Top 22 Douglas Trumbull Quotes

There was every reason to honestly say that 3D was a gimmick. And it’s largely true. And it’s largely pretty bad. When you put a filter in front of the projector, and you put on your glasses and cut the light in half again, the movies are dim as hell, and they give you headaches and eye strain, and it’s terrible.

My first job on 2001 was to make all of the HAL readouts: the 16 screens that surround HAL’s eyes.

It’s not appropriate to a love story, or – there are a million stories you could think of that don’t need 3D. A lot of movies don’t even need color!

Peter Jackson is a real big hero of mine because he had the nerve to make ‘The Hobbit’ at 48 frames per second.

I learned a lot on ‘2001.’

I’d formed a research and development company under the banner of Paramount Pictures back in about 1975, and its mandate was to explore advanced forms of entertainment, not just movies.

I got hooked on immersive cinema when I worked on ‘2001,’ which was initially shown on these Cinerama screens, which were all 90 feet wide and deeply curved.

Movies used to be called the ‘flicks’ because they flickered badly: because 16 or 18 frames a second – which was those hand cranked movies on a single-bladed shutter – was really badly flickering.

Every movie presents unusual challenges, and I like solving the problems with a combination of artwork and engineering.

The diversity of content is now offered from streaming and downloading, so young people are really not going to theaters because they don’t see any particular benefit.

I think ‘Avatar’ is much more appropriate to high frame rates because it’s like a ride, and it’s futuristic, and vividness and sharp edges and clarity would be an asset.

I have the deepest respect for Terrence Malick and greatly enjoyed helping him on ‘Tree of Life.’ I consider him to be a good personal friend and professional contemporary.

I visited a scientist who had a helmet with magnetic fields controlled by computer sequences that could profoundly affect your mood and your perceptions.

My personal feeling is that ultra-high frame rates and ultra-vivid giant screen movies can be like a window onto reality. And if you recognize it as such, you can write your screenplay, direct your movie, edit it, and present it as a live experience – not like a movie.

The technology of the time dictated the way things looked.

When I was a young man in school, I used to read science fiction and really liked it. And as I became a young artist, I was filling up my portfolio with alien planets and spacecraft and things like that.

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.

I honestly believe that the next big leap in immersive technology will be very much like Brainstorm.

There’s a consistency in my work that pops up independent of the limitations of the technology.

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.

I think miniatures are still superior to a lot of computer graphics.

We’re not that far from being able to plant images, memories, and emotional states directly into the brain.