LOVE (2011)—The Evening Class Interview With Gunner Wright

Another international premiere at the 15th edition of Montreal's Fantasia Film Festival currently on festival track is William Eubank's ambitious indie sci-fi drama Love (2011), produced by the alternative rock band Angels & Airwaves and poised to screen at Austin's Fantastic Fest. Slated as the opening night feature in Fantasia's Camera Lucida spotlight on "genre cinema in its utmost extreme, surprising and iconoclastic form"—Love is clearly a labor of.

Graphing the gradual madness born from the loss of human contact and the necessity of love for the furtherance of the human spirit, if not the prolongation of the human race, Love is structured as a parallel narrative that conjures up the messenger's recitation from The Book of Job (1:15): "I alone have escaped to tell thee." The film's prologue introduces Lt. Lee Briggs (Bradley Horn) witnessing the death of his Union regiment in a violent Civil War skirmish evocatively lensed in speed ramp slow-mo. Then—as Dennis Harvey phrases it in his favorable review for Variety—the narrative "lunges nearly two centuries forward and 220 miles outward" where the routine mission of lone astronaut Lee James Miller (Gunner Wright) goes seriously awry when he loses contact with Houston HQ as the Earth self-destructs in nuclear war. It's Miller's story that makes up most of the film and Gunner Wright's performance that nearly single-handedly carries it (other than the occasional hallucinatory cameo).

"Lead thesp Wright, shouldering nearly a one-man-show burden, is gamely athletic, all-American and somewhat of a blank slate, like Kubrick's astronauts," Harvey writes, "until some unfettered personality begins to seep out." At Twitch, Kurt Halfyard agrees: "Gunner Wright is very convincing in his reaction to first loss of control, then boredom, then loneliness and despair."

I caught up with Gunner Wright during Fantasia at The Irish Embassy, bought him a drink, and sat down to discuss his involvement with Eubank's respectful contribution to a lineage of thinking man's science fiction that harkens back to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972), and its more contemporary compatriot Duncan Jones' Moon (2009).

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Michael Guillén: Gunner, you worked on Love for four years. For an actor, that's a considerable investment of time. How did you react when you finally saw the film projected?

Gunner Wright: I first saw Love with an audience when it premiered at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. Although I had seen some remnants, bits and pieces, with Will, the Santa Barbara premiere was the first time I watched my performance. I was trying to watch the film for all the things we were trying to communicate and get out there, but I was being my own worst critic and looking at areas in my performance that I didn't believe—"You were real here. You were pushing it to get that emotion here"—but, that was just me from racing motorcycles for years fine tuning technique. For the most part, watching the audience get excited about the film was just special. Santa Barbara was amazing because there was so much support. It's close to L.A. and we had a lot of Hollywood there at the premiere giving us thumbs-up.

Guillén: Granted, you would be your own worst critic; but, I was impressed with the continuity of your performance. The progression of your character within such a complex narrative was noteworthy.

Wright: Thanks so much.

Guillén: As Love is a film whose narrative was built up over a long period of time, how did you adjust to that process as an actor? Were you given a general arc to your character at the beginning of filming to hold onto throughout? How did you compensate for the many adjustments made to the script over the years?

Wright: For me, it's like asking the question: "How come kids—if you aimed a camera at my nephew or niece, let's say, when they're playing astronauts or playing Batman—deliver some of the best performances I've ever seen?" The answer: because they're in it. My nephew Jet is four and when we play Batman and Robin, I'll watch him in awe because he's in it. This aspect of filmmaking really goes back to so many moments. I could almost play you back the movie and comment, "Okay, now this scene here is being filmed at 4:00 in the morning and it's basically Will and I and we have no producers to tell us, 'Hurry up, guys.' " We're just playing like two kids in a sandbox exploring dialogue, doing some improv with random ideas that had come to him or me. In some ways you're wondering, "When is this movie going to end?" but in other areas you realize you're never going to get that opportunity again to have that much time to just play.

These moments weren't set-ups. It wasn't like Will was saying, "Instead of you being here, you go over there." It was more about getting into an emotion. A lot of those scenes had ADR or voiceover in post so I didn't really have anybody to feed off of during filming. I had a handful of moments with the actresses but most of the time I was just looking at boards, trying to pretend that I'm introducing myself to my first love. Will would feed me imaginary lines. Again, it came down to two kids with capes on.

Guillén: I appreciate that having the time to develop Love was probably a once-in-a-lifetime acting experience for you; but—now that it's finally done—do you think it's going to be a difficult movie to sell?

Wright: I do. There's a couple of great aspects to Love that are our saving grace and one of them is that one of the producers happens to be a rock star with a great fan base who love him and his projects and you see that.

Guillén: In his Variety review, Dennis Harvey noted that "marketing hook."

Wright: We were in Seattle at the E&P with 500 kids five hours before one of our shows at the Seattle International signing autographs. Ewan McGregor and all these big stars were there—my heroes, my counterparts—but because of Tom DeLonge and because of the band, Will and I and Tom and the guitar player were signing autographs for a film. It's a kind of weird aspect to the film.

Guillén: But an effective melding of art forms.

Wright: It is. The film itself is artistic. It's an arthouse film. A lot of the questions at tonight's Q&A concerned the ending. You take a young director like Will who's a great fan of Stanley Kubrick and a poetic rock and roll star like Tom and you put them together in a room and they're not necessarily going to make Iron Man 3. They might love Iron Man 3 but with their own film they want to push the envelope. They want to stretch that rubber band, so to speak.

