Ahead of 2001: A Space Odyssey's anniversary, we look at special effects genius Douglas Trumbull’s contribution to the film – and how it helped build his reputation as a filmmaking genius in his own right.
This article originally appeared in Film Stories issue 41 in March 2023.
Douglas Trumbull was just 23 years old when he found himself sitting on a plane heading across the Atlantic to the UK set of 2001: A Space Odyssey in the summer of 1965. Despite a lack of feature film credits to his name, this young background artist and animator had managed to get a job on one of the biggest film productions of the 1960s.
Exactly how this happened was partly down to serendipity: just a few months earlier, director Stanley Kubrick and sci-fi author Arthur C Clarke had been in the audience for To The Moon And Beyond, a short film about space travel that used 70mm film projected onto a 96ft-tall, domed screen. It was one of the key attractions of the New York World’s Fair, and its immersive depiction of stars and planets chimed with the film Kubrick and Clarke were collaborating on – initially called Journey To The Stars. Impressed, Kubrick invited the team behind the short, Graphic Films, to illustrate a series of storyboards for his movie.
Ultimately, Kubrick’s broader deal with Graphic Films fell apart when the director shifted production from the US to the UK – where he would move to, and produce all his films going forward – but Trumbull’s illustrative work, which he regularly sent to Kubrick, clearly impressed the director; by August 1965, both Trumbull and Con Pederson, another Graphic Films team member, were winging their way to MGM Studios in Borehamwood.
Starting out
On closer inspection, though, Trumbull’s creative alliance with Kubrick looks less like serendipity and more like fate. Both technically minded and artistic, Trumbull was something of a Renaissance man, much like Kubrick. Trumbull was also blessed with the eye for detail – not to mention youthful energy – required to meet Kubrick’s famously exacting standards. Then there was Trumbull’s love of science fiction and movies.
“As I became a young artist, I was filling up my portfolio with alien planets and spacecraft and things like that,” Trumbull told me in 2014.
“Then when I started looking for a job, I was looking for something in animation, because I was watching all these Disney animated films.”
When Trumbull approached Disney in the early 1960s, the technical nature of his work saw him pointed in the direction of Graphic Films. A studio founded by former Disney animator Lester Novros, it specialised in making both animated and live-action shorts for such clients as NASA and Boeing. Trumbull’s skills as a draughtsperson and interest in sci-fi made him an ideal fit for the role, and in 1964 he illustrated the backgrounds for To The Moon And Beyond – a film that, like Kubrick’s production, was designed to envelop viewers in its vast (astronomical, you might say) scale.
By the time Trumbull boarded his flight to the UK in August 1965, Kubrick had been working on his “proverbial good science fiction movie” for over a year. In that time, the director had surrounded himself with some of the finest technical minds he could coax aboard his project, including NASA scientist Fred Ordway, Eliot Noyes, an industrial designer at IBM, and artificial intelligence expert Marvin Minsky.
The initial basis for Kubrick’s project was Arthur C Clarke’s short story The Sentinel, about the discovery of a mysterious, technologically advanced artefact left behind by alien visitors. But what Kubrick also had in mind was something far bigger and more mind-expanding – an epic story that spanned time from humanity’s prehistory to our future exploration of space, bookended by quasi‑religious encounters with an intelligence far beyond our own.
Ambition
Such an ambitious film required an equally extensive budget – MGM ultimately spent around $10m on 2001, then a fortune – and a huge quantity of sets, props, scale miniatures and then-new and untested visual effects. But if Trumbull felt intimidated by the vast scale of the production, as filming began at MGM Studios and Shepperton, then he didn’t show it. In a remarkably calm, matter-of-fact essay written for American Cinematographer in 1968, Trumbull described how much trouble the production had with keeping track of its array of “ideas, shots and changes” – such that a ‘control room’ was set up, populated by people whose full-time job was to keep everything tracked and logged in an elaborate filing system. Outside, Trumbull wrote, there were “a half-dozen cameras shooting simultaneously, some on 24-hour shifts.”
Originally, Trumbull was led to believe he’d be working on 2001 for about six months; instead, he was on the production for two and a half years. The film’s lengthy shoot was partly due to Kubrick’s insistence on interrogating every element in minute detail, whether it was an initial concept sketch or a split-second effects shot.
“There was a huge shooting ratio,” Trumbull told me, “because Stanley was very critical and discerning, and he didn’t like anything that had any kind of error in it. So every shot you can see in the movie had many takes of it, trying to debug it, making small changes until it was perfect.”
Nevertheless, Trumbull agreed he’d found a like-mind in Kubrick.
