Exclusive: ‘Voyage of Time’ Producers Talk Science, Visual Effects and More [Video]

Sarah Green: Well to be honest it was one of the first things that we ever discussed when I met him. I should know the number of years. Somewhere in the realm of 14 years ago, and there were a lot of ideas and movies on his mind, and this one was the one he was most excited about. He talked right away about could we make a film this way, and it would be about the history and the future of the universe, and it wouldn’t have a typical dialogue, it would have a kind of you know questioning voiceover, and it would have all the relevant facts of our universe that we could gather. I remember getting very excited about it because I hadn’t seen anything like it, and the idea of something like this through Terry Malick’s eyes is thrilling. Now we got to do it on a big IMAX screen which is doubly thrilling.

Nick Gonda: Yeah I think for me it started through research assignments of early abstract filmmaking, ways to convey the essence of things through different forms and chemicals. I knew it didn’t relate to the film we were working on at the time, which was The New World, so I had an idea it was for something in the future. Then as we were, I remember driving over Coldwater Canyon and he started, on the way to Warner Brothers we were editing New World at the time, and he started to speak about this story about the history of the universe and then those car rides every day became more and more explanation. That was my experience of essentially reading the script, was just hearing him describe his vision for it, which was incredibly inspiring.

Sophokles Tasioulis: For me, I am the newest member to the Malick family so I was approached about 4 or 5 years ago, if I would be interested to work on a big documentary because my past has been in documentaries, planet earth, and deep blue, and that sort of long scale big big scale project. I met Terry four years ago. I flew to Austin and then I had two dinners with him actually where he wanted to see how I feel about a film like this. What was driving me and my motivation in doing documentaries and everything, you know getting to know each other and trusting each other, and that was a very nice process.

In this movie there are also some elements of Tree of Life. You’re talking about things that are unknown. How is that, you know recreating something that we don’t really know how it happened. I mean the beginning of times.

Sarah Green: Right. What we have is data. We have hypotheses. We have you know great great scientific minds putting all the known data into one place and helping us figure out what it should have looked like, or probably looked like, or it might have looked like. Then we took that and brought it to Dan Glass, our extraordinary visual effects supervisor, and said now take this very rough simulation that’s sort of good from an educational point of view and make it Malickian. Make it beautiful. Make it extraordinary. Make it extreme. That was a really amazing process. Every step of the way we would check back with the scientists to make sure we weren’t going off-track, you know to make sure that we were still being true to the science, true to the to the chronological nature of all the events, but to make it as extraordinary an experience it could be for a viewer to have an emotional response to the beauty and the extraordinary events they were witnessing.

Nick Gonda: Yeah and I think one of the exciting things about Voyage Of Time is it does provide an opportunity to celebrate what we do know about our universe as a result of the incredible research that scientists have been doing for many years. As well as celebrating the mystery of what we still don’t know. So Voyage is in many ways a fusion of that knowledge as well as a celebration of the mystery that even scientists themselves are still enchanted by.

What is your personal connection with that with the beginning of times, one of the things that they talk about in the film is learning from the past, that we can learn you know about our future. How do you think that impacts you and what are some of the discoveries that you made, while making this movie?

Sophokles Tasioulis: I think working on Voyage is a very humbling experience. It puts you in perspective of who we are, and actually I think everybody has his own personal experience in watching Voyage. It’s everybody’s story and it’s everybody’s personal story at the same time.

Sarah Green: My dad is a scientist so I grew up asking questions like this, or being engaged in conversations like this, so it was really exciting for me to try to dig in and understand things like black holes and dark matter and all that stuff that I keep trying to understand and I still kind of makes my head go in circles. So the idea of exploring that in depth, in a way that I can then experience with my heart, is just is amazing.

Nick Gonda: I would say, echoing you know those great sentiments, it’s easy today when you turn on any channel or pick up most publications to see a world that appears to be very divided, and this film is a reminder that we all share the same ancestry. No matter where we live in the world today. No matter what neighborhood we’re in. We are all essentially coming from the same origins and I think that looking at that in conjunction with this amazing planet and the life that it has birthed, it’s also a reminder to care for what has been.

