![]() ![]() That there was anything releasable was some achievement, but reviews were middling and the box office was tepid, sending Trumbull into retreat: “I just had to stop. ![]() Studio bosses wanted to halt production and claim the insurance, but Trumbull persevered, recruiting Wood’s sister Lana as a stand-in for the remaining shots. When MGM balked at the cost, Trumbull ploughed on, only for the project to be comprehensively derailed when the film’s star Natalie Wood drowned in mysterious circumstances mid-shoot. Trumbull initially conceived the psychological thriller Brainstorm (1983) as a showcase for a new, high-definition photography process known as Showscan. He was again Oscar-nominated, again unsuccessfully, but by then he was directing once more. Drawn by the prospect of detailing a careworn Earth rather than something stratospheric, he contributed several elements to the stunning opening panorama, including the images projected on to skyscrapers and the refinery flames, recycled from explosions Trumbull had filmed for Zabriskie Point (1970). Upon recovery, Trumbull was lured back to hired-hand work, on Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). George Lucas approached Trumbull to work on Star Wars (1977) Trumbull turned him down, while approving Lucas’s plan to model the droid R2-D2 on Silent Running’s expressive drones Huey, Dewey and Louie (both Trumbull’s father and John Dykstra would work on Star Wars in various capacities). Though a commercial flop, Silent Running proved hugely influential. College students – including the future effects whizz John Dykstra – were hired to suppress costs, many set to assembling the 650 model tank kits used in the film’s miniature shots. A distribution quirk saw the film jettisoned on an underpromoted double bill with Trumbull’s directorial debut Silent Running (1972), an unusually emotive, eco-themed sci-fi about a lone scientist (Bruce Dern) tending plant life on a spaceship orbiting a dying Earth.Ĭompleted for a tenth of 2001’s budget, Silent Running allowed Trumbull to finesse a sequence involving Saturn’s rings originally visualised for 2001, but elsewhere the modest resources compelled him to improvise. Trumbull underbid for the effects work on Universal’s The Andromeda Strain (1971), leaving him with only $250,000 to generate the microscope-like close-ups of the titular virus. His freelance career began inauspiciously. As Trumbull put it: “We wanted the audience to feel like they were actually going into space.” Yet creative freedoms were tempered by Kubrickian control the two men fell out after the director assumed sole on-screen credit for the film’s Oscar-winning effects, with Trumbull vowing to work independently in future. The stroboscopic results were intercut with aerial views of Monument Valley and discarded footage from Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964) to produce one of the most strikingly original sequences in 20th-century cinema. It was great!”įor the climactic sequence in which the astronaut Bowman (Keir Dullea) passes through the Stargate, Trumbull invented Slitscan, a photographic process that sped the camera past illuminated backdrops with the shutter open so as to generate heightened flaring. Quick to earn the trust of his famously circumspect employer, Trumbull assumed additional responsibilities as production wore on: “He would say: ‘What do you need?’ and I’d say: ‘Well, I need to go into town and buy some weird bearings and some stuff,’ and he would send me off in his Bentley, with a driver, into London.
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