Like I said, as an actor the toughest thing was being a lead for the first time, trying to carry a film, and learning how you do that as you go. I had to trust Will. He was my only partner in this thing. And then to place my performance in that abstract canvas. Listen, I love popcorn action shoot-'em-ups come June, July and August and what we were making with Love was foreign to me. I had to internalize a lot of the ending for myself. Where did Captain Lee Miller go? Was it heaven? Did he find a euphoria of true love? To where it's not really fair to necessarily say he went here, he went there: it's open to everyone's interpretation. And that was kind of new for me. I don't see too many films like that. It was a big risk for everybody involved.

Guillén: Most films are formulaic and manipulative. They make the audience go to a certain place. I don't believe that Kubrick wanted 2001 to be understood; he wanted it to be felt. In that respect, Will's homage to Kubrick successfully restrains itself. As Kurt Halfyard mentioned in his review at Twitch, Will doesn't embarrass himself by trying to match one of the greatest films of all time. He finds his own measure of expression.

Wright: There were a handful of films that Will suggested I watch before the meat and potatoes of the space station production. One of them was, of course, 2001: A Space Odyssey and I had watched it just before he brought it up. I got on a Kubrick kick because, honestly, I was ignorant of film history. It's sad to say but true. So I watched Spartacus and a couple of other Kubrick films and I got it. I got more of a sense of why Will liked Kubrick to begin with, along with understanding other filmmakers and other actors.

I thought about what it was like to be pigeonholed in a box. I watched Cast Away and what Tom Hanks did with that character. But then you have to make it your own. That was a big issue. How insane do you take this guy? He's an astronaut. He's trained for all kinds of emergencies. You ask yourself, "What would I do if I were flying a 747 and the engine went out?" If you talk to pilots, you realize that they've been conditioned over and over and over, such that their motor skills take over in an emergency. There had to be a little bit of that with Captain Lee Miller. "Okay, I don't know what's going on but I know what I can control. And it's this button and this procedure." To where he might go off his rocker to a degree but he will still come back when his motor skills go into effect and press air and oxygen and lights are on.

Guillén: This is the first performance of yours I've seen. The adage "the camera loves you" applies to you.

Wright: I appreciate that.

Guillén: Give me a sense of your training. You came out of Florida?

Wright: I raced motorcycles. My dad's in the motorcycle business and—through his business with Honda Motorcycles—the whole family got uprooted from Florida to L.A. I thought I was going to be a professional racer for the longest time and I had roads to choose and things I wanted to do that with racing, unfortunately, the more professional you are as an athlete, your world becomes two-dimensional. But because of motorcycling and other endeavors, but mainly motorcycling, everyone in Hollywood's infatuated with two wheels—that Brando, Steve McQueen, machismo kind of thing—and it's still there, even more so than when we moved to L.A. 16 years ago. So because I was a motorcycle guy, I made a lot of friends in Hollywood who wanted to hang with me and talk about bikes. But I wanted to talk about what it was like to be on a set. I had friends who were stunt doubling for actors. So I was brought into Hollywood organically and in the great way of not knowing anything about it. Not knowing if I wanted to do stunts or if I wanted to be an actor.

I met people, specifically David Barrett and his family who were huge in Hollywood. Dave's dad was Burt Reynolds' stunt double. Burt taught Dave how to swim. David was a motorcycle racer first, then did stunts in second unit, and now he's a great big producer in Hollywood. David gave me an opportunity to get on set to do some extra work and stand-in work. I had no idea what I was doing, but I really fell in love with that process. My first starts were years of extra work and stand-in work part-time here and there. Today I tell tons of actors or people in L.A. who want to get involved in acting, "You know, it sounds menial but you learn so much by being an extra." We're all extras at some point, even the stars. You're in focus and I'm in the background getting a drink? That's extra work. You're not saying anything. You're basically crossing camera. But that's how you learn the foundation, at least for me. It set the tone.

I learned a lot of physical technique on the set of Love. There are no classes in Hollywood that teach you marks, for the most part. I took some on-camera training here and there. I had a great on-camera coach named Charles Carroll for a couple of years. Charles is great. He's a working actor, which I love. I trusted him because of that. He's working for Spielberg, and you'll see him as a judge or a lawyer, he's a big presence, and he's working, which I like.

I did a play called The Play Ground in L.A.. It was a challenging role. Very difficult. The director was a young guy out of New York City and his mentor had been Peter Flint, a great coach out of New York City, who came on his own dime to spend three weeks working with all of the cast. What helped in that theatrical experience is that The Play Ground was blocked like a feature film. It was gritty. I played a long-haired greasy pimp. It wasn't Hamlet. It was raw. And Peter was brilliant. He stripped me apart day after day. So, I did get a little bit of that formal training.

Guillén: How did you stumble into this project?

Wright: In a weird way I have to go back, again, to the blessings of being brought up around motorcycles. I had met Will. There was a Lifestyle pilot being shot of two motorcyclists leaving L.A. and driving up to Mendocino north of San Francisco. It was almost like a travel show with two guys on bikes going to five-star wineries and great restaurants along the way. Will's friend was putting this project together. He was the D.P., one of the shooters. It was one of those projects that never really saw the light of day, so to speak, but we had a great time. I basically rode the motorcycle, read my script on camera and hung out.

