The Rewatchables - ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ With Bill Simmons, Steven Spielberg, and Sean Fennessey

Episode Date: June 1, 2026

Bill and Sean open up the pod bay doors with director Steven Spielberg to revisit one of the greatest films of all time, Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, and William Sylvester. Producer: Craig Horlbeck, Chia Hao Tat, Eduardo Ocampo, and Matt Pevic The Ringer is committed to responsible trading. Please visit https://fanduel.com/predicts to learn more about the resources and helpline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Rwatchables. I'm Bill Simmons. This is a special one. It's going to actually be a special summer for us. We're going to do a from hell gimmick. We're going to rip through a bunch of my favorite dot, dot, dot from hells. We're talking about the roommate from hell. We're talking about the tenant from hell. We're talking about the little kid from hell, the nanny from hell. These are some of my favorite movies. They're ridiculous. They're just perfect for the Rewatchables. We can make fun of them. We could admire them. We can talk about how campy they are. We could talk about what they did right and wrong. And we're going to do a lot of them. And guess what? Almost all of them are going to be on Netflix.

So keep an eye out for it. Next week we're going to be doing single-white female, which is on Netflix. But a bunch of them will be on Netflix. We're going to be from hell at least through June and in part of July as well. So stay tuned for that. Coming up, me and Sean Fantasy got to do an entire rewatchables episode with the greatest living director we have, Steven Spielberg. Yeah, it's the three of us.

It's me, Sean, and Steven Spielberg. And we're going to talk about 2001 as Space Odyssey. I can cram it into the From Hell gimmick just by saying this is Hal, the computer from hell. It's a little bit of a reach, but to kick off from hell, we'll do it that way. Anyway, this is really one of the great podcasts I've ever been a part of. Steven Spielberg was incredible. Can't wait for you to listen to it.

Here it is. The rewatchables, 2001, a space odyssey. The rewatchables, brought to you by the Ringer podcast network, where you can find the big picture with Sean Fantasy. That's right. Steven Spielberg, not on Ringer Podcast Network. This is like your second podcast ever, right? My second podcast where there's a couple of cameras around, ever.

What do you think of this whole new world? Well, it's, guess what? Radio's back. We're going to talk about one of your favorite movies ever, 2001, a Space Odyssey, which is the oldest movie I think we've ever done when we watched us. By one year. Yeah.

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One less thing on your plate. Actually, a lot less. Visit staples. slash preferred. That was easy. This episode is brought to you by L'Oreal Group. Beauty is a powerful force that moves us. That's why L'Oreal Group has built a business that is inclusive at its heart with 100% of its brands, championing diversity. With 25,000 professional opportunities for people under 30 worldwide and 54% of leading positions held by women,

diversity is a strength that helps L'Oreal Group create the best beauty products for all. people. Visit loriel.com to learn more. Next. All right, so this movie's released April 2nd, 1968. What are you doing? I'm in school. I believe I'm at Long Beach State in April of that year. Semester's coming to an end.

Everybody's talking about this movie that is a drug trip. So the word around campus really surrounded my circles, and I'm a teetolder. I've never done any of that at all. But I spoke cigarettes for a year. That was the worst thing I did in college. For one year? Yeah, I quit. One year.

I quit. But everybody was talking about this kind of like Roger Corman's The Trip. And so the scuttlebutt on campus was, this is trippy. This is going to be like the trip. this is going to be like a really trippy film. So everybody was getting ready to get into a car and go down to, I believe it was the Pantages Theater to see the film. So I think I saw the film probably the first week at open.

And I went with three or four of my college friends. We all piled into a car, drove into Hollywood. And correct me if I'm wrong, it might have been to the Pantages. It might have been one of those big movie palaces in 1968. but we parked, walked like nine blocks to get to the theater, got into a line because in those days there was no such thing as buying your tickets ahead of time. And so we waited in line for a long time,

and everybody was being, I looked around, nobody was smoking grass because there were cops up and down Hollywood over. But when I walked into that theater, and people started filling it up, it was filled with smoke. It was just filled with smoke. Was that common?

