WASHINGTON — It’s been 50 years since Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) made its mind-blowing world premiere at the historic Uptown Theater in Northwest D.C.
This week, the science-fiction masterpiece celebrates its 50th anniversary with a 70-millimeter screening at the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring, Maryland, a special engagement that kicks off Thursday night with an appearance by actor Keir Dullea and runs July 5 through 12.
“He really wanted to depict some amazing things,” special effects legend Douglas Trumbull told WTOP. “He was broadly conceptual and impressionistic … rather than being expositional and telling you exactly in detail. … It left a lot of room for interpretation, which is one of the reasons that the movie still resonates 50 years later, because it hasn’t become very dated.”
While Trumbull’s father Donald did the special effects on such Golden Age classics as “The Wizard of Oz” (1939), the younger Trumbull admits he came to filmmaking on his own terms.
“By the time I was born, (my dad) was out of the movie industry,” Trumbull said. “I never went to studios with him, he didn’t really seem to think very much of it, and it wasn’t very present in my life. I grew up watching Disney Sunday night shows and seeing how Disneyland was being built and all of these documentaries about animation and the multi-plane camera. I was fascinated with all that, but I had no inkling at all that I would be in the movie industry.”
But as fate would have it, he slowly found his way into filmmaking.
“When I graduated from school my portfolio was filled with spaceships and alien planets because I was very interested in science fiction,” Trumbull said. “That led to me getting a job at a company called Graphic Films in Hollywood that was doing space films for NASA and the Air Force about the Apollo, Mercury and Gemini programs. We got a job to do a movie for the New York World’s Fair called ‘To the Moon and Beyond,’ which I worked on when I was 21.”
This caught the eye of “2001” director Stanley Kubrick and author Arthur C. Clarke.
“Kubrick and Clark saw that movie at the expo and contacted Graphic Films to see if we could help with the preliminary design and development of ‘2001,’” Trumbull said. “That led me to getting a job directly with Kubrick and moving my family near London to work on the movie. So, working for Kubrick was really my film school. That was where my film experience began.”
Together, the creative team crafted a futuristic world that actually predicted a lot of real-life technology, from video chats predicting Skype, to HAL 9000 predicting Siri and Alexa.
“There were a lot of really talented, creative people as consultants on the movie who worked with NASA and major corporations and were advising Kubrick (on) where IBM thought computers would be going,” Trumbull said. “There was a lot of really intelligent, thoughtful ideas in the movie, particularly about artificial intelligence. … Kubrick was an incredibly brilliant, genius-level, thought-provoking individual, quite unusual from most directors.”
You can see the visionary genius right from the opening image, as the sun, earth and moon beautifully align to Richard Strauss’ classical “Sunrise” piece from “Also Sprach Zarathustra.”
“That was done on an animation stand (with) a flat photograph of the real moon that we got from Lick Observatory,” Trumbull said. “The sun was nothing but a hole in a piece of sheet metal with an extremely bright, hot light behind it. … The Earth was a painting (and) I painted the stars. … That shot was derivative from a movie called ‘Universe’ by the National Film Board of Canada. … That movie showed … a very beautiful depiction of being out in space.”
After a prologue of the “Dawn of Man,” Kubrick shows the evolutionary spark of apes to humans with a famous match cut from a prehistoric bone to a futuristic space weapon.
“The idea was there from the very beginning with Kubrick that there would be this gigantic conceptional leap from the bone being the first weapon,” Trumbull said. “The cut was from one weapon to another. Those were intended to be nuclear weapons orbiting Earth. … He realized too many people were going to think of that as ‘Dr. Strangelove’ revisited and he wanted to shy away from that, so he never overtly said it. … It’s really quite profound. … Millions of years of time have passed … and millions of years of technological evolution.”
As we meet the astronauts, we lose our sense of direction inside a giant rotating spaceship, where a man jogs in forward motion. Later, the camera looks down on an astronaut climbing up a ladder before pulling back to see another astronaut standing perpendicular.
“Kubrick was fascinated with the idea of weightlessness and the whole idea that there is no longer an up or a down,” Trumbull said. “He helped design this entire rotating set, so the actors could just be at the very bottom of the set and walk or run, but the camera could go all around. By the camera moving and the person walking, it could actually look like the camera was fixed and the person was moving. So you’d make this illusion that someone was walking up the wall and all around the room … to give the audience the feeling of being weightless.”