Will and I bonded enough that—when he was courted through Tom DeLonge about this project—they were thinking, "What should we do?" Angels & Airwaves had a song called "Love Like Rockets" that's about an astronaut who gets left in space. Will liked that aspect of the potential story. The more he started mulling around: "Well, who should I get to play this astronaut?", he remembered me. I got a call from Will in August 2007 saying, "Hey man, I want to talk to you about something. I don't want to talk about it over the phone. Come meet for coffee." He showed me some basic storyboards and rough sketches and—as soon as I heard the word "astronaut"—I went to eight years old in 30 seconds. I said, "Sign me up, Daddy!"

Guillén: Can you speak a bit to your specific process of creating the character of astronaut Lee Miller?

Wright: It was so far-reaching. As I said, when Will asked me about this project and mentioned, "Hey, how do you feel about playing an astronaut?", the two things that I wanted to do as a kid growing up was either race motorcycles or be an astronaut. I'm from Florida and Cape Canaveral was always just around the corner. As he was building the space station, I was trying to wrap my head around being an astronaut and doing that role justice as far as what astronauts do. All we had really were books. I'd sit on the floor and look at old photos and go through stories and try to figure out, "What would this character do on a day-to-day basis?" Other films, I would play around and watch and pick some things that I could pick apart; but, the process for creating the character in Love was abstract.

Will didn't want this character to be too Cast Away, which—as I mentioned earlier—I did watch early on. I had to think about how insane was this guy going to be? How crazy was he going to be? But I kept going back to the fact that—though he might not be a Navy S.E.A.L.; he might not be a special forces operative—but, he's someone who's trained to handle a lot of different circumstances and he has a job to do to survive. He's a survivalist. And yet he's by himself for years, which—hence the title of the film—we all want contact. We all want some form of communication. That's why he breaks down when he can't see his brother's video anymore. That was his only human connection. Now all he has left are Polaroids of girls because, c'mon, this guy had at least a couple of girlfriends on Earth. [Grins.] So that was kind of the process. It was very organic. His character wasn't ever set. We really did explore and discover, sometimes even on the day.

I have to give Will tons of props as a filmmaker and as a friend, but the thing I kept thinking about when I watched the film with the audience earlier tonight that hit me as an actor was that the biggest aspect between a filmmaker and an actor together is trust. I was watching certain scenes that we started to shoot in September 2007. At that time I knew Will briefly, but I didn't know Will. You have to understand, I was in short shorts, which I didn't want to be in. I had this whole idea in my mind that I'd be wearing these cool spacesuits and he handed me these shorts and said, "Here you go, bro." It was a challenge enough to be carrying a film in my first leading man role, but to trust Will when I was in such a vulnerable situation as a first-time actor in those situations took a lot of trust. Will and I developed over the course of those four years mutual respect, mutual trust, even as friends. And tonight as I was watching the film, I noticed towards the end certain scenes where Will said, "You say what you want, man, because I know exactly where this is going to go." So I gave him everything I had. I wasn't going to second guess him. I knew his vision and I was in.

Guillén: Did you know, however, when you agreed to this project that it would be such a prolonged effort? Yet you remained committed enough to sandwich your participation in between whatever else you had to do to pay bills?

Wright: Absolutely. All of us did. Will would have to go off to do some DP work. Sometimes we'd have to reschedule things because at the last minute a very key person for that day had to go shoot something to earn a living. It was very cowboys and Indians style, you know? Just roll camera and shoot when you can. But I was committed, yeah.

After the first year, the project kept building momentum because the few money men that were seeing more dailies and hearing more buzz, the fans hearing more or finding behind-the-scenes photos on Facebook or Twitter or the A&A website, you kept feeling the energy and the excitement of what could be. Not what it was going to be but what it could be. We wanted it to be what everyone was hoping it would be because we were all doing it out of the honesty and the innocence of what we loved to do. I love acting. I don't want to direct. I don't want to produce. I don't want to write. I just want to act. If some of those other things come together, that's fine, but I love acting. I'll never grasp it. I'll never own the craft.

Guillén: Why would you say that? You do own your craft. You show that in this film.

Wright: And I appreciate that—that really means so much to me—but there are so many actors I could watch for days that resonate for me. Paul Newman. Clint Eastwood. Guys that time and time again prove themselves. It goes back to the sport of motorcycle racing for me. The most consistent driver wins the championship, not necessarily the fastest guy or the guy who wins the most races. It's the consistency and longevity of one's career that's so romantic to me.

To parlay that into golf, you can have two or three great holes and you go, "I got it. I just parred. I got it." And then the very next hole you shake it, it hits the house, and you think, "What did I just do?" There's moments when you're on set and you feel like you're an Oscar®-contending actor. "Yup! Got it!" And the very next take for me personally, I go, "Man, what in the hell am I doing?" You feel like you just lost all of that magic and skill that you had during the last take or the last scene.

Guillén: Aside from the spirit of play—which you've been describing quite affectionately in our conversation—what have you gained from this experience that has given you a professional edge or personal growth?