I had never been to a movie where I smelled marijuana as thick as a London fog inside that movie palace. But everybody was in the theater, a lot of guys, not as many women, more men, everybody with long hair, everybody making a lot of noise. I thought I wouldn't be able to hear the dialogue. first of all I didn't realize because the movie hadn't started yet there was going to be very little dialogue but it didn't matter I was worried that there wasn't going to be room

to hear the dialogue because everybody was making so much noise in the theater and then when the movie started and thus spoke the astustra started and it hits that tremendous cord it shut everybody the F up

everyone just got completely quiet So as the music was decaying after that big explosive chord, I was aware that everyone was still. It was kind of in itself before the film started mind-blowing. And then what began, I think, from a lot of people in that theater, was a religious experience, fueled by whatever they were on. For me, it was not so much a religious experience.

but one of the most audacious films I had ever watched in my life. The audacity and I, of course, we all knew Kubrick and we all knew he was audacious, but the audacity and the risks he took telling that story, if you could even call it a story, set me back. And I think, you know, just rock my world for sure. Rock my cinema world. Your career started next year. Yeah, I got my contract to be a TV director at Universal the next year.

Correct. Pretty good start. And it really is like a before and after with movies, the 68, right? Like, it feels like, I remember you said it in some interview, Stephen, that you thought this was like the Big Bang Theory for a whole generation of filmmakers. But what was the before and after? Well, it's like that year is Planet of the Apes, Rosemary's Baby, Bullet, a handful of other, like, all-time classics. I've seen a lot.

A couple. Yeah. I had seen them all. Yeah. Did you feel it in the moment? Did you feel like something is changing about this thing that I love? Yeah, I did. I didn't feel that way until after Stargate, which we'll get to.

But after Stargate, I felt that nothing would ever be the same. Especially as you're watching people run out of the theater. But I'm watching the movie completely in a state of, you know, intoxication. because Stanley intoxicated me where perhaps I was getting a contact high with all the smoke in the room. But I was completely intoxicated by what I experienced. And it wasn't a film. It was an experience. It was the most experiential thing I had ever seen since I was a little kid and got scared to death by the greatest show on Earth.

And then later by Bambi and then again by Snow White in reissues. Well, what's crazy. It's it's 58 years old now. still kind of banging. Like when you think of like some of the other movies from back then feel like they happen in the 60s.

Yeah. This is like, you know, it's obviously it's slow by today's standards and things like that. But for the most part, the special effects, the feeling of like being in space,

just like, is this what it's actually like to be in space? Like that couldn't have existed in a movie before. Also, you have to remember how big the screen was. The screen was so big.

During Stargate, I just have to say that a person in the theater several people in the theater got up and started walking into the screen. And that was, by the way, you can probably look it up in the LA Times. It was reported that people were walking into the screen. In those days, at least in that theater, the screens were like louvers. They were vertical strips of reflective material.

And a couple of the people in the film during Stargate were reported to have walked actually into the screen. and disappeared backstage. Did you find anybody was not feeling it or walking out? Because there was reports of it being divisive when it was released. No, because, no, everybody I saw the movie with that day were all probably under 35 years old. So I don't know anyone that I wasn't, I was unaware of it. Look, half the audience could have walked out and I would not have noticed.

Right. I looked dead center, dead left to center, dead right of center, because that was my field of vision. And I was completely, you know, I guess completely magnetized by what was happening. Yeah, because there was a story when it had its big premiere. They were counting how many people walked out. And it was like 241 people. And the writer Arthur Clark was there who worked on it with them. And he was like, this is a disaster.

This is devastating. but young people were what saved this movie. Yeah, listen, a lot of people walked out of the sneak preview of Goodfellas. One of the greatest films I've ever seen and one of the greatest films Marty's ever made and yet I didn't go to the preview but Brian and Palma was there

and he just said there were a lot of walkouts and that because of the violence but the movie went on to become a piece of our collective history. So you said nobody could shoot a picture better in history than Kubrick? Well, what context did I say that?

