Cinema in the desert

Wadi Rum’s landscape — alien, monumental, and photogenic in any light — has made it one of the most filmed locations on Earth. Four landmark productions have used it as a primary shooting location:

Lawrence of Arabia (David Lean, 1962): The film that introduced Wadi Rum to world cinema. Director David Lean spent months scouting Arabian locations and chose Rum specifically for its scale — he needed a landscape that could make human figures look genuinely small. The desert campaign sequences, including the famous charge on Aqaba and the long tracking shots of Peter O’Toole riding across open plains, were filmed here. The production was based in the valley for weeks; crew members’ accounts describe waking to the monoliths turning pink at sunrise, which gave Lean some of his most celebrated lighting setups. The film won seven Academy Awards.

The Martian (Ridley Scott, 2015): Wadi Rum doubled as Mars in its entirety. Production designer Arthur Max (who had worked with Scott on Gladiator and Black Hawk Down) chose it because its reddish iron-rich sandstone and flat gravel plains matched the colour palette of NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter photographs. Matt Damon and the production team filmed exterior sequences over six weeks; the Bedouin camps at the valley’s edge served as the production base. To reduce post-production colour grading, the location was chosen partly because it needed the least digital manipulation of any candidate site.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (Gareth Edwards, 2016): The desert sequences set on the planet Jedha — the Force-sensitive desert moon quarried for kyber crystals — were filmed at Wadi Rum. The valley’s scale and the interplay of sand plain and monolith gave the Jedha sequences their particular sense of a landscape scarred by occupation. The film’s visual effects team augmented the real location with digital city structures, but the ground and rock formations seen in the finished film are the actual geology of the valley.

Dune (Denis Villeneuve, 2021): Wadi Rum was the primary location for the desert planet Arrakis. Production designer Patrice Vermette spent six weeks scouting the valley and described the Siiq slot canyon and the 1,850-metre face of Jebel Um Ishrin as “Arrakis incarnate.” Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya filmed desert sequences here over several weeks, with the production employing hundreds of local Bedouin crew members and camel handlers. Villeneuve publicly credited the location as being essential to the film’s visual language: the sand is real, the rock is real, the wind is real — and that physical reality is what distinguishes the film’s desert from CGI alternatives.