Throughout it all, Kubrick insisted on the “photorealism” of practical effects.
“We used a lot of miniatures,” Trumbull said. “A lot of things were hand-done, hand-painted. There were no computer graphics. … Today we have a movie industry very dominated by visual effects that are done with computer graphics. They tend to look similar to one another and they don’t necessarily age well, because they’re only as good as the algorithm for the week. But when you shoot a miniature that’s really photorealistic, it really ages gracefully.”
In fact, their work was so realistic that they were accused of faking the moon landing in 1969.
“I know there has been and probably will be conspiracy theories … trying to say the whole thing was faked — I can assure you that it was not,” Trumbull said. “But the fact that the movie depicts a near future like ‘2001’ … astronauts, astrophysicists and scientists … look at ‘2001’ as a real touchstone in a time where the idea of man in space was taken seriously and not treated as a B-movie. … This was a serious, scientifically valid concept of the future.”
Trumbull was thrilled with the result, but some critics were challenged by its abstract nature.
“My reaction was extremely positive. … It was everything I had hoped it would be,” Trumbull said. “I was really glad to see that the movie got tremendous traction despite the fact that early reviewers and early New Yorkers specifically didn’t understand the film at all and thought it was very lethargic and slow and didn’t understand what Kubrick was trying to do.”
Thankfully, Baby Boomers flocked to the film as a “trippy” experience perfect for the ’60s.
“The young audience of the day really got it and liked the trippiness and ideas behind it: extra terrestrial contact, super-intelligence, artificial intelligence,” Trumbull said. “It took a month for that to really kick in when a guy at MGM re-branded the movie as ‘The Ultimate Trip.’ People started looking at it with new eyes and said, ‘Wow! We’re not getting this with regular cowboy movies, love stories or cop chase thrillers.’ They saw a new genre being born.”
After “2001,” Trumbull continued in the genre with “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), designing the famous spaceship over Devil’s Tower for director Steven Spielberg.
“(Spielberg) was reading the works of a French writer named Jacques Vallet, who was writing real reports of UFO encounters,” Trumbull said. “(Francois Truffaut’s character) Lacombe actually was (based on) Jacques Vallet, the guy writing these supposedly real stories of events in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s (with) gray aliens that are four feet tall with slanted black eyes. In retrospect, I now look at ‘Close Encounters’ as a movie that is weirdly a documentary.”
Next, he did Robert Wise’s “Star Trek” (1979) and Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” (1982).
“I met Ridley and really liked him,” Trumbull said. “He’s an amazing artist and a man of terrific ideas. He can draw, write and explain to you very succinctly what his ideas are. … I thought it was a good opportunity, but I approach all these jobs from my own point of view. … These directors, whether it’s Steven Spielberg or Ridley Scott, respect me as a director myself.”
By that, Trumbull alludes to his own self-directed films, including “Silent Running” (1972), from which George Lucas borrowed several ideas for “Star Wars” (1977). He also wrote and directed “Brainstorm” (1982) about seeing things from another person’s point of view.
“I write, direct and make movies myself — and occasionally hang out doing visual effects for other directors,” Trumbull casually said of his now legendary career.
More recently, he worked with Terrence Malick on “The Tree of Life” (2011), including the lengthy plasma-looking sequence where we watch the entire formation of the universe.
“We both like what we call organic effects, where you use tanks of water, liquids and chemicals,” Trumbull said. “Nature happens in the microcosm in your cup of tea when you add milk. … If you can find clever ways to have the camera running when some phenomenal chemical reaction happens, you can get stunning visual effects that are impossible to compute. … Terry has some of the same traits as Kubrick: a willingness to experiment.”
Indeed, “The Tree of Life” might be the closest any film has come to “2001” in capturing the mind-blowing scope of intercutting present day drama with the epic origins of our past.
“I’m trying to help transform the entire movie industry,” Trumbull said. “We’re at a crossroads where people don’t see much of a difference between a movie and a television show. What one would call a ‘movie palace’ has to offer a sense of spectacle … beyond anything you can see on your smartphone. … I’m hoping to transform the movie industry to its next iteration … a giant holodeck experience (where) you’re in the movie rather than looking at the movie.”
To steal a phrase from “2001,” that’s the next Monolith of our entertainment evolution.
“I’m working at it,” Trumbull smiled.
Find screening details on the theater website. Listen to our full chat with Douglas Trumbull below:
