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.