Douglas Trumbull is nearly 70, but the special effects whiz behind classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey says he's launching a new phase in his filmmaking career.
Trumbull is being honoured with a special career achievement Academy Award at the Science and Technical Oscars this weekend, and was given another lifetime honour by the Visual Effects Society earlier this week.
But he says that despite winning Oscars for his work on films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, he wasn't able to accomplish everything that he wanted to in Hollywood.
"I was a very young, impressionable guy when I was working on 2001 with Stanley Kubrick. And here it was, Cinerama, 90-foot screens, deeply curved screens. And he was trying to make this immersive experience that took you into space, and made you a participant in the movie," Trumbull said. "I said 'Sign me up. I'd like to do it.' But the movie industry subsequently went into the multiplex industry and actually shrunk the theatres, shrunk the screens, went back to 35-millimeter, abandoned 70-millimeter. So that spectacular showmanship of Cinerama just disappeared from the marketplace. Now we can get that back, and I feel that it's kind of my job to get back in the fray and bring it to fruition."
Trumbull turned down a request from George Lucas to supervise special effects on Star Wars because he was focused on his own career as a director (Silent Running, Brainstorm). But when Brainstorm fell apart after the death of star Natalie Wood, Trumbull ran into problems with his other projects, and eventually decided to move to Massachusetts and work outside the mainstream film industry.
Trumbull briefly helped lead IMAX and created immersive theme park simulators, including one based on Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future film franchise.
"I'm always pushing the envelope. I'm always kind of outside the mainstream," he said. "A lot of the stuff I was doing in visual effects was outside the mainstream. I had some big successes with movies I worked on. But over the years I just continued to be very disappointed and frustrated that the movie industry wasn't embracing what it was that I wanted to do."
Now, Trumbull is pushing a blending of new technologies - higher frame-rates, brighter projection, bigger screens - to improve the movie-going experience. And he's going to direct his own movie to demonstrate its potential.
Film is traditionally shot in 24 frames-per-second, but high-level filmmakers are starting to embrace higher frame rates in an effort to reduce on-screen blur and create richer 3D images. Peter Jackson is filming his two Hobbit films at 48 frames-per-second and James Cameron is considering shooting his two Avatar sequels at 60 frames-per-second.
Trumbull wants to go beyond that.
"Just in the same way that Jim Cameron used Avatar to show that 3D was really a whole new palette of filmmaking, I think I can demonstrate (120 fps)," he said. "I know it's feasible. I'm doing it every day. I have it in my studio. I'm seeing 120 frame 3D on my own screen in my own lab. And it's mind-boggling. So I have to make a movie and say, 'OK here it is. Here's what this looks like, folks. Decide if you like it or not.'"
Trumbull's film is a space adventure that he says will take place over 100 years in the future and will immerse audiences like his simulator work and like he says "2001" did at the time of its release.
"It's going to invite the audience to become part of the adventure. And I wouldn't do this film if I didn't have this new palette of giant screens and high brightness and high frame rates to enable this kind of participatory cinema that I want to explore," he said.
Trumbull, who is also pitching his own small studio on the East Coast to other filmmakers, says he thinks the combination of new, bigger screens, better projectors and film shot at high frame-rates can give a jolt to the industry that he had mostly left behind nearly three decades ago.
"That'll get people back into theatres, because the experience will unleash that $200 million production value that Hollywood is producing with blockbusters, but which is being filtered down to too small and too dim an image right now," he said.
AP