I don't know. Okay. I don't want to reference something. You said it. If I said it, I'm sure there was a context for saying it. I'm not sure it was a declarative statement. Well, explain the shooting part, like what made him so special, like, as you saw his different catalog. Well, I think because Stanley in all the films, for one thing, he started out as a still photographer for Look magazine.

So he had he had an audacious, rambunctious, ambitious eye, and his compositions and his choices of what to show, what pictures to take, already set him apart. I mean, if he wanted to become a war correspondent, like Bob Cab, Robert Kappa, he could have become that too. But he turned that still eye into 24 frames of stills the second and became one of the greatest, I think, professors we've ever had, my generation,

that always looked up to him as one of our greatest teachers. And what made him that way was he knew how to tell a story. He knew how to tell a story unconventionally. He knew how to shock the audience. And he knew how to make them laugh. Dr. Strangelove is one of the greatest black comedies ever created for the screen. And with 2001 Space Audency, he was also, He was also a wizard technologically.

He was almost an engineer. His mind had a kind of OCD quality where when he focused in on something, he was doing it for himself and we were the beneficiaries. And whatever reason, he was creating these incredibly advanced spacecraft that no one had ever seen before

in anybody else's films. Those spacecraft alone were, kind of works of art, I always felt. And those spacecraft, especially the Jupiter mission craft, is what inspired Ralph McCorry and myself to create the mothership in close encounters, inspired George Lucas with the Imperial Star,

you know, Starship Destroyer. Yeah. And included, and certainly, certainly, inspired Ridley Scott in creating the space freighter Nostromo. These wouldn't have existed unless Stanley had come first. It seems like the lesson is, if you're going to do this, we're going all out. Even in the research where they told him it would take them like 13 years to basically create this universe and have people do the painting.

He's like, well, I'll get 13 people and it'll take one year each. I'll be done in a year. And it was just, I don't know who else was even like that in the 60s. It seemed like he had incredible patience and spent four years developing, writing, and then making the movie. Long period of editing, which there's not a lot of information about the period of time when he was editing the film together and what it ultimately became. If you read about him first reaching out to Arthur C. Clark and the idea that he has for the movie, it changes a lot in the progression. It does. And I knew Arthur.

I had the honor of meeting and having one with Arthur C. Clark when I was shooting. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, we stopped, we were shooting in Candy, Sri Lanka, and we stopped in Columbo before changing airplanes to fly back to the UK to continue shooting the film.

And he lived there for decades, right? And he lived in the botanical gardens where David Lina Shot Bridge in the River Kwai. And he invited us all to lunch at his house. And I had a great conversation with him about 2001 to Space Odyssey. Wow.

So he, He had the kind of filmmaking where he might take five years before he made his next movie. Yes. You're more prolific than that. There's two type of directors. I wouldn't call it prolific. I'm more impatient. Stanley was prolific.

I was impatient. I just love telling stories. And I'd love, I just, if I get a story and it gets into my, into my bananas, I just have to make, I just have to tell the story. I got to get it out. I got to exercise it. So you never could have had the type of career where you would have spent four years between projects. You've got nuts. No, I've spent three years between two projects, and I went a little nuts.

But the great thing about that, I went a little bit nuts not directing, but I was raising a family, and that was keeping me completely preoccupied. So it was okay. Yeah. So you didn't actually talk to him until 1980. I met him on the set of, on the set of the Shining in 1980, when they had just finished dressing the big Overlook Hotel, grand, grand. grand room with the double staircase and the fireplace and the table with the typewriter on it.

That's where I first met him. Did he invite you to the set? What led you to going there? Yeah, who reached out to who? No, what happened was I was about to make Raiders Lost Ark and I was going to build the well of the souls on the same set that he had already built the Overluck Hotel. Yeah. And I was scheduled to move when he struck his set when he was done shooting with it, we were

going to build our set. and so I was going to scout the set anyway, but Stanley happened to be there doing his still photographs. And he had a camera with a periscope lens, and he had a tabletop model of the set that he was actually standing in when I first met him. And Doug Douglas Twitty, our production manager, brought me over at Stanley's. I asked to meet Stanley, and Stanley said, yeah, he'd meet me.

