Quotes from Douglas Trumbull

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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!

I'm fearless when it comes to engineering and motors and gears and pulleys and glass and artwork.

I like the unknown. That's what Terry Malick has always really liked. He's always looking for the unexpected.

Working on '2001' was my film school. Stanley Kubrick was my mentor.

I'm developing some high-frame-rate 3-D processes that are going to be, I hope, indistiguishable from reality. This will be quite an unusual cinematic event - you don't just tell an ordinary story, it's more of a first-person experience where the melodrama doesn't get in the way. Being inside the movie rather than looking at the movie.

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

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.

IBM was the original contractor for much of the computer interface design on the film.

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

Clearly, if wed 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.

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