Syd Mead is cinema’s first visual futurist (a term he coined for his groundbreaking previsualization work on Blade Runner). Since then he’s designed the future we see in a variety of movies from Tron, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, 2010 and others. SPACE.com’s Don Lipper spoke with the man who can see the future.

SPACE.com: How did you get started with the movies?

SM: [Star Wars special effects wizard] John Dykstra had used some of the books that I had illustrated for U.S. Steel in the early and middle 1960s, as sort of inspiration material.

So that was my first movie entrée. And then in ’80 Ridley Scott and his people went out into book stores to get fantasy artists, science-fiction books, and picked mine and liked some of the illustrations and I had a meeting with him in Hollywood, and that started the Blade Runner involvement.

SC: When you’re designing what it will look like in space for 2010 and Aliens, and even Star Trek, what sort of models or concepts do you use?

SM: As in industrial design, the problem defines the solution. The problem sets up your common denominator parameters, and then you start designing inside the desired end result.

My constraints are always the story, and in the case of classic industrial design, it’s pretty much the same. The story becomes the marketing studies or whatever parameters are driving the desired direction toward the solution. And then you just have to wait for the public to react.

SC: On Aliens, did you design the Sulaco?

SM: Yes. I stayed up all night [reading the script], it was very exciting, [Jim Cameron’s] a great scriptwriter, I must tell you.

SM: The script describes this array of antennae coming into frame from the left, moving right, and then this volume comes through the frame, and I thought, "a sphere is nature’s most neutral volumetric shape," so I did this huge ball with this forest of antennas sticking up.

So I get back to Hollywood, and I go to Jim’s house, and he says, "we have a problem here, because when you move a model past camera, you have to stay in focus. We’re gonna be photographing this pretty close, the model’s only five feet long."

So, he said we needed to make it longer, sort of more narrow, and flat, like a wall of detail moving past camera. So, I reconfigured it into this long, sort of vertical blade-like, bumpy design. Made it look very severe -- huge, huge armament -- and it in effect was a kind of cargo ship also. Much like the Nostromo was in the first Alien that Ridley Scott directed.

SC: For 2010, you obviously didn’t do the Discovery?

SM: No. When Kubrick [finished making] that film [2001, in which the Discovery originally appeared] he had sort of a fetish of destroying everything that had to do with making one of his films.

I created essentially a pressurized living environment with all the tubing and the wiring and so forth exterior to the living space, so that if you had to fix everything, you just go out onto a EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity) and get to it without having to tear the inside apart.

It became again a very logical industrial design process. The rotating cabin block was because Peter Hyams did not want to have to wire everything and suspend actors on harnesses throughout the entire film. So the rotating cabin block gave some excuse for things setting down on surfaces.

SC: Have you had people from NASA and other aerospace folks coming and looking at your designs and commenting on them?

SM: They did. Peter had a meeting with some people from JPL. Originally we [planned to have] an ablation shield that was carried on the Leonov for entry into the atmosphere of Jupiter, and they said no, you wouldn’t do that, you’d turn the rocket around and retrofire.

So that was a change specifically caused by the comments from the people at JPL, and involved retrofitting existing prop design to make it all look logical.

SC: Lets skip ahead to Mission to Mars.

SM: So on Mission to Mars the directions I got were to design the Mars recovery vehicle, the long duration vehicle [and] the Mars rover -- which was the surface vehicle -- to look like they would be NASA designed for, let's say five to eight years from now.

I proceeded to do that. They liked what they got. Then when Disney finally assigned John McTiernan to be director, he didn’t like anything I’d done. What they are doing now in the movies, is to assign design and prop building to a single source. I’m sort of an extra, assigned directly to the director, which is the only way I’ll work.

SC: If NASA came to you and said, "we want you to design the next Mars craft, we’re actually going to put humans in it and send it to Mars," do you think you could do it?

SM: I would work with their experts. What they sometimes lose sight of is how exciting their business really is, and somebody can come in from the outside, outside of their box, and literally reinvent their industry with their expert help, and come up with something they would never have come up with themselves.

SC: Because the future is your business now, what are you looking for right now? What ideas excite you about the future? What captivates your imagination?

SM: The totality and the philosophical impact of what’s happening with computer-generated intense alternate reality, virtual reality. Because what I’ve been doing for 40-some years is inventing scenarios, visualizing scenarios that are a future. Not the future, but a future.

SC: So what’s next for you?

SM: I’m working with several sources on this whole virtual world creation, and the trick seems to be creating a world that’s just familiar enough so you don’t get scared out of your wits or disoriented, but is still weird or interesting or nouveau or fascinating enough to hold the interest and be a success, a commercial success.

SC: Any movies that you’re working on?

SM: I’m starting to work with [director] Buzz Alexander on Ray Bradbury’s "Frost and Fire" story. Apparently they finally got funding, so we’re supposed to start that in July. I’m going help him do the crashed spaceship.

SC: Is there a Syd Mead signature? And what is it?

SM: People tell me that, and I don’t know what that is. People call me up and they say, "did you work on that?," and I’ll say "no," and then I’ll find out that maybe some of the people that did were using our books as reference.

I don’t really know what that is, and maybe I shouldn’t know because I’d become stale. I’d start recreating myself over and over, and that’s called being in a rut, I think.