And when I met Stanley, I was surprised he knew. knew anything I had done, and he just wanted to talk about Duel. The movie I made, the TV movie I made with Dennis Weaver about the truck chasing the car. Thank you. And that's what he wanted to talk about. And then we didn't talk for long because he was busy, but he said, why didn't we talk more? Come over to the house for dinner tonight. And so I got a chance to meet Christian Jan Harlan and Vivian and his daughters.

And that was the beginning of our relationship. Sean, you never claim him as a New Yorker. I think most people mistakenly think he's from England. All you do is hear his speaking voice. He totally bronxed through and through. He sounds like a WFAN caller. I mean, he really is, it's an unusual thing because he obviously looms over film history

as this great intellectual and dynamic powerhouse. But he really just is a fast-talking New Yorker. Yeah, yeah. What was the biggest thing you learned during all your conversations with him, just about him as a talent? Well, what I'd learn was he was a human being. And I also learned he was not a recluse,

as he's so often been accused of. And I think it's the most unfair thing about Stanley's reputation is that people think he's like Howard Hughes. He never, you know, he never left his house, didn't speak to people, didn't go out anywhere. Stanley used the telephone, and Stanley used all kinds of means of communication. If Stanley had been born now, he would have reinvented the iPad and the iPhone to his. to his need. He would have bent it toward his visionary needs.

I mean, you could argue he invented it in the movie. He kind of looks like that. He kind of did. He sort of did. You know, but Stanley, Stanley really, really was social in the sense

that if you'd like somebody's movie, he would surprise a director and call him and just say, hi, it's, it's Jenna Cooper here. I just saw your picture. I loved it. Where'd you get the idea and start a conversation?

Was he the number one, holy shit, this guy likes my movie director? Because like, you're that now. He was the number one, holy shit, that guy, loves my movie director. And I'll tell you the story. He just quickly, as Albert Brooks was a friend of mine, called me up. And he said, did you give Stanley my phone number? And I said, yeah, because he asked for it.

Why? Because he called me at 3 o'clock in the morning to tell me how much he loved Lost in America. And then Stanley and Albert began a friendship from that moment. Do you imagine getting a call from him at 3 in the morning? Was it 3 in the morning, though? Because he was in England and he was calling L.A.? Yeah, probably. Sanne was never aware of times.

He called me at the strangest hour. He just didn't have that kind of... I mean, I'll never understand Stanley. I don't have to. I was not in his family circle. But I feel that Stanley allowed me to be a colleague. And the greatest honor he afforded me was he let me into his professional circle. And he treated me like a colleague.

And he was very generous with his compliments when he saw a movie I made and liked it. and we had a real rapport and talked often on the phone. I mean, he basically handed AI over to you. Well, he asked me to direct it for him to produce, and then after that didn't work out only because Stanley really wound up directing it. Directing it with a lot of memos, he was sending me many faxes about, hey, it'd be great if you put the camera here. Here's a couple storyboards.

And I finally, after six months, to the said to Stanley, let's reverse roles. I'll co-produce it with you. Yeah. And you direct it because this is your baby. This is your vision. And he agreed. And then he got distracted by eyes wide shut.

And then sadly, tragically, in 1999, he passed. Well, when you were talking to him about that movie, did he see a very clear link between 2001 and AI? We never, he never made the link there. He did, we did a couple of times. The only link he made was the, um, clear and present danger. He thought it was a cautionary tale about unrestricted machine sentience.

He was really, really concerned about machine learning and machines teaching machines to teach machines. And that was, I think, the main link between 2001 and his version of AI. I mean, you could argue, 2026 is the most. relevant year we've had for this movie since 1968. These are all the conversations everyone's having right now. What happens if the machines learn too much? These are things that have been in movies now for six decades. Sean, can you think of anybody who could have gone

Strange Love, 2001, Clockwork, Orange, and Barry Lyndon all in a row in 10 years? No, I mean, obviously that's the thing I think that continues to attract film fans, especially young film fans, to him, is that each movie feels. so dramatically different. And so you start trying to comprehend how one person can bounce around between genre, style, time period.

