Legendary director Douglas Trumbull talks to Graham Jones about what moviemakers and scientists can learn from each other
Douglas Trumbull has spent more than 50 years at the technological cutting edge of moviemaking – from his iconic special effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), The Andromeda Strain (1971), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Star Trek: the Motion Picture (1979), Blade Runner (1982) and The Tree of Life (2011), to his directorial work on the cult classics Silent Running (1972) and Brainstorm (1983). Now 77, the moviemaking legend admits he is “a complete outlier and weirdo relative to the entrenched motion-picture industry”. Indeed, he says he feels “much better understood by scientists and mathematicians than by studio executives”.
Trumbull’s career began on the short film To the Moon and Beyond (1964), which transports the viewer from Earth out to the entire universe before zooming back down to the atomic scale. Recorded at 18 frames per second using a fish-eye wide-angle lens on 70 mm film – a technique dubbed Cinerama 360° – the movie was projected onto a domed exhibit at the New York World’s Fair in 1964. Impressed by the special effects, director Stanley Kubrick hired Trumbull to work on 2001.
Since the 1980s he’s been based in rural Massachusetts, where Trumbull Studios is experimenting with new ways of making and showing films. These include a prototype 70-seat “pod” featuring advanced digital-projection technology as well as a slightly curved, torus-shaped cinema screen. “The work that I’m doing is predicated upon a belief that there’s an intrinsically, vitally important link between the medium itself and the movie experience you can deliver to audiences,” Trumbull says. “Kubrick was very conscious of this, he talked to me about it a lot. That has stayed with me forever.”
Trumbull’s entire career has been a learning curve. Or, as he puts it, “a hybrid of science, technology, and the drama and art form of movies”. It has also given him a unique perspective on the worlds of filmmaking and science, and the way that practitioners in one area can learn from those in the other. He cites, for example, his work on Terrence Malick’s epic The Tree of Life, which includes a 17-minute “creation” sequence showing the birth of stars and evolution of life on Earth.
“Terry is very scientific and well studied,” Trumbull says, pointing to Malick’s ability to understand, say, the fluid dynamics of two galaxies colliding. “He would go to a supercomputing lab at a major university and see if they had something like that. And sure enough, there were experimental movies made by weighting each star with a certain gravitational pull and having them interact in a scientifically valid way.”
Unfortunately, those simulations were, says Trumbull, “weirdly underwhelming, because they were only as good as the mathematical algorithms”, which prompted him and Malick to try something new. “By using real fluids in a real liquid, or real gases and explosive lights – and filming that with high-speed cameras at a thousand frames a second – we would find much more intuitively natural-looking effects than anything we could create with a computer.”
That ability to turn abstract thoughts into visual form is a skill that filmmakers share with scientists. For instance, Trumbull is about to start making a film about the engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla. “One of the aspects of Tesla’s nature was that he saw everything in his mind long before he manifested it in reality,” says Trumbull. “He could see things so vividly that, when he was developing some idea, he didn’t draw or build anything until his mind had completed the project – pre-visualized it. And this enabled him to understand more completely how one magnetic field would interact with another to create the Tesla coil, for example.”
At the same time, Tesla’s story provides a cautionary note about the limits of visualization, Trumbull warns. “In the later years of his life Tesla made some significant mistakes by believing that what was imagined in his mind was always accurate. He believed he could scale up a Tesla coil to the Wardenclyffe Tower [an experimental wireless station in New York] and transmit energy around the world, which I don’t think was ever going to work.”
Turning science to movie magic
One intriguing collision between the make-believe world of movies and real life is Blade Runner. Trumbull’s visual effects helped give the film its famously futuristic feel, but the story’s setting – Los Angeles, November 2019 – is no longer the distant future; it’s now. While not everything predicted in that film – flying cars, human-like robots and 3D holographic billboards – has been realized, “a lot of Blade Runner has come true but in a different form”, Trumbull says, pointing to the growing impact of artificial intelligence (AI). “AI is one of the most compelling topics of discussion in our society – and it’s evolved over time in such a way you don’t notice.”
Significantly, Blade Runner predicted a shift in our relationship with technology. “The resistance exerted by the AI beings – against the limit in their lifespan – is very much like 2001,” says Trumbull, pointing to the fictional crew’s decision in that movie to shut down the HAL computer. “The dying of HAL was really tragic. The fact that the audience could empathize with HAL more than they could empathize with the human characters in the movie is really telling. I think we’re going to see more and more of that. You’re going to feel bad when your vacuum cleaner dies.”