Wright: Two things. One, instinct. Instinct as an actor. So many times there are certain things that I will do that, again, stem from racing motorcycles. You start off analyzing the track, analyzing your moves, looking to see obstacles, and it's the same as trying to look at a scene for the day, and trying to visualize it in your mind. But sometimes the best scenes are when you throw that all away. You always hear that story, you know, where you learn the scene and its objective so that you can lose yourself and find something that you didn't expect to find. That instinct is something that Love helped me gain and grasp. But also, again, it's a technical aspect. The minute camera focus on your close-up. Finding the emotion and the scene's objective but making sure you're in focus and that you're hitting your marks, things that sound so elementary.

I just watched this great YouTube of Christopher Reeve in a scene of Richard Donner's Superman. It's a close-up but the behind the scene camera's wide so you get the marks where his feet are going to hit. It's take after take of him going after Gene Hackman and, I kid you not, he is nailing his marks with every single take—his toes are on the tape!—and I know how hard that is. People don't understand that he's either counting or he's so programmed that he's walking and his steps are perfect, but, he's in that scene. Picture four years of Love, mainly being the central character on set day in and day out, fast forward and you've done a handful of big films, smaller roles per se but you're playing Dwight Eisenhower and Leonardo di Caprio's right beside you and there's Clint Eastwood in the Paramount lot and the camera goes tight: being on set is an experience you can't buy and you can't replace it.

Guillén: Let's shift to these alternate performances. Clearly you secured these roles not on the laurels of this project?

Wright: That's right. It was kind of weird because—as I was struggling and in this world of Love—I was blessed to get small roles. I got a chance to play a secret service agent opposite Jonathan Pryce as President in G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra (2009). It was a small two-day role that gave me the chance to experience some great moments with a guy like Jonathan Pryce. In The Losers from Warner Brothers I'm a jet pilot and it's me and Idris Elba and a few cast and crew working for Joel Silver. Working with Idris was amazing. Watching his process. Because I want to be a leading man. I want to do some action. I want to push myself in that world. So to get a chance to carry a film like Love is, in some ways, to be a paid fly on the wall. The Losers did what it did but what Garrett Warren, who's an amazing second unit stunts coordinator, was doing on set at least while I was there blew my mind. He was doing Avatar at the same time.

Guillén: I, too, romanticize the longevity of a career. And one of my favorite ways to approach movies, since I watch so many of them, is to take note of the early performances of actors when they're, as you say, paying their dues and learning their chops in small career-building performances. I project that somewhere down the line, perhaps because of your motorcycle skills, you'll do a Steve McQueen role; a remake of Le Mans (1971) perhaps?

Wright: I want it soooooo bad!

Guillén: [Laughs.]

Wright: I'm a great fan of Steve McQueen. It's funny. I was in London years ago and I found this Steve McQueen book in a bookstore at Heathrow coming back to L.A. I was so broke at that time. That was an early lesson in my acting career. I got involved in acting and immediately I got a hosting job on a Lifestyle motorcycle show so I was at least getting paid and I thought, "Here we go. This is easy." Until production went belly-up and I didn't get checks for a couple of months and I'm grabbing my guitar and I'm on Venice Beach Strand playing five days a week making $20 a day. I didn't want to call my dad and say, "Hey Dad, can you loan me $500" because he was like, "You're leaving what to be an actor?" It was the principle of course at that time. Anyway, I'm in London, I find this book, and I read this book on Steve McQueen. I had heard about him. I had liked him because he was a motorcycle guy. But when I read his story, that's when I started to research his catalogue.

Guillén: More appropriately, however, I could see you doing a Paul Newman biopic. Would you do that?

Wright: In a heartbeat. But I don't know if I could do him justice. A friend of mine in L.A. recently gave me a box set of McQueen films and a box set of Paul Newman films. I watched Cool Hand Luke...

Guillén: One of my favorite Newman films.

Wright: ...and I watched three or four more of his films including The Towering Inferno, which I love because it's got McQueen and Newman and you can see the nuances between the two. It seems like Newman loves dialogue, his performances are dialogue-driven, whereas McQueen hardly needs any dialogue. He's a presence. It's comforting who he is or at least who he appears to be.

Whoever plays Paul Newman, if that film ever comes to the surface, is the same person that I hope will give Steve McQueen credit. Out of anybody if you're considering who to cast in a biopic, James Franco did James Dean so much justice. James Dean wasn't easy to do. So you hope that someone like him can do a Newman or McQueen the same way.

Guillén: As you develop into an actor who handles leading roles, who would you want to be your leading lady? There's got to be at least one.

Wright: There's more than one. I'll throw in Raquel Welch just because I want to throw in Raquel Welch. There's so many, you know. Currently, I think Olivia Wilde. Her onscreen presence is striking. Natalie Portman is a feminine gem. I try not to be all male chauvinistic but it's somewhat like looking at a gallery of wonderful art or a museum exhibit of 30 motorcycles and each one has their own distinct beauty.

Guillén: Finally, returning to Love, can you give me a sense of how the film will roll out?

Wright: Right now Fathom Events has it in close to 500 theaters on August 10. It's live so it's 9:30 East Coast, 6:30 West Coast. You can log onto the Fathom Events website and buy the tickets on line. A couple of kids already approached me, saying, "Hey, we're going to see it in Boston."

Guillén: These are some of the fans that are following you around?

Wright: Yeah, these kids drove from New York City. It's amazing. And that again is Tom. That's not me or Will. It's the band's fans wanting to support the film and see it succeed, which is so rare for an indie film. But the August 10 event is amazing because I looked at the markets and they're all major. Chicago alone has 30 theaters. Almost every major city involved are going to have five or six theaters involved.