The other thing is that all the movies, once you've seen them, I think multiple times, you realize they are all sort of the same in some ways too. Even this movie, which is a little bit quieter than some of those films, they're all about like controlled chaos. There's always something very intense and dangerous

and manic happening inside the middle of the story, even if this film is a little more leisurely. or quiet or there's not as much dialogue, as you said. But his flexibility and versatility, I think maybe accounts for those long stretches of time, too, between projects where he's trying to figure out what can I do that would interest me maybe for a five-year period if I'm really going to spend

this much time developing something. But I don't know. My experience with him is the same as, like, I think millions of movie freaks, which is that you're 13 years old and you find one of these films. Usually it's either this one, Clockwork Orange, or The Shining,

and then you just launch yourself into his entire filmography, which feels very conquerable to young people too. Hopefully it's not as well shed at 13 years old. No, well, you never know. You never know. That wasn't around when I was 13, but I anticipated it. I saw The Shining when I was 10. My dad took me probably a wee bit too early for me,

but holy macro. And that became everybody, I think, has their entry point with his career and that was mine. Yeah, I think I think everybody does. And I think the thing that Stanley, does to all of us is if we're just surfing the channels and we come across Stanley,

one of Stanley's movies 30 minutes in, I dare anybody to switch it off. Even if you have a meeting at 7 o'clock the next morning and it's already midnight, I don't know how you get your finger on that off switch. I don't know how you do that. Yeah. I don't care what the movie is.

You know, from, you know, from Killer's Kiss to eyes wide shot, whether you love these films more than others of his or not, you completely become, you know, in it, you become a zombie. Right. You come Stanley Zombie. And you just stare at you, you walk straight ahead and you sit there and you wait until it's over. Do you remember the first one of his that you saw?

I think the first movie I saw was, I know the first movie I saw in a movie theater was Dr. Strangelove. That was the first one. The other films I saw were in art houses later in my life. For instance, you know, Killers Kiss and those in Pasoises. glory I saw on television, actually, for the first time. But I cut up with Stanley in terms of going in a regular basis to his films right around, I would think,

clockwork orange. What do you think the equivalent is in 2006 of this movie coming out? Like a movie where the people watching it could just walk into the movie. I don't even know, like, some of the effects that he has in here were so far ahead of anything else. I don't even know how to wrap my head around it. I don't know if it's a movie so much. It may be the sphere in Las Vegas.

Maybe the equivalent of 2001 of Space Odyssey. Oh, that's a good call. I like that. Just went for the first time. It was fascinating. We were there together. But I mean, I mean, Santa Kubrick with 2001 created, I think, the first 3D experience. Not a 3D in terms of interocular, but I'm talking about wraparound,

three-dimensional sight and sound. And even though the screen did have its boundaries, and you could look off the screen, top, bottom, left, right. It didn't matter because it had enough of a fold around the audience, that the audience was really enrapped and by the experience in 2001

was the perfect film for it. And also 2001 also does something with suspense. The middle part of that film is as suspenseful as anything Alfred Hitchcock ever made. I feel that film is the most suspenseful movie Stanley ever made, the whole section with Bowman and Pool going out to replace the AE-35 antenna unit and what happens to pool and then what Bowman has to do when Hal decides that the human beings are too flawed to really successfully carry this mission through to completion.

and has to take over command of that ship. When you first saw it, did you feel like you grasped all of these details and the construction that he was building? Or was it repeated viewings and trying to study it to understand what he was doing? Because it's a film that can be confusing on first viewing. It was, to see the least. I've absolutely repeated viewings. I mean, I've seen 2001 countless times.

I can't tell you how many times I sat there beginning to end. I finally saw it for the first time in 70 millimeter in New York City in 2000. in 2001 when it was reissued on that special year. But I can watch it over and over again, and I don't claim to have understood it metaphysically or philosophically or even completely when I first saw it, but it kept bringing me back and the layers continue to expose themselves to me. And then when I got to meet Stanley,

I got to talk to Stanley about the film. I knew enough about it at that point that I didn't sound like a clown talking to him about his own work. But the thing about the picture is it's an anti-emotional film that's truly a deeply empathic picture. But it's kind of anti-emotional.

