Imaginary Worlds - 2001: A Filmmaking Odyssey

Episode Date: February 6, 2020

2001: A Space Odyssey is considered a masterpiece, and a game changer for sci-fi on film. But the movie had a tumultuous origin story, and it was initially scorned by critics. Barbara Miller of The Museum of The Moving Image walks me through their new exhibit on the making of 2001. And I talk with author Michael Benson, actor Keir Dullea and Stanley Kubrick’s daughter Katharina about how Kubrick and his collaborator Arthur C. Clarke reached for the stars, but felt lost in space as they struggled to finish this incredibly ambitious project. Here’s the link to Michael Benson’s book: https://www.amazon.com/Space-Odyssey-Stanley-Kubrick-Masterpiece/dp/1501163930 Here’s a link the Museum of the Moving Image’s 2001 exhibit: http://www.movingimage.us/exhibitions/2020/01/18/detail/envisioning-2001-stanley-kubricks-space-odyssey/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. So why don't you tell us where we are right now? We are in the entrance to Envisioning 2001, Stanley Kubrick's Space Odyssey, an exhibition at Museum of the Moving Image. I'm Barbara Miller. I'm the director of curatorial affairs here at the museum. of Curatorial Affairs here at the museum. The Museum of the Moving Image is one of my favorite museums in New York because they focus on television and movies.

They have props and costumes from Blade Runner, Star Wars, and The Muppets. So when I found out they were doing an exhibit on 2001 A Space Odyssey, I had to check it out. Now, I had always assumed that 2001, the movie, was based on the novel 2001 by Arthur C. Clarke, but I learned that the novel and the film were actually created at the same time. They were both based on a treatment that Arthur C. Clarke and the director Stanley Kubrick wrote together in 1964. In fact, one of the first objects that you see is not a prop from the film. It is a small telescope that Kubrick and Clark first bonded over. So this is a Questar

telescope that Kubrick saw. He was, you know, really sort of avidly into sort of looking up at the night sky. And actually, this letter here from Stanley Kubrick to Arthur C. Clarke is the first time that they had any point of connection. Kubrick wrote a letter to Arthur C. Clarke, and he writes to him sort of with this idea of, I heard that you can help me. I'm trying to, I want to buy a telescope. And I heard you're the one that can really give me the advice. And by the way, I want to make a really good science fiction film. Are you interested in working with me on it? Now, at the time, a lot of Kubrick's colleagues were surprised

that he was suddenly interested in science fiction. Up until that point, he was best known for directing Spartacus, Lolita, and Dr. Strangelove, which was a dark satire of the nuclear arms race. A lot of people still considered science fiction to be lowbrow. You know, at the time, especially sci-fi and, you know, aliens, like you said, that was the stuff of these B-movies, these sort of like bad genre films. But the sort of ideas that laid behind them were the eternal questions.

Is there other life out there? What is it like? What impact would it have on us if we found it? These are not sort of trivial questions. And, you know, they're sort of being engaged by this genre that wasn't, you know, really engaged in very serious filmmaking. They were out to entertain and sort of to sort of build on the momentum that was growing around the space race and other things. And Kubrick saw an opportunity to engage these ideas really seriously. One of the many extraordinary things about 2001

is that the film was made with practical effects, meaning no CGI. So instead, they would film miniature spaceships, make them look gigantic. And the museum has models of those spaceships from 2001 on display. But they were not the original models that were used during production. Unfortunately, those were scrapped. These models were made by fans, and they are perfectly accurate. Well, it might surprise you to know that there is a very lively community of people committed to model making and sort of generally geeking out about 2001 A Space Odyssey. Yeah, I guess that doesn't really surprise me very much.

And it's almost like a sub story here. I think you could really sort of do a walk through this whole exhibition talking about fans. So the reproduction spacesuit that we have, the models that we have were made by people not just work for hire, like here's $10,000 making us a spacesuit. This is work that was made by super fans that were doing it to get it right from the pure love of it and the commitment. Stanley Kubrick was also committed to accuracy and realism. He immersed himself in the latest scientific thinking. And at the exhibit, there's a video of Wernher von Braun, who was one of the main scientists at NASA, showing off a model space station that looks like a wheel. It also happens to look like the space station in 2001. But this video was not from a NASA documentary. This was an episode of the television show Disneyland.

