This is the kind of sci-fi that Trumbull is use to working on.

BD: Getting back to your own projects, what sort of subject matter, or genres or styles are you embracing?

DT: I’m sick of what you generally call science fiction, I guess. Although one of my projects is a submarine film that I’m just working on right now, which has nothing to do with that at all. I’m just looking at a wide range of things. I’ve always been fascinated by UFOs and aliens and space and the cosmos and life in the universe and intelligent thought about it.

BD: Are you working through independent means internationally?

DT: Yeah. I’m working as an independent producer/director on a deal-by-deal basis. I don’t have a deal with anybody specifically to get it produced yet; I’m just in the development phase. You know, it’s very simple — you just make a movie. For me, I’ve spent my years as an entrepreneur starting companies and developing technologies and struggling and raising venture capital and all that kind of thing and I’ve just kind of felt that I’ve done enough of that now and I need to get back to just being a filmmaker and just put something on the screen that I feel strongly about with whatever technology seems to work for that particular show.

BD: How long has it been since you’ve directed?

DT: Well, lets see. The Back to the Future ride was one of the most recent jobs I did. I did several shows for the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas. I consider all these to be directing jobs.

BD: Brainstorm was your last feature, right?

Trumbull directed the cult sci-fi film Brainstorm.

DT: Yeah. One of the things that I felt for myself about my interest in making movie is that I’ve always been more drawn to the difficult and challenging aspects in movies like the simulated rides in Back to the Future and things like that, but no one else can figure out how to do them. Universal and Spielberg and the whole crowd behind the Back to the Future trilogy could not figure out how to make this ride work. They were building the buildings, and simulators and screens and bought the projectors and it was a disaster. I really like coming in and helping solve really difficult problems like that. Which I consider a really central part of what the cinema is to me. Cinema is about images on screens and making you feel involved, and I thought that the Back to the Future ride for me was a big experiment in cinema. I think it’s generally dismissed by people as a theme park ride or a cute attraction, but, for me, it was an experiment in the extremes of cinema.

BD: Which now can be applied to other things, I’m sure.

DT: Sure, I mean, I learned a lot making that show and it’s been very successful and very few directors can claim that they’ve got a movie that’s on the screen all day everywhere around the world for years. It just keeps running and running. I’m very proud of it because it was extremely difficult and it was fun to figure it out and kind of write the material to fit the difficulties of the technology and make it all work. So that’s one of things I’ve been doing is pushing that envelope for a while. It gets to be where its too much technology and not enough art and story. I’m just trying to get back to it. A feature film to me is a much simpler event.

Bill Desowitz is the editor of VFXWorld.