Interviews · Movies

Douglas Trumbull Discusses the Preservation of the Epic Theatrical Experience

We spoke with the effects legend behind ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ and ‘Star Trek: The Motion Picture,’ and his insight is crucial.
Screen Shot At Am
Paramount Pictures
By  · Published on September 14th, 2019

You get one heck of an advantage from this insanity, and it’s a tremendous opportunity, but at the same time, you now have to deliver Star Trek: The Motion Picture under an incredibly limited timeframe. That had to have been stressful.

It was very stressful and very scary. It’s a long story about how we actually pulled it off, and how we had to resort to what I would call tried and true techniques that had already been successfully used previously in other films. We already had all the 65mm cameras and the 65mm optical printers and the matte painting department, and the whole studio set up for these kinds of visual effects, so we could hit the ground running so to speak.

The Enterprise, she was already built before you got on board, right?

Well, we had to rebuild it.

Oh, really?

It wasn’t finished properly, and it just looked like a big fiberglass Enterprise. It didn’t have enough detail on it, and it didn’t have good lighting. I insisted that we take it apart and go at it again so that it would be a high-quality enough miniature to survive some extreme close-ups that I planned to shoot for that big dry dock sequence. That scene was going to be really critical. So we just went at it. There’s a funny story that I haven’t told anybody. Want to hear it?

Oh, please.

Well, during the period that the movie was in production, before I came on board, Richard Yuricich noted that the procurement of visual effects, materials, parts, and necessary lenses, or other objects that were necessary for making this movie were kind of extraordinary, particularly in the context of Bob Abel’s desire to do it with computers. A lot of computers were purchased on behalf of the production that really weren’t even necessary and were kind of fraudulently produced because his company was buying the computers for the production on the Paramount payroll and then selling them to others, net a profit. So, that’s part of the story.

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Huh, okay.

They realized that the accounting department of Paramount really didn’t understand what the heck was going on or why you needed a computer. You know, this was a whole new idea. So the crew decided to pull a joke on the accounting department to see if they were really stupid and they said, “Well, what we need now, we need to order right away, is a special model warmer for the Enterprise. Oh, it’s very fragile. If the temperature changes, all the paint will crack off and the lights will blow up or whatever, and we need a model warmer.” They priced it out and got a bid on it, and that actually went through the system and got approved. This is one of the funny kinds of transitional stories about how to suss out whether anybody was really in charge.

It sounds like a lot of panic, is what it sounds like.

Yeah, it was a lot of panic. They were ready to cut a check for anything you could think of to get this movie done. So we said, “Well that was just a test.” But we didn’t do anything fraudulent. We certainly had no intention to do anything like that. We just were trying to figure out what was going on. That was a big practical joke, really (Laughter).

Well, let’s talk about the dry dock sequence. You directed that yourself.

Yes.

Why showcase the Enterprise in that way?

Well, you know, when I came on board, the Enterprise had been built, the dry dock had been built, and that was all underway, but I didn’t like the way any of it was lit. We rebuilt both of them. We rebuilt the dry dock with a different kind of lighting system onboard and other things like that. I wanted to direct the sequence so the approach to the dry dock was from behind, where the Enterprise is facing away from the camera and it’s shrouded by the dry dock. So you can’t see the Enterprise very well. You can’t really make up what it is. It’s like a secret, it’s like a Howard Hughes airplane in a hangar, kind of thing.

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I wanted to kind of tease the audience about when would you get to really see the Enterprise in its new form because this was a completely new departure from the design of the previous Enterprise from the series. It was upgraded, and modified, and streamlined, and it looked really cool. I just wanted to tease the audience and have this approach from behind along the side of the dry dock, so you can kind of see the Enterprise back there, but it’s being obscured by the dry dock and it’s not until Kirk and Scotty turn around and reveal this from the front that you get the big music cue and the big beauty shot that we put a lot of energy into. That had to be stunningly beautiful, and you had to establish that it’s orbiting around the earth and the earth is below and the stars are there and the sky is here in space, and it’s just the ultimate reveal shot.

From there you had to make shot after shot after shot pop in some way. We did it by getting closer and closer and revealing more and more detail. You get a tour of the Enterprise from the top to the bottom and we go 360 degrees around the Enterprise. Like looking at the Titanic before it launched. So, that was the idea behind that sequence. I got Bob Wise’s permission to direct it that way. We kind of tag-teamed where he directed the live-action of Kirk and Scotty in the shuttle so that we could have a proper interaction of the lighting and the reflections and the shadows altogether.

It’s a fascinating sequence. The film stops to have a moment. Why was it important to slow the narrative down and allow the audience to just soak in the Enterprise?

Well, this was something that I learned when I was working with Stanley Kubrick. During the production of 2001, Kubrick was realizing that he had this responsibility to create an epic experiential movie that would be about space, completely unusual, and take the B-movie sci-fi thing to a completely new and higher level of production quality. He realized that he wanted to change the cinematic language of having dialogue and reverse angles and over the shoulder shots and all the conventions of cinema. He said, “I’m going to take those out.” He started doing them and then realized how that would interfere with the ability of the audience to see it themselves and he didn’t really have to talk about it. If he did a good job visually, the Enterprise would speak for itself, and in 2001, the Star Gate would speak for itself.

No one in the film ever says, “Oh my God, it’s the Star Gate!” or “Look out!” or “Watch out!” or “Duck!” or whatever. There were none of the normal melodramatic cliches. Kubrick was trying to avoid them in 2001 and that carried with me and has carried with me ever since. So, when a movie comes along like Star Trek, I look for an opportunity for a sequence like that, where people stop talking and you can just enjoy the beauty and the music. That’s my very intentional way of going about making movies. Making them more immersive and less traditional or melodramatic.

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Brad Gullickson is a Weekly Columnist for Film School Rejects and Senior Curator for One Perfect Shot. When not rambling about movies here, he's rambling about comics as the co-host of Comic Book Couples Counseling. Hunt him down on Twitter: @MouthDork. (He/Him)