The Tree of Life has been in release for just about a month, but most people won’t be able to check it out until it opens wide on July 8th. If you are one of those people, turn away now because this is one you’ll want to see in theaters. If not, you have already experienced the breathtaking (I mean that literally) sequence in which Terrence Malick shows us the birth of the universe. Assisted by 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner VFX legend Douglas Trumbull, with his first feature film work in 27 years, my spine got chills each time I saw it in theaters. And now a bit of the footage has been released by Fox Searchlight.
Wired has a clip from the sequence, which can be see below in today’s Daily Distraction:
Trumbull told Cinematography.com that they “worked with chemicals, paint, fluorescent dyes, smoke, liquids, CO2, flares, spin dishes, fluid dynamics, lighting and high speed photography to see how effective they might be.” He shared that “it was a free-wheeling opportunity to explore, something that I have found extraordinarily hard to get in the movie business. Terry didn’t have any preconceived ideas of what something should look like. We did things like pour milk through a funnel into a narrow trough and shoot it with a high-speed camera and folded lens, lighting it carefully and using a frame rate that would give the right kind of flow characteristics to look cosmic, galactic, huge and epic.”
For now, we may be getting a six-hour cut of The Tree of Life and you will be able to see more of Trumbull’s work in the IMAX supplement The Voyage of Time, which Malick still has plans to work on.
See The Tree of Life in theaters as it expands, until it goes wide July 8th, because it truly is “one of the most ambitious films one will likely ever be able to experience.”
