Westworld was the first feature film to process imagery by computer. Working long hours and nights with giant mainframes, John was able to process only a few seconds of film a week.īut in the end, we got what we needed. Eventually, John Whitney Jr., agreed to undertake the job in four months for $20,000. Since the entire film had to be finished and released in six months at a total cost of $1 million, we had to look elsewhere. It would take nine months and cost $200,000. But they said they could do it: they could process two minutes of movie film.
We were talking about two minutes of film, or 2,880 separate images. They explained that the technique had thus far been used for single images, because each required massive computer power. At least they knew what we were talking about. I wanted a mechanical process.įinally, we went to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. But photographic techniques look just like that – darkroom manipulation of the filmed image. None of the special-effects houses had computers or were even thinking about them all they could do were variations on photographic techniques. At this time, film special effects were limited to purely photographic processes, such as solarization – the technique used, for example, to make the shimmery, bizarre-colored landscapes in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Such a process had never been used for motion picture films before, and none of the special-effects houses even knew what we were talking about.
I wanted to film the scenes and then manipulate the film with a computer. I proposed a rather simple solution: to show the point of view of a machine, use a machine. But what special-effects technique would best suggest a machine’s point of view? The film required us to show the point of view of the main robot, played by Yul Brynner. In 1973, I made a movie called Westworld, which was a fantasy about robots.
Everything’s digital these days, but it wasn’t always so.
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