You have a fascination for the beginning of time so I wanted to start by telling me about that. When did that start, and what fascinated you the most about talking about that theme in Voyage Of Time?

Dan Glass: Well I doubt that it’s a very personal fascination. I mean in the sense that there’s something that we all probably have a deep-rooted curiosity for at least in terms of where we come from, and the ultimate in terms of where we come from is actually the very origins of our universe and the cosmos. It’s fascinating really how much is being learned, and discovered, and theorized really every year. And that every year that goes by the more we learn, and the deeper we appear to be able to peer into space, and into the history of our own universe. And so, you know reading about, that learning about that, and with this project Voyage Of Time, having a chance to actually be required to learn about that, and then try to find ways to represent them on the screen, to in some ways raise curiosity, and partially educate people has been a fantastic opportunity.

Yeah I was talking about that. I was speaking of you know recreating that on the screen. What are some of the things they use, some of the techniques, you mixed organic and digital photography in this movie, and how was that approach you know with Terrence as well?

Dan Glass: In this project, literally involved the full gamut of techniques that we have in the filmmaking kind of tool box these days. We always put an emphasis on trying to find analog solutions to things, whether was a photographic source material or at least photographic reference that we could adapt and augment. Where none of those were possible, we would film or set up scenarios that could represent either in an abstract form or sometimes a more literal representation of things, whether it’s the early stages of the universe which depict kind of asteroid belts hanging in space that began to coalesce to form planets of our solar system. You know we would use techniques like scattered salt crystals on a disc that spins with a very harsh back light that represents the sun. You film that the right frame rate and the right kind of contrast of light and then afterwards maybe just paint in a few little details around. It’s really amazing how powerful that can communicate the idea that we were trying to, and that’s of course just one example. There are also instances where things are far more abstract, that nobody really knows how to depict, and so for those we often went to science itself and collaborated closely with some of the world’s leading experts in different fields. For example, dark matter. Dark matter is something that a lot of people have heard talked about, and the theories seem to uphold its existence, but we have no evidence. We can’t photograph it per say, and so there are data sets that exist that show this incredibly beautiful lattice like structure for how they theorize that dark matter exists or is spread out through our universe. We took those data sets, worked with the scientists to turn those into images that are not just diagrammatical schematic, but that actually look kind of beautiful in their own right, and whilst I think probably somebody watching the movie for the first time won’t understand what those structures are, if it raises their curiosity to find out a bit more about it, they’ll learn that a shot like that, the dark matter shot, in fact every shot in the piece, has a rich story behind it, and a science that is behind it, the cause of it.

Yeah, on that same line of creating things of the unknown, that we don’t know what it would look like, like the dinosaurs that you have in the movie, and it’s also a theme that is a recurring theme from Tree of Life to Voyage of Time. Tell me a little bit about recreating the dinosaurs, and also what that represents for you and for Terry as well. That’s such a strong representation.

Dan Glass: Well the thing about a lot of the early creatures that don’t exist today is we do know a tremendous amount about them by now. In terms of their skeletal movement, we were able to understand from the way their skeletons are formed like how the muscle systems must have worked, and the kind of bulk and the mass that must have sat on top of those skeletons. What we don’t necessarily know is coloration, and the literal kind of feel of how their skin would have been, but there are good theories because we can draw analogs of how we believe the descendants of those creatures have evolved. From that we can deduce, you know fairly, with a good assumption you know, what these things look like. For Terry in this project what was probably more important even than how they looked, because he didn’t want the look to be something that you kind of were drawn to or starstruck by, but actually something that almost felt just more natural, and just sat within its world. For him what was more important was that these creatures felt like they could emote, like they represented a point in the evolution of consciousness almost. A beginning of self-awareness in animals or creatures that predated anything that obviously we have evolved to become.

And using nature as a main character in the film as well.

Dan Glass: Correct, yes, yeah. You know throughout, wherever we could, we photographed and took real creatures that we know existed a long time ago. Obviously the landscapes that can stand in, like Iceland, which is a land predominately without trees or very little vegetation, so that can work for a very early era of the earth, and it’s very convincing because it’s real still.