“We had a really great relationship. It turned out that I had the right skill-set that he was looking for, which was part art, part engineering, and part photography… he worked me up through the ranks, and by the end of the two and a half years I was there, I was one of four head supervisors on the movie.”
Trumbull’s work on 2001 therefore ran the gamut from animating displays on the interiors of spacecraft to overseeing shots of the Moon’s surface to building and painting scale miniatures, such as the 60ft-long Discovery spacecraft that features in much of the film’s later stages.
A shifting story
Aside from Kubrick’s constant demands for perfection, the production’s pace was slowed by the changing nature of the film’s plot and storytelling details. In August 1965 – mere months before filming began that December – the artificially intelligent computer that drives the latter half of the movie had a female voice, and was called Athena rather than HAL-9000. At other times, story details had to be changed because the puzzle of making them look convincing on the big screen was simply too great to solve with the technology of the time.
A prime example of this arrived near the end of the movie. Astronaut Dave Bowman (played with icy calm by Keir Dullea) has reached his destination orbiting Jupiter, and in the original script, “there was a slot in one of Jupiter’s moons,” Trumbull recalled.
“And if you looked down through it, you could see another universe on the other side – so it was as if the slot was a kind of time-space gate. No one could make it look convincing.”
As an alternative, Trumbull suggested trying out an experimental process he, colleague Con Pederson and inventor John Whitney had been tinkering with at Graphic Films – a photographic technique Whitney had dubbed ‘slit scanning’. It involved placing a camera on a track and exposing its aperture to an image viewed through a narrow slit; Trumbull took the technique and adapted it to create the illusion of streaks of coloured light hurtling out of the screen at the viewer.
“It was quite a large machine – about 30ft by 30ft,” Trumbull recalled of the system that was a precursor to the advanced motion control systems that revolutionised special effects almost a decade later. “It took up a whole room… Salvador Dalí experimented with things like that – he experimented with strobe lights and time-lapse. All kinds of interesting stuff that I’d studied. So it seemed natural to say, ‘well, let’s put the slit outside the camera and move it in three-dimensional space rather than two-dimensional space.’ It all worked perfectly, and it solved a problem for Kubrick.”
Inventing
Once again, Trumbull’s technical ingenuity and artistic flair combined to create something new. Along with an ape smashing skulls with a bone, or Dave Bowman running in zero gravity, the ‘Stargate’ sequence became one of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s most famous sequences.
“I’m fearless when it comes to engineering and motors and gears and pulleys and glass and artwork,” said Trumbull. “It all just seemed completely natural to me, and it was a good thing I was there, because I could invent this thing and work with the engineers at the studio and have them help me build it.”
Of course, visual effects such as these were only a part of what made the larger picture, and even by the standards of 21st century filmmaking, the scale and detail of what Kubrick and his collaborators attempted was quite mind-boggling. Almost as an aside, Trumbull mentions towards the end of his essay for American Cinematographer that all of 2001’s interior sets had “lighting that was an actual integral part of the set itself, and additional lighting was used only for critical close-ups.” Kubrick never was one for cutting corners.
Recognition
Kubrick’s fame as an auteur was such that, despite the number of genius-level collaborators that surrounded him throughout the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the input of his fellow artists and filmmakers was often downplayed, at least at the time of the film’s release. In a list of credits printed in that same issue of American Cinematographer, it somewhat sternly states, “All special effects designed and directed by MR KUBRICK”. Yes, Kubrick’s name was printed in all-capitals.
At the Academy Awards the following year, it was therefore Kubrick who collected the Oscar for Best Special Visual Effects and not Trumbull – something that must have stung at the time. Meanwhile, it was Oliver! that cleaned up at 1969’s awards, with Kubrick losing out to Carol Reed in the Best Director category. Kubrick’s film was also nominated but failed to win Best Art Direction, Writing, and didn’t even get a mention for Editing, Sound, or Cinematography.
The appreciation for 2001: A Space Odyssey only grew, however. The film went from initially divisive reviews and slow ticket sales in 1968 to a worldwide hit thanks to later theatrical re-releases in the early 1970s. The film also gave Douglas Trumbull the grounding he needed to further his career in movies; in the years that followed, Trumbull found acclaim for his special effects work on such classics as Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and Blade Runner. For the former, Trumbull jointly received an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, meaning he finally got the Oscar recognition he deserved.
Trumbull would also adapt and refine some of the techniques used on 2001: A Space Odyssey in his first film as director, Silent Running – a sci-fi fable that is itself regarded as a classic. As Trumbull later said of 2001: “It was film school for me.”
