I have the deepest respect for Terrence Malick and greatly enjoyed helping him on 'Tree of Life.' I consider him to be a good personal friend and professional contemporary.
When I was a young man in school, I used to read science fiction and really liked it. And as I became a young artist, I was filling up my portfolio with alien planets and spacecraft and things like that.
Working on '2001' was my film school. Stanley Kubrick was my mentor.
My particular aesthetic of light and color and design wouldn't change as a result of working with computer graphics rather than with slit scan or miniatures.
'2001' used a lot of what's called 'front projection.' You project an image onto this giant reflective screen, and the image bounces back and comes back to the lens and seems to be in the background behind the actors. The whole 'dawn of man' sequence in '2001' was projected eight-by-ten photographs of the African savannah.
My personal feeling is that ultra-high frame rates and ultra-vivid giant screen movies can be like a window onto reality. And if you recognize it as such, you can write your screenplay, direct your movie, edit it, and present it as a live experience - not like a movie.