It aired in 1955. Oh. And it was an episode of that TV series that was devoted to sort of looking at the possibilities of space. And there's Werner talking about what the space station would look like. And it's nearly identical to the space station as it's depicted in 2001. Of course, it winds up looking very different from what the actual space station that is actually up there in space looks like. But at the time, that was their best guess. that is actually up there in space looks like.

But at the time, that was their best guess. Now, in case you need a refresher or have not seen 2001, the plot of the film is not as important as knowing about the film's iconic imagery. There's the opening sequence, which is called Dawn of Man, where a prehistoric ape man discovers that he can use a bone as a tool. Eventually, he throws the bone into the air and we jump cut to a spaceship of the same shape. And even if you haven't seen the film,

I'm sure you've seen all the pop culture references to Hal, the computer which is eerily calm and homicidal. Open the pod bay doors, Hal. I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that. And then there's the mysterious Black Monolith, built by an alien civilization. It's a big rectangle that stands upright

and gives off this really eerie sound. And you've probably heard about the ending, where we travel inside the mind of this alien intelligence. And without giving too much away, the imagery is very surreal. And it took Kubrick a long time to decide that the monolith should be that big, giant rectangle. At the exhibit, there were sketches of other shapes that he considered, and it looks like a page of black origami designs.

But Kubrick also really struggled very much up until the end of production with, were you going to see images of aliens, of ETs during the Stargate sequence? And I thought it was really, that sort of line was, that sort of line of thinking was something I really dove into, because I was very interested in that, and to why they decided not to, because, and I think in some sense, it's sort of emblematic of Kubrick's approach to the film, that it was better to leave it up to your imagination than to be told what these things look like, because he felt that the minute you depicted something, it sort of loses its power to, you know, to sort of mystify or to inspire. This is the kind of imagery that defines a culture. Not just the power of the imagery itself, but the way it is reverberated through pop culture and our collective imagination for more than half a century.

And as I learned about the making of 2001, I became fascinated by Stanley Kubrick himself and his struggle to get the film made. I mean, that production was an odyssey in itself. He pushed himself and his crew to the limits, especially his friend and collaborator, Arthur C. Clarke. We will fly into that monolith of a story just after the break. So as I mentioned earlier, the movie 2001 and the novel 2001 were both based on a treatment that Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick wrote together in 1964. The two men had an instant bromance.

Katerina Kubrick was just a kid at the time, but she remembers how much her father loved picking Arthur C. Clarke's brain. You've got two giant brains asking the big questions, you know, what's it all about? Why are we here? Who's controlling us? We'll never know. What's it going to be like in the future? And will we be able to maintain our humanity once we know what we know? It was a huge adventure for both of them. And he loved Arthur C. Clarke's more lyrical thought process and also the fact that he was quite a good scientist himself, and then using his substantial scientific knowledge to then

create these extraordinary stories. So the two of them work very well together. Kubrick was described by almost everybody as a sponge. You know, when he had a topic in mind, he just sucked information out of everybody connected to that topic. Michael Benson wrote an excellent book about the making of 2001 called Space Odyssey. He says Kubrick looked through Clark's previous work to find a plot that he could hinge their movie on. And he finally settled on a short story that Clark wrote in 1951 called The Sentinel. It was a story, a short story about the discovery of an object on the moon.

It was left there by an alien intelligence millions of years ago. And at the end of the story, they realized that it was kind of a burglar alarm. It was an early warning system to warn those who had made it that intelligence had arisen on Earth sufficient to bridge the space between Earth and moon. Kubrick liked the story because he felt that humanity's exploration into space would change us He felt that humanity's exploration into space would change us, somehow. He wasn't exactly sure. And Clark gave him the answer.

He said to Kubrick, It's not so simple that the human race developed tools and then proceeded to build civilization. Rather, our ancestors made tools, and then those tools changed the way we think and changed how we operate. And then we modified the tools accordingly. And then those tools proceeded to modify how we work and think. Clark said, you know, it was more that tools invented us. And that's at the heart of 2001, isn't it? Eventually, they had a treatment that they were satisfied with. So each man went off to do his thing, Kubrick to make

the movie, Clark to write the novel. And at this point, Stanley Kubrick had earned a lot of goodwill in the film industry. He had been considered a wunderkind, up-and-coming, bankable director, and his last film, Dr. Strangelove, was a huge commercial and critical success. last film, Dr. Strangelove, was a huge commercial and critical success. The head of MGM gave him a very long leash to do what he wanted with 2001. Kubrick took that freedom and ran with it. Now, as I mentioned before, they were inventing these special effects as they were making the film. Keir Dullea, who played the astronaut Dave Bowman, remembers how they came up with a very down-to-Earth solution for the illusion of gravity in the centrifuge space station.

