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THR: Are there filmmakers working today that you feel like are even close to tapping into that kind of spectacle that you would like to see?

Trumbull: There’s only a few filmmakers that I know and I hang out with who are really in what we call the “special venue” business – it’s the kind of IMAX, science museum, historical museum. [And] there’s a small group of people who make these 4K, extremely high-resolution films, shooting 65mm negative and scanning it at 8K and putting it out digitally at 4K - a tremendous amount of detail, particularly for very large screens, which are in science museums. But in the theatrical movie industry, I’ve seen almost nothing, except people that I know and admire like Jim Cameron and Peter Jackson, who are very aware that 24 frames a second is not good enough for 3D. There’s a real fundamental technical problem that’s hard to explain, but 3D is just a slight difference between the left and right eye, and when the motion from one frame to the next becomes more than the difference, the 3D effect is destroyed in blur and strobing.

THR: Is the process of creating images and spectacle the same now on something like Tree of Life as it was on 2001 or Blade Runner?

Trumbull: I think it’s been disturbed by the fact that a lot of people bought into computer graphics as the solution to all of their problems. We’ve gotten into this period right now where in spite of the artistry and the magic of all of the people in this room, visual effects from a producer and studio standpoint has become a commodity. They bid these companies against each other, they say, well, if you’re not going to give us a better price we’re going to go to New Zealand or we’re going to go to India or someplace else to get it done, because we really don’t care about the ultimate quality. We care about price. And so there’s a really shocking lack of ingenuity that’s possible because it’s all computer graphics – there’s very few miniatures or the broader range of visual effects experimentation that I’ve done in my life because there’s almost no major companies left. One of the biggest ones was George Lucas’ company, Kerner Optical, and they just went bankrupt, because there was not enough work for them. Because the fact that the studios bid all of these companies against each other, it’s bid on the basis of computer graphics, and algorithms and computer hardware and render issue, and so there’s not a broad range of diversity to the way effects are done, or movies are done. Because Hollywood would just like to figure out how to make a movie for less money so they don’t have to build sets and they don’t have to go on location, so they do it with set extensions and digital effects to supplant what they don’t want to pay for. That’s all well and good, but it’s become very homogenized.