreides meeting with Charlotte Rampling’s Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohaim, the leader of the Bene Gesserit religious order that's one of the greatest political forces in the galaxy. The scene also briefly features Rebecca Ferguson as Lady Jessica, Paul’s mother and a member of the Bene Gesserit. Through a combination of mental conditioning and consumption of the spice Melange, the Bene Gesserit have honed their minds and gained superhuman abilities.
Their leader, Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, is obsessed with using selective breeding to produce an all-powerful Bene Gesserit superhuman called the Kwisatz Haderach. Years before, she sent Lady Jessica to be Duke Leto's concubine and produce that daughter, but instead, Jessica bore him a son, Paul. Now, the time has come to test Paul to see if the powers he has inherited from his mother give him the potential to be the Kwisatz Haderach.
In this scene, Paul undergoes the first of several rites of passage by placing his hand inside a torture box while the Reverend Mother holds a poisoned needle called the Gom Jabbar to his neck. Only by keeping his hand in place and enduring the psychological pain can he prove himself to be a man rather than an animal. Should he speak or remove his hand from the box then the Reverend Mother will kill him with the Gom Jabbar. It’s a crucial sequence that hints at the grand destiny awaiting Paul.
“It's a very important scene, where we learn about the Bene Gesserit power, this female congregation that is the most powerful power in Dune. And that's where we learn about a secret, something that would be revealed about Paul's identity,” Villeneuve explains in his commentary.
“It's a scene that I was very excited to shoot, with the great Charlotte Rampling and with Timothée Chalamet. And it was one of the very first scenes I shot with Timothée. And as I was shooting the scene, the character of Paul is going through a transformation, a bit like an exorcism. The Reverend Mother pushed the envelope a bit too much, and she will provoke and awaken a force inside Paul that he is not aware of. And it's really a transformative process.”
Villeneuve said filming this particular scene made him realize just how well he had chosen his lead actor: “I witnessed in front of the camera this transformation [from] Timothée, which was really amazing and very powerful moment for me, because I realized that I had chosen the perfect actor to be Paul Atreides.”
For more on the upcoming sci-fi epic, check out our Dune review as well as our previous Path to Dune exclusives breaking down House Atreides, the Fremen, and House Harkonnen.
Dune opens in the US on October 22, October 21 in the UK and in Australia on December 2.