The centrifuge, of course, was whirling around and created artificial gravity, but for the rest of the ship, we had Velcros at the bottom. The padding on all the hallways throughout the ship had Velcros, and Velcros at the bottom, that the padding on all the hallways throughout the ship had velcros and velcros at the bottom of our shoes. So that's why it was stuck to the floor. Now, figuring out groundbreaking special effects required a lot of trial and error. But Katerina Kubrick says that her father treated every aspect of production that way. He always said he didn't know what he wanted, but he knew what he didn't want. So if you were going out looking for locations, for instance,

which I did for him a great deal, you had to show him everything. Wherever you went, you had to do a 360 and then you had to do detail shots. And he didn't know until he saw it, because he didn't know what was out there. So you had to give him lots and lots of options. Also scripts throughout his filmmaking career, a script was a very fluid thing. It was just a skeleton. And if you hired actors who came up with an idea or they were ad-libbing and he would say, oh, gee, that's great, do that again. And then that would go into the script. He was constantly on set, or he would come home after a night of shooting and rewrite the next day's script pages.

Cair Dulles remembers a lot of improvising on the set. Like, there's a scene where he and the actor Gary Lockwood are discussing whether to dismant HAL, the ship's malfunctioning computer. That was a much longer scene originally. We honed it down. What he would do is we would improvise on the scene and it was recorded. Then he'd take that recording and give it to someone to type up. Then we'd get new pages and we'd improvise on that and it got shorter and shorter and shorter. There isn't a single aspect of ship operations

that's not under his control. If he were proven to be malfunctioning, I wouldn't see how I would have any choice but disconnection. I'm afraid I agree with you. A lot of the dialogue

was pared down to the bare minimum. I mean, the longest amount of dialogue he had in the script was a mission report that didn't even make the final cut of the film. And I, for weeks, worked on it privately to get it down.

And I worked on it so strongly that 53 years later, I'll go to my grave within my mind. Mission control is an X-ray Delta-1. A 192.0 onboard board Fall Prediction Center, and our 9000 computer showed Alpha Echo 3.5 unit as possible failure within 48 hours. Request check your in-ship system simulator. Also confirm your approval. Our plan to go EVA replaced Alpha Echo 3.5 unit prior to failure. Mission control, this is X-ray Delta-1.

Transmission concluded. That's the only real long speech I had in the whole film. Wow, you spent so much time learning it. And when you realized that it got cut, how did you feel? Oh, it didn't bother me at all. Not at all. It wasn't, there are, I mean, if you cut the scene where I take Hal apart, I might have been upset. Right, right, right, yeah, yeah.

But Kubrick did upset a lot of people. I mean, it's one thing to cut dialogue. It's another thing to scrap sets and models that are built, ready to film until the director decides he's unhappy with them. On top of that, he kept changing his mind about major things, like whether the backdrop of the story was going to be Jupiter or Saturn. And he eventually was that way with the music. The film was supposed to have an original score, but he fired several composers after they had

scored the film and ended up going with the classical music that he'd been using as a temporary track. He definitely drove some people crazy to the point where they needed psychiatric care, you know. So because he was so incredibly exacting and required things to be just so and he would definitely insist on things being a certain way and he would drive some people crazy. In Michael Benson's book, somebody who worked on the film described the mood in the art department as, quote, suicidal. But, you know, there are people who keep on changing their mind and they produce a disaster, and there are people who keep on changing their mind

because they are producing something more and more and more refined. And Kubrick fell into the latter. Now, to put this in context, we need to skip ahead into the future. Stanley Kubrick would eventually become infamous for his perfectionism. When he made The Shining, he did 127 takes of a single scene, which traumatized the actress Shelley Duvall and made it into the Guinness Book of World Records as the most takes ever for a scripted scene.

