SFX artist Douglas Trumbull claimed Stanley Kubrick didn’t deserve his Oscar for ‘2001’
When it comes to the most pioneering special effects in cinema history, it’s hard to look beyond the impact that Stanley Kubrick had with his 1969 science fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film was written in collaboration with the legendary sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke, based on his 1951 short story The Sentinel.
The narrative of the film, which told of the evolution of humankind from prehistoric apes to spacefaring technological pioneers – with the help of a mysterious monolith – is what had many of us become besotted with it, but Kubrick’s movie would likely be nothing without its amazing special effects that were completely innovative for the time.
Actor Keir Dullea once spoke of his amazement at the attention to detail Kubrick’s SFX team went through to make 2001 the masterpiece that it still is today. “Not one foot of this film was made with computer-generated special effects,” he said. “Everything you see in this film or saw in this film was done physically or chemically, one way or the other.”
However, the special effects master Douglas Trumbull, who worked on 2001 as a special photographic effects supervisor, claims that Kubrick himself did not actually deserve the Academy Award for ‘Best Special Effects’ because he merely directed them rather than creating them himself.
“Kubrick did not create the visual effects. He directed them,” Trumbull once told The Hollywood Reporter. “There was a certain level of inappropriateness to taking that Oscar.” Interestingly, though, despite these comments, Trumball also believes that Kubrick should have been given more recognition by the Academy for his efforts, even if he didn’t entirely deserve the SFX one for 2001.
He continued: “But the tragic aspect of it for me is it’s the only Oscar Stanley Kubrick ever won. He was an incredibly gifted director and should have gotten something for directing and writing and what his real strength was — not special effects”. It’s fair to say that Trumball is right in pointing out the fact that Kubrick hadn’t won more Oscars throughout his career.
In addition to his pioneering work on 2001, Trumball also created scenes for Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the 1979 movie Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, proving his masterful science fiction credentials. The American film master also took the directorial reigns on 1972’s Silent Running and 1983’s Brainstorm.