Guillén: What will your participation be in that event?

Wright: I don't know for certain. On the way flying here Will said the event will be three hours and will include the movie, a Q&A, and then the band at one of those venues is going to put on a psuedo-concert, an acoustic performance or something to give the fans a treat. Because it's live for that one night, every single viewer's going to see the film with a little bit something special at the end. I'm excited. I was talking to one of the other filmmakers this weekend who had heard remnants about this event, though not in detail. It's such a unique event. It could screen for more days, depending on what markets sell out down the road; but, for the fans, this is it. They have one night. This is the time. You don't have a chance to say, "Awww, I'll see it on Saturday or I'll see it at a matinee."

Guillén: There's no doubt in my mind that the value added at such cinema events is what is helping keep film culture alive. So to finish up here, Gunner, congratulations on your lead performance in Love. I wish the film well. Thank you for taking the time to talk with me today.

Wright: Hey listen, thank you, man. You're a film connoisseur yourself who's clearly been around a lot of movies, a lot of actors, and it's clear you love it. That's what I like most: just sitting around, having a drink, shooting the shit and talking about our favorite pics.


Love - William Eubank - Trailer n°1 (HD) by 6ne_Web

DOUGLAS TRUMBULL ON....

As anyone who reads my work is aware, I have a great affection for the Q&A format. For me it represents an extremely important point of cultural contact and a unique zone of interaction between film talent and fans essential to an enhanced cinematic experience. But, even I recognize that—as avidly as I aim to transcribe my favorite sessions—there are built-in restrictions to the format. The time allowed for a session, for example, or the quality of questions asked have everything to do with a successful Q&A session. Then again, conveying an interviewee's personality, character, or even the gist of a rambling inquiry pitched by an audience member are challenges for me as a writer. Frequently—though not always—I've seen Q&A sessions being filmed but have rarely seen these taped sessions made available to the public. That fact alone became one of the driving inspirations for my transcribing Q&A sessions so that an institution's archival impulse expands out to the public sector. That being said, however, I admit that I am not too keen on watching interviews or Q&A sessions and am partial to the written word, for reasons too numerous to account for here; but, in the instance of someone as fascinating and articulate as Special Effects maestro Douglas Trumbull, I make exception.

When Trumbull joined TCM weekend host Ben Mankiewicz on stage at the Egyptian Theater after the screening of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey at TCM's first-ever Classic Film Festival in Hollywood earlier this year, I struggled to capture the breadth of his intelligence and to convey the many ideas he proposed; several which, admittedly, I barely comprehended. I've received favorable response to that transcript; but, perhaps one of the most welcome responses came this morning in an email from Evening Class reader Eugene Mamut who forwarded a blip.tv clip that enumerates Douglas Trumbull's past, present and future enterprises, including his career in film and simulation technologies, his love for astronomy, his more than 23 patents, and—most intriguingly—his fix solution to the BP oil spill. And, believe me, that's just the tip of the iceberg. One of the sweetest bits of trivia was discovering that his father was the technician who slapped the apples out of Dorothy's hands in The Wizard of Oz, as well as dangling the Cowardly Lion's tail by a wire. My thanks to Eugene for sharing this taped session with me, which achieves what a written transcript cannot by way of supplemented visuals that help convey some of Trumbull's more complex explorations.

In tandem with this clip—which I avidly encourage folks to watch—is Trumbull's YouTube demonstration of a vacuum-sealed manifold cap that he suggests might remedy the BP oil spill disaster.



Cross-published on Twitch.

TCM CLASSIC FILM FESTIVAL 2010: 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)—Onstage Conversation With Douglas Trumbull and Ben Mankiewicz

Each morning at the TCM Classic Film Festival a 70mm film was screened at The Egyptian Theater. I wish I could say I caught them all but the only one that truly worked for my schedule was the Friday morning screening of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which—believe it or not—I'd never seen in 70mm.

As the TCM notes synopsize: "With the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, science fiction moved into the Hollywood mainstream, paving the way for such later blockbusters as Star Wars (1976) and Avatar (2009). Director Stanley Kubrick and legendary novelist Arthur C. Clarke created a visionary work about the human race's coming of age, highlighted by a richly detailed view of space travel. The film not only featured space ships so realistic they seemed about to take off, it filled them with product placements for everything from IBM computers to Howard Johnson hotels. And the Oscar®-winning special effects team, led by Douglas Trumbull, pioneered in the use of front projection and split-scan photography to create the most dazzling visions of space travel to that time. Kubrick deliberately kept the film's action ambiguous, a choice that left most critics dumbfounded and even hostile. But it also opened Hollywood's eyes to a new audience. Word soon came back that box office returns were being generated largely by students and hippies who attended multiple times, often in drug altered states, to experience what they considered 'the ultimate trip.' The film's success helped create the cult movie phenomenon of the '70s and established the market for other visionary filmmakers like David Lynch. In Kubrick's words, he proved the viability of film as 'a non-verbal experience—the truth is in the feel of it, not the think of it.' "

I was baffled by 2001 when I first saw it as a 14-year-old at the Idaho Theatre in Twin Falls, Idaho; but, just as the TCM notes characterize, my young psyche was already galvanized by the cultural foment taking place all around me. I hadn't even tried pot yet; but, 2001: A Space Odyssey insinuated that inevitability and—until that first puff—was, as Spike Lee coined it, my first joint. Like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, I have watched this movie countless times, but am grateful to the TCM Classic Film Festival for providing the opportunity to see it in a pristine 70mm print provided by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. It was a spectacular experience, nearly as thrilling as when I first saw it over 40 years ago. This go-round, I was struck by the startling contrast between the immaculate interiors of the Discovery One—all that white plastic and metal—and Gary Lockwood's virile physique; yet another inflection of the tension between technology/machinery and flesh/the human. Lockwood's performance of astronaut Dr. Frank Poole has entered the domain of the iconic and, without question, he never looked better (except, perhaps, wearing a tight black t-shirt in Jacques Demy's Model Shop).