In the 1980s and 90s, there were huge gaps between films, as he spent years obsessively researching ideas that never saw the light of day. His final film, Eyes Wide Shut, was such an epic production, he died less than a week after he handed in the final cut. But Katarina says this aspect of her father's personality has been blown out of proportion. Okay, fine, he was a perfectionist. But she says he was not the reclusive, obsessive madman that some journalists had made him out to be.

In fact, at one point during our interview, she took out her phone to show me candid pictures of Kubrick. It was just a dad and a grandpa. And when people say, and this is his favorite cat, that's Polly. And people say such terrible things about Stanley. And when he died and all this terrible stuff was being taught in babysitting in the newspapers. And we just had this big family meeting. It's my son's birthday and he's helping himself to cake. It's funny to see those iconic Stanley Kubrick eyebrows while holding his grandson or getting a piece of cake.

But Michael Benson says that we can see hints of Kubrick's increasing perfectionism in the making of 2001. And that's partly because this film was so ambitious. I mean, he was aiming for really profound ideas like the evolution of sentient life in the galaxy. And he didn't want to make a fool out of himself. I do a PowerPoint talk about 2001, and I show a photo of Kubrick in 64 and a photo of him in 68. And obviously only four years have passed, but he looks 20 years older. But the production was not supposed to take four years. The head of MGM had unshakable faith in Kubrick, but the lower level executives were freaking out because he was going millions over budget. In the meantime, Arthur C. Clarke finished his novel. His agent

was putting a lot of pressure on him to sell it. His publisher was dying for it. And Arthur C. Clarke really needed the money. All he needed was Kubrick's permission. Kubrick said no. He had a good reason. He didn't want to give the story away. But that also meant the novel couldn't be published until the film came out, and the film's completion was nowhere in sight. Now, everybody else involved with 2001 was an employee trying to please a director that they greatly admired and kind of feared. But Clark had seen Kubrick as an equal partner, and he was not happy about this. And so there was this frozen conflict that would flare into hot, you know, debate, hot exchanges between the two of them. Clark said, I tried everything with Stanley.

Tears, anger, rage, you know, lawyers. None of it worked. So there was definitely drama there. There was definitely serious drama there. The next conflict in their relationship came around the film's narration. Now, if you're thinking, I don't remember any narration in 2001, you're right. There is none. But the original concept was to explain everything.

In fact, the movie was supposed to begin with a short documentary about space. And as Kubrick was putting the film together, he actually worried that audiences would be confused. So he kept asking Clark to write more and more narration. But when he finally put the film together in the editing room, he decided that the problem wasn't too little narration. The problem was the narration. So we cut every word of it. The problem was the narration. So we cut every word of it. Thank God, because if the film had what Arthur wrote, with all due respect to Arthur, I mean, Arthur's a writer, Kubrick's a filmmaker, Arthur knows how to write, knew how to write brilliantly.

But, you know, that doesn't necessarily always translate to the screen. And what Arthur wrote was kind of nice, but it was a little purple, you know, you know, for example, at the Dawn of Man sequence, there was supposed to be a voice saying the reign of the terrible lizards was long in the past, you know, these kinds of things. It's all there in the image. And Kubrick had the strength of character to decide, no, this film will stand or fall on the basis of the visual storytelling and the dialogue. To say that Clark was disappointed would be an understatement. He was upset because he had been writing it on airplanes, on trains, you know, in hotel rooms. He was on a book tour, refining it, getting frantic, you know, at the time, obviously not emails at the time. I mean, he got cables delivered,

Western Union telegrams delivered to his hotel room saying, I need more on that for this section. And yeah, he was upset when it turned out it would all be thrown out. But by that point, Clark had seen the writing on the wall. This was going to be Kubrick's vision no matter what. And everybody trusted Kubrick. I mean, he may have driven them nuts, but nobody doubted that he would make a masterpiece. And then Clark went to a screening of the film. And all of his fears about the lack of narration seemed to come true. You know, people were streaming out. Half the theater left. It was considered a disaster. The reviews were terrible. The screening was full of journalists and studio executives that came up to Clark afterwards to either offer their condolences on this giant mess of a film or ask him.

What is it? What is the meaning? You know, what ask him, What is the meaning? What is this about? What is this film about? And so, of course, Clark had every reason to think, Oh my God, this is a disaster. This is not communicating. They had more screenings for VIPs that went just as badly. At one point, Kubrick asked someone to stand by the door and count the number of walkouts.

