Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

filming science fiction

On seeing Soderbergh's Solaris, based as he said not on the Tarkovsky film but on the Stanslaw Lem novel, I remembered this passage:

For some reason in all the science-fiction films which I have ever seen, the audience is forced into a detailed, close-up examination of what the future will look like. Indeed, often (like Stanley Kubrick) they call their films "visions of the future" … I would like to film Solaris in such a way that the audiences are not faced with something technologically outlandish.

If, for instance, we were to film passengers getting into a tram as something never before seen or even heard of, then it would look like Kubrick's moon-landing sequence. But if we film a moon-landing the way they film a tram-stop in an ordinary film, then everything will be as we would wish it.

[Maya Turovskaya Tarkovsky: Cinema as Poetry, p. 59]