After the screening, TCM daytime host Ben Mankiewicz welcomed special effects wizard Douglas Trumbull to the stage of the Egyptian to discuss his participation in the film.

Mankiewicz asked Trumbull if he was still moved watching the film? "Yeah, I am," Trumbull responded. "It's really great to see it on a big screen and to see it in 70mm." Guessing the Egyptian had a 65-foot screen, Trumbull reminded his audience that 2001 was designed for a 90-foot curved Cinerama screen. "There are very few people alive today," he conjectured, "who have seen it in that format."

Mankiewicz enquired how Trumbull came about to work on the film? How Kubrick found him and hired him? Recounting that one of the first films he worked on was To the Moon and Beyond for the 1964-1965 New York World's Fair, the film was produced by Cinerama Inc. using a camera with a single fisheye lens and projected onto a dome screen in a process called Cinerama 360. To the Moon and Beyond was shown in a 96-foot high "Moon Dome" that was part of the Transportation and Travel building (Pavilion No. 123) in the Transportation section of the Fair. Both Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke had seen the film at the Expo and hired Con Pederson from Graphic Films—where Trumbull was working at the time—to do some preliminary designs because they were specializing in space simulations. Trumbull then cold-called Kubrick after obtaining the director's home phone number from Pederson and left Graphic Films to work on 2001.

Asked of his impressions of Stanley Kubrick as a person and as a professional, Trumbull answered, "Stanley Kubrick is a lovely man. Stanley is—or was—extremely intelligent. Way over people's heads. People around him were intimidated by him. But he also was a very private man. He liked to be left alone. He liked to be left to his own creative processes. He didn't like the interference of Hollywood studios and of people second guessing him. That's why he left the country and went to shoot in England for most of his films. He didn't like being critiqued and he didn't like talking to the press about what it was he was trying to do. It pissed everybody off, frankly, because the press doesn't like being denied access. For a lot of reasons like that, he got a bad reputation of being eccentric, difficult, whatever. Stanley was definitely eccentric—there's no doubt about it—but, I don't say that in a derogatory way.

"My experience of him was that he loved me and I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. He was extremely supportive. We were struggling with the Star Gate. Nobody knew what a Star Gate was; but, I came up with some ideas that I didn't even know at the time were based on some things I was learning as a young guy about street photography and weird photographic techniques where the camera is a different kind of a camera; the shutter is not in the camera, the shutter is out in the world. Street photography was a technique that was used for photo-finish cameras at the race track. Stanley was a photographer. He knew a lot about photography. He knew all about lenses. He had a lot of Nikkons all around. A lot of people don't even know that 2001 was shot largely with Nikkon lenses—Panavision doesn't like to admit that—but, he was very involved with photography and when I came up with ideas and said, 'I think there's this street photography application that will solve the Star Gate thing', he would say, 'Hey. That's great. I love it. I believe it. I understand it. What do you need to do it?' and I would have complete carte blanche, which was wild as a young guy; I was 23-24 when I started the movie, and was 25 by the time I was doing the Star Gate. 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 to town in his Bentley, with a driver, into London. It was great!"

Despite Kubrick not wanting to have to explain himself to the press, he was nonetheless sensitive to reviews and was very hurt by Pauline Kael's negative response to 2001. "He was completely dumbfounded that people didn't get the movie when it first came out. He was totally there and he'd been in it for years, obviously he'd made this movie and understood it completely. He incorrectly estimated how much slow, endless shots that people could tolerate, so—as you probably know, 17 minutes was cut out right after the first premiere to get the pace up a little bit; but, yeah, he was very hurt by these reviews and it really wasn't until a whole different audience than the studio expected started showing up for what they rebranded 2001 as 'the ultimate trip' and it became an experience where you would sit in the front row, smoke a little pot, and trip out. It completely rebirthed the movie. The movie was a day or two away from being pulled when the theater owners started calling the distribution company saying, 'Why don't you wait a couple more days before you pull this movie because the audience is starting to build back up' and it was all about the young people in the front row. People, finally, after a lot of agony for Stanley, started understanding what he was trying to do."

Referencing the impressive special effects and Bruce Dern's performance as an "eco-astronaut" in Trumbull's 1972 film Silent Running, Mankiewicz queried about the film's effect on a young filmmaker named George Lucas who was making his own film at the time. "George came to me after I had made Silent Running—I had a little office out in the San Fernando Valley—and asked me if I would do the special effects for Star Wars and I said no. That would have diverted my life or changed the course of my life in some drastic way if I had. I had just directed a movie and I told him, 'I'm very honored to be asked and I'll give you all the help I can'—because he said he was going to need robots (which became R2D2)—and I said, 'I'll help you out by giving you the names of all the people we used, the bilateral amputees who were performing' and he said, 'No, no, no, thank you, but that creeps me out.' He was going to use midgets and I said, 'Well, whatever you want.'

