"I grabbed the tools of cinema the way I had grabbed the tools of painting, and just started using my inspirations, my emotions, my friends".
What began to obsess him was the idea of seeing what advanced 21st-century movie technology ("The tools of cinema are now wasted on cinema," he said) could do if harnessed to a few thousand years of its two-dimensional forefather, Western painting.
Begun by the directors Thomas Vinterberg and Lars Von Trier, Dogma 95 rejects the use of lighting, camera dollies, scored music and a host of other tools of mainstream cinema.
Each one is the result of creative problem solving in his ever-evolving animation tool box of of Cinema 4D, Octane, and most recently, Houdini.
He is not the first to attempt to frame a master narrative of cinema using the tools of the medium itself.
It set me down a whole road of not being afraid to remove some of cinema's manipulative tools.
Its quest to find fresh ways of seeing, to push the limits of cinema as a tool for both capturing reality and heightening the senses, was precisely the one that, as far back as the 1920s, compelled the Soviet master Dziga Vertov to formulate his concept of the camera as an all-seeing, endlessly perfectible Kino-Eye.
I came fully prepared to be faced with a tough interview, someone who would challenge me and perhaps disagree with my vision of cinema as a tool to bring us humanly closer.
He's conscious of cinema as a social tool, but I don't think he's a filmmaker who's pushing an agenda.
But a genius of cinema he is, though his primary tools are often light and shadow rather than film.
The sound designer, Ben Burtt, said of Dolby's work in the world of cinema: "Here we have a scientist who invents tools for the artist and so you get the two important cornerstones of entertainment, which are science and creativity.
