Nobody’s going to argue that Douglas Trumbull, the visual effects mastermind behind The Tree of Life, Blade Runner, (some) Star Trek, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, isn’t a genius in his field. He’d have to be to get away with the insanely boastful things he’s been saying about his two upcoming “120fps 3D” sic-fi epics, which would be “a big space adventure” with “a survival bent” pertaining to “reaching for the stars and why we would have to go to the stars.”
Here are a few choice quotes from his recent THR interview:
“I’m developing my own film, well, several films, but one of these films is going to go into this new territory I’m talking about – which is first person cinema reality which is indistinguishable from reality. The screen is going to be so big it’s like a window into another world. I’m going way beyond anything that Peter Jackson and Jim Cameron have been doing or are thinking of, and I don’t expect to get traction from investors until I can show what it is. Because no one’s ever seen it before, and no one can imagine what it would be like.”
First-person cinema indistinguishable from reality? Film quality so high, no one can imagine it?
“I have my own studio, I work in the Berkshires, I have my own stage, my own cameras, my own lights, my own editing, my own workshop, my machine shop, and I’m trying to reinvent the movies – with no help whatsoever from Hollywood. But very good, supportive help from projector manufacturers and camera manufacturers, who are completely open to anything that’s going to invigorate their business.”
A lone tinkerer, reinventing moviemaking by himself, without any help from Hollywood.
“There’s a whole new era of laser projectors that’s entering the marketplace now that very few people have seen. I witnessed it about a month ago and it’s mind-boggling. The quality of image that we can project on screens with laser projectors is incredible color gamut, absolutely even field of light, very bright, very big, and when I increase the frame rate, it’s going to be like a window. So it’s a movie that’s more like a live show, and I want to see what that’s going to be like. I think it’s going to be really fun.”
Alright, that sounds cool. But what about the plot?
“I can only say that it’s a 200-years-in-the-future science fiction space epic that’s going to address very big, lofty issues, like man’s place in the universe, and how our contact with an extraterrestrial civilizations that are so mind-bogglingly in advance of our own that it will go into some of the same territory that 2001 went into, and it’s going to do it in a very plausibly scientific way, not a fanciful way. There are no alien monsters, and the earth is not being attacked by anybody. It’s going to be a much more intelligent, what we call hard-science fiction, and I think there’s absolutely nothing out there like this. I think the studios believe that they have to dumb everything down and the audience is not scientific, not up for anything truly intelligent, but I think just the opposite. I think we’re in the most technologically advanced society of all time, and people can go with that immediately.”
The most unbelievable thing about the braggadocio on display above is that, not only is all of what he’s saying plausible by virtue of who is saying it, it also sounds, for lack of a better term, awesome; I’d love to see more hard science fiction in film. I’d also love to see laser-projected first-person movies that look so real I can’t tell they aren’t.
We don’t have any more details for now — this project has to be far from off the ground — but we’ll let you know as soon as we hear more. I know I’ll be seeing whatever this movie is called the day it comes out. Until then, I guess I’ll have to settle for real life.
What do you think is most likely to go wrong with this production?