Dune - Stillsuits (1984)

One of the most interesting things about designing Dune was solving the stillsuit.
The stillsuit is the essential central thing of the movie. To me it seemed that it should
have a sort of futuristic, aboriginal quality so they were almost tribal
Every single suit was hand made
He had to do body casts from which we made fibreglass forms
and then from there we would draw the pattern in chalk on the unitard
and start cutting from the patterns of each form rubber section
laid them on, one by one,
until we got all the understructure built including the tubing.
We would brush coat it then with a thick latex
and then spray coat it with another thinner latex for a final seal.
At that put it in an oven where it would just help the latex dry.
The women had to obviously have breasts rather than, sort of, pecs
I so I did a sort of a female version, and we did children versions of it too.
They were really quite confortable, until of course you got them out
in the hot sun and the desert you know at 110 degrees and started
running around and fighting battles and sweating in them
I think down in Mexico they would call them death suits
Max Von Sydow was standing there in the desert hot
and his figure tips were dripping sweat
and I asked him if he was confortable and was it all OK
and he said no it was absolute hell, but he looked so good I'll put it with it
That's how they felt about it, all the men had the body they never had
you know, they had got muscles suddenly so they loved it
And I was determined that the Stillsuit was going to be very sexy.