"I said no to George because I was on my own career path starting out as a young director in this town. I was getting into development deals with almost all the major studios and I had a number of sci-fi films that I was going to direct after Silent Running. I went into what is called development hell. You don't get paid much money when you're developing a screenplay or a production design or whatever. I kept going through these incredibly amazing experiences as a young filmmaker. I was like the hot young filmmaker. Everyone was amazed that I could make Silent Running for such a low amount of money—just a little over a million dollars; a fraction of what 2001 had cost—but, I had a project at MGM and we got way down the pipe: we had a screenplay; we had locations scouted; we were starting to cast the movie when Kirk Kerkorian decided to close the studio and build a Las Vegas casino. That stopped that one dead.

"And then I had a project called Journey of the Oceanauts, a big underwater action adventure sci-fi spectacle with Arthur Jacobs who had done The Planet of the Apes. We got way down the pipe on that, started shooting tests, had a screenplay in production, and Bob McCall did a lot of production design for me—he did the poster for 2001—and we were getting that all geared up when Arthur Jacobs suddenly died and the whole project got tied up in his estate. I could go on and on and on but development hell is exactly that.

"I was really hitting the wall and going broke and—though I've never had an agent—I went to my attorney and said, 'I'm desperate. I've got to find something to do and I do have a lot of ideas about how movies can or should be made. We could dramatically improve the quality of film technology by doing some experiments.' So we actually got some money from Gulf & Western and Paramount Pictures to start a company called Future General Corporation, which was a research and development company down in Marina del Rey where we started experimenting with film. We started exploring tests with every film format known to man, every kind of camera, every kind of lens, every kind of projector and that's when I realized that one thing no one had ever tried was to really dramatically change frame rates. We shot films at 24, 36, 48, 66 and 72 frames per second and showed them in a special theater. We were blown away. We knew it was great; but, in order to get a patent, we had to prove that it was stimulating to audiences. We set up a lab out in Pomona at a university and hooked individuals up in a screening room to galvanic skin response ... four different sensors—breathing, heart rate—like a lie detector test and mapped them out relative to frame rate. That was in 1975-1976 and we found out that getting up to around 60 frames per second created a dramatic increase in human stimulation; a sense of immersion. That became the Showscan film process, which I patented. We did quite a few films for expos and world fairs and other special projects. We invented simulator rides, 3D-interactive video games, virtual sets, electronic cinematography, all kinds of stuff came out of this little company. Then the management of Paramount changed and I was back in development hell."

With the current popularity of 3D, Trumbull was asked if he would have done 2001: A Space Odyssey in 3D were it being made today? "I would," he said, "but not like this." Conceding he was "a complete media fanatic" as a result of working on 2001, he learned a lot about film formats and giant screens and film technology even as they began making the movie. They hit a lot of obstacles. For starters, they discovered that 24 frames per second limited the speed at which anything could move across the screen before it would start blurring and strobing. They had trouble holding the resolution of stars against a black field. But since then, Trumbull has been looking at every conceivable way to make movies, including the Showscan process he developed several years ago that used 60 frames per second, which got rid of all the resolution problems they had making 2001. Jim Cameron, who has "broken the mold" with Avatar, has often talked about Showscan and high frame rates. They both opine that 24 frames per second is inadequate for 3D and Trumbull is convinced that Cameron will continue to push the envelope. "There has been talk about going to 30 frames per second, there's more talk about 48, there's serious talk about 60, and now there's talk about going to frame rates even above that. As a result of Avatar, and 3D, a whole lot of other dynamics in the way that movies can be made are in play."

Understanding that Trumbull was impressed with Avatar from a technological point of view, Mankiewicz queried whether Trumbull was as impressed with its storyboard? "I have complicated feelings about it," Trumbull offered. "Impressed? Yes. If you look at 2001, Kubrick was trying to explore what he thought was a new cinematic form. He was very tired of normal cinematic conventions: master shots, two shots, over the shoulder singles, close-ups, inserts. There's a language of film that's very well-known that every good filmmaker knows how to do. He was trying to break the mold here. 2001 was a first-person experience. It was about you being in space. He wanted you to be able to interpret any way you wanted and just kind of be there rather than him hitting every nail on the head where—by the end of the movie—you knew everything and there was total closure. He wanted you to drift off into all kinds of your own speculations about what the meaning of life is, what the meaning of God is, what encountering a civilization a billion years in advance of us would entail, and how would we handle it? It's an extremely intelligent movie in that respect.

"What I'm getting at is that Jim Cameron made Avatar in this completely amazing new technology, which is only enabled by digital computer graphics; but, it does adhere to normal cinema conventions. All the stuff in there is fairly straight drama ... but he lands in this new territory, which is really beautiful and is one of the attributes that people are enjoying about the movie. We don't discuss it very much and critics don't seem to talk very much about it; but, it's a technology-enabled out-of-body experience. ...He shot his actors in advance, he built all the virtual location sets and props in advance, worked out all his lighting, worked out all his blocking, and then went back in with this virtual camera and looks at the scene in its digital form but with total camera fluidity inside the computer-generated world. He has controls on it so that he can be one-to-one, which means that—if he moves a foot—the camera's going to move a foot. But if he wants a hundred-to-one, they dial it up and just doing this [Trumbull gestures a dive with his hand] is a thousand-foot dive off the edge of a cliff. He becomes, still, the director of these virtual shots that are completely amazing arobatic maneuvers.

