Douglas Trumbull Quotes

I love the irony of movies. I really do. For whatever reason, I'm incredibly intrigued by the irony of reality in a motion picture.

'Apocalypse Now' does not alienate us or deconstruct itself. In fact, it welcomes us in.

Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express.

Adam and Eve are like imaginary numbers, like the square root of minus one... If you include it in your equation, you can calculate all manners of things, which cannot be imagined without it.

What I've realized is that a film operates both on the intellectual and emotional levels, and if you can find a way to tell a riveting story and draw ideas out of that, it's very powerful.

I feel very strongly influenced by long-form box-set TV drama... I feel really excited that, at last, the novel has found its on-screen equivalent, because the emotional arcs and changes that you can follow are just so much more like a novel, and so many amazing shows recently have done as much as film can do to show the interior world.

I try not to look for messages in films.

The big influence on me was Robert Altman, who, especially in 'Nashville,' transformed my sense of dramatic structure and showed how you could handle overlapping stories.

Whenever I read a contemporary literary novel that describes the world we're living in, I wait for the science fiction tools to come out. Because they have to - the material demands it.

Mathematics is a game played according to certain simple rules with meaningless marks on paper.

Every technology that comes into filmmaking is first a gimmick. Think about sound with 'The Jazz Singer' or the first colour or surround sound - it takes a while for filmmakers to understand how to use it.

It's easy in a novel to be completely unambiguous about the relationship between animal and daemon simply by stating it outright; whereas you get very few opportunities to do this in an elegant way in a film.

A fragmented film such as 'Babel' gives the impression of 'edginess' but, in its form, tells us nothing we didn't already know.

When you make illustrations, you're supposed to have a subtext; you're not just communicating words - you're actually adding another story altogether.

I think that, as a filmmaker, you're always making the same film, regardless of how many different stories you tell. This is the case for me, whether I'm making documentaries or fiction films.

I think what really stays with me is the idea that you can write music about the texture of a wall, and everything is in some way connected.

Magnitudes are algebraically represented by letter, men by men of letters, and so on.

Most mistakes in philosophy and logic occur because the human mind is apt to take the symbol for the reality.

Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the give and take of talk have worn away with use.

Our thesis is that symbols and myths are an expression of man's unique self-consciousness, his capacity to transcend the immediate concrete situation and see his life in terms of 'the possible,' and that this capacity is one aspect of his experiencing himself as a being having a world.

The whole machinery of our intelligence, our general ideas and laws, fixed and external objects, principles, persons, and gods, are so many symbolic, algebraic expressions. They stand for experience; experience which we are incapable of retaining and surveying in its multitudinous immediacy. We should flounder hopelessly, like the animals, did we not keep ourselves afloat and direct our course by these intellectual devices. Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of fact.

The map is not the territory (coined by Alfred Korzybski), and the name is not the thing named.

Photography is full of symbolism, it's a symbolic language. You have to be able to materialize all your thoughts in one single image.

I tried to find a language for the film - not just telling stories. I picked the Picasso painting because it said more than I could explain. I need images, I need representation which deals in other means than reality. We have to use reality but get out of it. That's what I try to do all the time.

In the contexts of religion and politics, words are not regarded as standing, rather inadequately, for things and events; on the contrary things and events are regarded as particular illustrations of words.