Silent Running - Growing Pains, Part I
A guy famous for shooting John Wayne, a disillusioned FX genius, four amputees and the female Bob Dylan - yes, it's the small-scale eco-friendly sci-fic epic without we mightn’t have WALL-E. Probably.
“People always want to talk to me about Silent Running,” smiles Bruce Dern. “I’ve done a lot of things in film. I’ve worked with Alfred Hitchcock [Family Plot], I’ve been nominated for Oscars and Golden Globes, I’m one of the few people to have shot dead John Wayne on screen, and my daughter [Jurassic Park’s Laura Dern] has been in some of the biggest movies ever made. And still barely a week goes by without someone stopping me in the street to talk about that great little movie.”
A “great little movie” is an apt description of Douglas Trumbull’s eco-friendly space fantasy. Made in the window between 2001 and Star Wars, Silent Running is a film way ahead of its time. Our hero is Dern’s Freeman Lowell, a space gardener who loathes his human colleagues but loves the arboretums he’s been entrusted with cultivating. That is until Lowell and his crewmates receive the order to return home, ahead of which Freeman must destroy his beloved forests - an instruction that leads the quiet man to take unusual, brutal action.
Perhaps the closest Hollywood ever came to restaging the 1960s counter-culture struggles in outer space, Silent Running was only a modest box-office success on its original theatrical release. But as Bruce Dern explains, the film’s cult following continues to flourish.
More pertinently, Silent Running is still shaping the way cinema sees the future. Indeed, when Duncan Jones released his lo-fi sci-fi drama Moon, it was rare to read an interview in which he didn’t talk up Trumbull’s picture.
And when Pixar introduced the world to WALL-E, there can’t have been many critics who didn’t look at the amiable automatons and immediately think back to Huey, Dewey and Louie, Lowell’s trio of robot aides whose quiet, clunky charm made Silent Running one of 1970s science-fiction’s genuine delights.