Douglas Trumbull Quotes

Cinema has the capacity to be so physiological.

Most of us do not consciously look at movies.

A movie is so visually powerful, so overwhelming, that it tends to crowd out how you might have imagined things.

When I worked on 2001 - which was my first feature film - I was deeply and permanently affected by the notion that a movie could be like a first-person experience.

I think 'Avatar' is much more appropriate to high frame rates because it's like a ride, and it's futuristic, and vividness and sharp edges and clarity would be an asset.

[With theater] you draw the audience into the room as best you can, and in film, you can draw them into the room, you can draw them outside into the desert, you can take them out into the ocean, you can do all these amazing things.

I think that the cinema is a physical thing. What I'm looking for is creating a physical shock with the audience. I don't care of the meaning. I don't care of the idea. I don't want to say something. I want to make a 'shock physique.'

I wanted to make people feel the same way I feel when I see a good movie.

The audience is the camera. I don't want the audience to sit and watch, I want it to move.

Wes Anderson's mind must be an exciting place for a story idea to be born. It immediately becomes more than a series of events and is transformed into a world with its own rules, in which everything is driven by emotions and desires as convincing as they are magical.

Hollywood films are alienating to the spectator because they use too much dialogue, too much explication and leave no space for the viewer. They depress me.

Cinema is visually powerful, it is a complete experience, reaches a different audience. It's something I really like. I like movies.

Look, I'm just a storyteller. When I make a film, I never want the film to become a vehicle of social propaganda.

Modern-day cinema takes the form of a sermon. You don't get to think, you only get to receive information.

I wanted to have a reaction from the audience. I wanted to be able to talk to somebody, and not be talking just to myself. That's when I did 'The Conformist,' 'Last Tango in Paris,' etc. And I found it was incredibly rewarding, something new.

As filmmakers, we want the audience to have the most complete experience they can. For example, I interviewed Stanley Kubrick years ago around the time of '2001: A Space Odyssey.' I was going to see the film that night in London, and he insisted I sit in one of four seats in the theater for the best view or not watch the film.

The interesting thing about movies, it's not always - y'know, you have to have structure etc and all those things, but an audience responds, in many ways, we walk away and certain things stay in our heads that are memorable.

In Blow-up I used my head instinctively!

It is also difficult to articulate the subtleties in cinema, because there aren't words or metaphors which describe many of the emotions you are attempting to evoke.

I really ought to try and make a film that's a bit more cynical. But I don't think I'd know how to do it. I think what it is, is that if you're a film director, you're basically there because you enjoy manipulating people's emotions.

There's such an immediate intimacy with film that you just don't get in theater.

It's kind of the filmmaker's job to use visual, cinematic language in a way possible to tell a story that reaches and touches as many people as possible.

I always feel in movies, I don't know if it's because I'm jaded, but I always feel like we don't go far enough.

There's no reason my films can't work as hard as VR does to hook an audience and never let them go, so I think that that it turns the volume up a little bit on storytelling. The same way when I was doing commercials and then I went and shot 'Go,' and 'Go' has a level of pace that is unlike any of my other movies.

Whatever I do, I'm always struggling to create a visceral experience. With my music, I'm more of a live performer these days. And film is such a different thing. It's where people sit in a dark theater. I want them to feel me as viscerally as if they were at a live show.