"Jim is an informed filmmaker because he understands flying dynamics, he understands underwater dynamics, he understands what bioluminescent creatures look like underwater when there's no light, all kinds of things that you see in Avatar that have been informed by a lot of his diving experience before and after Titanic. You see a lot of things in there that are enhancing 3D. They're not necessarily story elements, but—when there's a lot of little sprites and things or motes of dust in the air—it's all about enhancing your perception of depth and scale."

Cross-published at Twitch.

A Fierce New Person—First Stabs: Formative Works by Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman (By Frako Loden)

The redoubtable folks at Film on Film Foundation, dedicated to screening films strictly on celluloid, move to the Roxie Cinema this Sunday to show the very first features of Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman. When Carl Martin announced this program at the Ida Lupino screening at PFA, a pleased gasp went up in the crowd. Although both features have been disavowed, even suppressed in Kubrick's case, by their makers, they're still fascinating looks at nascent preoccupations and budding technique in these recently deceased American masters. I'm struck more than anything else by their early and already skillful renderings of violent action. But first, the short Kubrick films.

Kubrick's first short, the 1951 Day of the Fight, is 16 taut minutes in the pre-fight day of American middleweight boxer Walter Cartier, the subject of a previous Kubrick pictorial in Look magazine. Like the photos in that profile, this film foreshadows the anticipatory pre-fight tension and magnificent boxing sequence in Killer's Kiss (1955). You could even say that Kubrick's emphasis on Cartier's inseparable twin brother, with whom he sleeps and who gives him a Vaseline rub, foreshadows the doppelganger preoccupations of The Shining. I don't think it's stretching things to suggest that these films dramatize "becoming another man . . . a fierce new person"—violent creatures like Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Jack Torrance in The Shining or the soldiers in Full Metal Jacket.

Kubrick's second short Flying Padre, also 1951, is a shorter and more perfunctory profile, this time of Catholic priest Fred Stadtmueller as he flies in a Piper Cub ministering to his far-flung flock over a 4000-square-mile parish in rural New Mexico. The father, shot in heroic low angles whether attending a funeral or shooting his gun, recalls the sun-bleached iconography of films of the common people like Salt of the Earth. Otherwise it's not very interesting.

All of these films are compromised by a 1950s voiceover narration that strikes 21st-century audiences as preachy and paternalistic. The 1953 Fear and Desire, Kubrick's first feature, opens on a vista of forested mountains with a voiceover introduction that evokes Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, especially in telling us that the war happening in this landscape is "outside history. Only the unchanging shapes of fear and doubt and death are from our world. These soldiers that you see keep our language and our time but have no other country but the mind." Thus we're given plenty of warning that this war film is allegorical, maybe even metaphysical-Malick territory.

Still, violence and personal transformation take their "unchanging shapes" in this landscape. Three grunts and a lieutenant find themselves shot down six miles into enemy territory. While trying to build a raft to sail back to their brothers, the men encounter a beautiful fisherwoman and an enemy general whose death would be a glorious redemption for one frustrated sergeant. The grotesque violence in these encounters—the woman tied to a tree by the men's belts, a dying hand squeezing the spilled contents of a stew, another character clawing the floor as he drools his last—is far more memorable than the muttered allusions to The Tempest or whatever higher meaning Kubrick may have wanted to invoke in this story. A standout is the earliest, if not exactly successful, example of Kubrick's many portrayals of psychopaths (Paul Mazursky in a toe-curling cringefest of a performance). Curiously, Kenneth Harp plays double roles as the lieutenant and the enemy general.

There's more than one baby psycho in Robert Altman's first feature film, the low-budget The Delinquents (1957), set in Altman's hometown of Kansas City. After a sequence in which Cholly's underage gang wreak havoc in a bar, the voiceover narration helpfully tells us, "The story you are about to see is about violence . . . teenage violence"—an immensely popular exploitation obsession during the 1950s. Released two years after Rebel Without a Cause (with which it has many common plot turns), The Delinquents gave Tom Laughlin his first starring role in a film long before he achieved fame as the star and director of the "Billy Jack" films (and lesser fame as a 2008 presidential candidate).

One interesting Altmanesque feature of the film is the semi-vérité views of a drive-in theatre and a party in an abandoned house. But it's Laughlin who is most worth watching here, as the decent young high school senior rejected by the father of his straitlaced girlfriend just for going steady. In his vulnerable state he's tricked into joining Cholly's gang and then must rescue his kidnapped girlfriend after a bout of forced drinking. Laughlin and Altman didn't get along; apparently the star was difficult and did the last half of the film under protest. But his performance is explosive and reminds me of his later persona as a half-Indian hapkido artist. Over the course of the film he moves from pained stoicism to unsettling violence, attaining awesome JD mayhem in a kitchen brawl displaying his transformation into another "fierce new person" thanks to the brutality that surrounds him.

Sunday, May 10, 7:00PM: Fear and Desire (preceded by shorts); 8:45PM: The Delinquents. Roxie Cinema, 3117 16th Street, San Francisco. Cross-published on Twitch.