He invented modern special effects with his work on 2001. Now Douglas Trumbull believes that the future of special effects is beyond movies.
A mere 30 years ago, there were no personal computers. Laptops were a fantasy; even Pong, the triceratops of computer games, was years away. Still, the mid-1960s were the can-do days of American technology, and when Stanley Kubrick decided to make a science fiction film called Journey Beyond the Stars, he wanted it to look real - real in a way that no sci-fi film had ever looked before. Kubrick recalled a documentary he'd seen in the Travel and Transportation pavilion at the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair. Graphic Films, which specialized in making space industrials for NASA and the US Air Force, had produced the movie, and one of its visionaries was a 23-year-old named Douglas Trumbull. Trumbull eventually became one of the four special effects supervisors hired by Kubrick to realize his own vision - a film ultimately renamed 2001: A Space Odyssey. Over the past three decades, Trumbull has become the godfather of other-worldly special effects. His credits include The Andromeda Strain, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner,as well as Silent Running and Brainstorm,both of which he also directed. Trumbull is now vice chair of IMAX - arguably the world's cutting-edge producer of immersive cinema - as well as president and CEO of Ridefilm Corporation, which produces motion-simulation experiences.
Wired:
2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the most beautiful films ever made. It has a sense of being shot on location that may have come partly from the analog special effects you used back then. Do you think 2001 would be as beautiful if it had been made today using digital effects?
Trumbull: Yes. My particular aesthetic of light and color and design wouldn't change as a result of working with computer graphics rather than with slit scan or miniatures. There's a consistency in my work that pops up independent of the limitations of the technology.
What was the greatest technical challenge of working on 2001?
The biggest challenge, and the most satisfying for me, was the Star Gate sequence [in which astronaut Dave Bowman is transported,
via the monolith, into an alternate universe]. It was the point where things became much more abstract and less literal than in the bulk of the film, which was hardcore rockets and space and planets - all a fairly straightforward evolution from what I had been doing before.
If you could do it over again with the technology you have now, would your approach to that sequence be different?
Clearly, if we'd had the kind of computer graphics capability then that we have now, the Star Gate sequence would be much more complex than flat planes of light and color. It probably would have gotten into a lot of weird geometries, and turns, and shifts of angle. I just had a straight track and some straight pieces of glass. The technology of the time dictated the way things looked.
What was your relationship to HAL?
My first job on 2001 was to make all of the HAL readouts: the 16 screens that surround HAL's eyes. They actually were rear-projected films - I made all of them. But as far as the concept of HAL, who HAL was, his character - I had no role in creating him.
Did computer companies help with designing HAL?
IBM was the original contractor for much of the computer interface design on the film. There were IBM logos designed for the film, and there were IBM design consultants working with Kubrick on the layout of the controls and computer screens. It was only when they found out that HAL was going to go apeshit and kill the whole crew that IBM pulled out of the project and all the logos came off.
How does your work today differ from that of 30 years ago?
When I worked on 2001 - which was my first feature film - I was deeply and permanently affected by the notion that a movie could be like a first-person experience. That the movie could be an immersive experience. 2001 was structured in a way that it doesn't grab you because of its plot construct, or its suspense, or its dramatic narrative mechanisms. It was an immersive visual experience, in 70mm, on giant Cinerama screens. And it actually became, toward the end of the film, a first-person experience. The normal editorial process just went away, and you, as an audience member, sort of became Dave Bowman and went on this trip.
That deeply affected me, and it began my commitment to movies as an immersive experience. In the ensuing 30 years, I've found that it has been harder and harder to make immersive movies because we've multiplexed cinemas into showing films on small, flat screens. The giant, 70mm curved screen format went away, so the palette for delivering immersive cinematic experiences became nonexistent.
I finally came to the revelation that the future of the cinema, in terms of an immersive experience, was occurring outside of mainstream cinema - in theme park rides and attractions and world's fairs. Those were the only places I could ever get the money to continue to work in large formats. That's why I deflected my career from making 35mm, drama-based features to experimenting with these new mediums in alternate venues.
Where do you suppose the next big leap in immersive technology will come from?
In terms of the near future of immersive cinematic entertainment, it's clearly happening at IMAX. That's why I joined the company. Everything in the IMAX theaters is perfected way beyond anything that was ever achieved during the best days of Cinerama.
At present I'm developing an alien contact film project - along with a playwright named Constance Congdon - that'll be shot in 3-D. I hope to get it shot in IMAX and on the screens by next year.
So what will the next big leap be?
I honestly believe that the next big leap in immersive technology will be very much like Brainstorm. We're not that far from being able to plant images, memories, and emotional states directly into the brain. I think that the whole business of stereophonic sound and virtual reality glasses are a transitory state.
And I've had it confirmed to me - just in the last month - that very powerful work is going on in this direction right now. I visited a scientist who had a helmet with magnetic fields controlled by computer sequences that could profoundly affect your mood and your perceptions.
There's some work out there that's going into some really amazing territory.
