Those guys were working very hard to make their responses and even their heartbeats, as machine-like and predictable as possible. “I’d visited Kennedy Space Center and seen how astronauts were being trained – and I realized that they were really being trained to be machines. Here’s an excerpt from Michael Crichton’s interview:
Westworld hbo soundtrack download torrent movie#
As a result, the film is intentionally structured around old movie cliche situations-the shoot-out in the saloon, the sword fight in the castle banquet hall-and we very much tried to play on an audience’s vague memory of having seen it before, and, in a way, wondering what it would be like to be an actor in an old movie.Īmerican Cinematographer magazine dedicated an entire issue to Westworld in November 1973. In some ways, it’s a lot cleaner as a movie, because it’s a movie about people acting out movie fantasies. They were things that had antecedents in John Ford and John Wayne and Errol Flynn-that sort of thing. They weren’t things that had literal antecedents, literary antecedents. The actual detailing of these three worlds-and also the kinds of fantasies that people experienced in them-were movie fantasies, and because they were movie fantasies, they got to be very strange-looking on the written page. It’s about an amusement park built to represent three different sorts of worlds: a Western world, a Medieval world and a Roman world. It didn’t work as a novel, and I think the reason for that is the rather special structure of this particular story. We obtained a sort of blocky, animated effect that was remarkable in 1973 – and a cliche seven years later, when similar imagery appeared in every thing from perfume ads to paintings by Salvador Dali.
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.