Over 240 people left the theater. So he went back to the editing room to recut the film, days away from its wide release. Katerina says, What was upsetting for me at the time was seeing how upset my parents were and how upset Stanley was. And then my parents were upset because the film critics were really harsh. The review in the New York Times said that the movie was, quote, so completely absorbed in its own problems that it's somewhere between hypnotic and immensely boring. The Washington Post called it pretentious, abysmally slow, amateurishly acted, and above all, wrong. Now during production, Kubrick had been projecting

unshakable self-confidence. But Katerina says behind the scenes, her father was more insecure than people realized. Stanley was incredibly self-critical and he was questioning himself and his ideas and things that he said all the time. And he would say something and he said, oh my God, what I just said was ridiculous. What was I thinking? Stanley was extremely worried that he had produced a bomb, a complete bomb, lost his voice, was on the edge of tears. And then the movie opened. A month later, there were lines around the block. Keir Dullea never lost faith in his director.

And he thinks it's funny that MGM not only thought that they had a bomb that could sink the studio, but when the film was a hit, they were baffled as to why. You know, MGM was very worried at first. As a matter of fact, they were worried enough they wanted to get the right publicity so that when they realized there were lines around the block, they kind of estimated that most of the lines were made of young people that were the age of those who were protesting the Vietnam War.

And so, or probably even more likely, smoking funny cigarettes. They got a brand new poster that came out, the new poster said, 2001, The Space Odyssey, the ultimate trip. But the audiences were not just stoner hippies. 2001 was the highest grossing movie of 1968. And today it's a classic. I mean, it was recently rated among the top 10 best films ever made. To say that Arthur C. Clarke was relieved would be an understatement. Also, his novel, 2001, was a hit. In fact, he would later write three sequels. He and Kubrick stayed in touch, but the bromance was over. Kubrick was also relieved.

Although the film's success may have validated his pattern of perfectionism, which would later create several more cinematic masterpieces, but also a bit of angst for some of the people involved with those productions. And looking back at the legacy of 2001 A Space Odyssey, what amazes me is that first of all, the film set the standard for special effects and tropes that would become common in science fiction. But the lack of exposition feels so out of sync with science fiction today,

where the stories are jam-packed, and if a plot point isn't explained enough to satisfy the fans, the filmmakers will never hear the end of it on social media or at Comic-Con panels. Katarina is glad that her father did not go in that direction. Stanley didn't treat his audience as fools. That's why he was so careful. That's why he was so particular with details because he didn't, you know, he gave respect to the audience and he wanted, you know, he put his money on the screen and he said, look, this is my very best effort. This is what I think. Make of it what you will. And people respond to not being taken for fools. And if you explain something totally, you know, if you put a long fool's

cap explanation of why Mona Lisa is smiling, you know, I mean, it's just going to take it all away. It'll take the mystery away. Now, if you go online, you can find a lot of essays and videos of people explaining the ending of 2001, what it all means. And they're very well thought out, intelligent arguments. But when I was at the 2001 exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image,

Barbara Miller said to me, you know, when people were walking out of the theater in 1968, and they said, what does it all mean? The movie is designed for you to ask those kinds of questions. These are big questions. This question of, is there life out there? What's the future of humankind? Stanley Kubrick doesn't know the answers to those questions. This film doesn't know the answers to those questions.

Everyone makes those decisions for themselves. And, you know, the film provides an opportunity for you to sit and consider those things. And it leaves space for you as a viewer to engage in those questions. And I think that that is sort of the ultimate reason why we're still watching it and talking about it. Well, that is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Barbara Miller and everybody at the Museum of the Moving Image. Also, thanks to Michael Benson. I put a link to his book, Space Odyssey, in the show notes.

Also thanks to Katerina Kubrick and Keir Dullea. You know, Keir has actually been in dozens of movies and TV shows, but he doesn't mind the fact that everybody still thinks of him as the astronaut in 2001. Hey, if all you could do, if all you could have achieved, anyone, an actor, and all this actor has achieved was being in 2001, a space odyssey, you could do worse. Very true. My assistant producer is Stephanie Bellman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinski at Imagine Worlds Pod. And if you go in the Imaginary Worlds

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