Poole and Bowman, Gary Lockwood and carried. dolia uh uh play it like you know they don't they they they don't laugh they don't smile there's nothing you know uh you know pool is getting a little getting a little he's he's on on the sundack you know in an adjustable kind of bed and he's he's getting some rays yeah good vitamin c and a recording comes from his mother and father wishing him happy birthday and he takes it in his stride he doesn't smile he doesn't blink he's not warm he just listens and says, and he asks how to adjust the chair.

Right. You know, you know, full recline after his parents sing happy birthday to him, badly. And so the most emotional, and we've all heard this spoken, but it's true. The most emotional character is Howe 9,000. And a great villain, too. That was built in 1992 in, I believe, Urbane, Illinois. Yeah. And that was the most emotional character in the entire piece.

The movie begins with a pretty good character, played by William Sylvester. You know, Haywood Floyd, Haywood R. Floyd. And he's warm, and he's commanding, and you listen to him. He's got that great scene in the kind of Hilton, the Space Station, next to what the wall it says, Hilton 5. and he's meeting with a Russian delegation that he knows, I think, is, I think the Russian's name is

Shmirnov or Shmirakov, possibly. I don't really know, talking about, you know, one of their landers was denied landing rights at Clavius Moonbase, and he wants to know why, and there's a rumor the Russians here that there's some kind of an epidemic, But that, of course, is the cover story, which I immediately stole when I made close encounters

and used Fosgene Gas as the cover story to clear the civilians away from Devil's Tower so they can have this first communion between an off-world civilization and the human race. So how many movies did this directly influence you think? Because you...

Every movie. Every movie. Every film. Every film. It's funny, like, growing up with it, because, you know, the theme of the movie if you're a kid is computers are going to take over. Computers someday.

Watch out. Watch out the moment they get too much. That's true. You know, and it's like, all right. And then in the 80s, we start getting the home computers. Like, this is nice. This is great. And the internet comes in the 90s.

This is fun. I can talk to my family. And now we're in this stage. Yeah. It's like, uh-oh, did we go too far? No. And I remember the great movie that Walter Parks made called War Games. Oh, yeah.

1980. And before that, there was Colossus, the Forbun Project. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Where computers, you know, machines were threatening to take over the world. Now, that's an old sci-fi trope, and it's fine because all science fiction eventually comes true. Yeah. It just does.

Yeah. One thing that struck me thinking very hard about this movie was there are dozens, maybe hundreds of sci-fi movies that come before this, but almost all of them, and especially the American films, are all about what will happen when either an alien species or robots come to Earth. And this is not that. This is a kind of post-earth exploration of life. It's about something completely different. And just to conceive that very small but critical thing makes the movie feel so different than everything that came before it.

2001 made me feel as big as a grain of sand. You know, I felt no more aware. When I was done seeing the film for the first time, I was no more important than any of the stars in that sky that would, by the way, hand-painted by Doug Trumbull and his team. It made me feel really small in a good way because you can look up at the night sky and feel pretty small and diminish you

if you don't have the contamination of a big city, spoiling your view. But if you get out into the desert into the country where there's no city lights, and you really see that awesome vistas. You see our entire Milky Way. You can get the same feeling every single time you watch 2001 in Space Odyssey.

Stanley created that. And when you think about some of his concepts, they found a monolith buried on the moon and had been buried there for four million years. Right away, that makes us all feel Yeah. Like a greater intelligence before we ever had evolved into, you know, a race of homo sapiens, had already been here once and possibly had ceded the planet with the life that we claim is,

is generated from whatever your belief system is. And so 2001, even if you've seen it 50 times, the movie can still, I think shock you. Well, it does seem like... Do I thought like an ad to get people to see 2001? Sean are having the best time ever. This is, yeah.

This is what I wanted. Well, it feels like there's two types of people, right? There's the people who are like, I really want to know what's out there. Yeah. Like, tell me more, like, what's talking... And then there's the other people are like, I'm afraid to know what's out there.

And I think I'm in that camp. The latter. Yeah. Really? Yeah, the sci-fi stuff has always kind of freaked me out. Wow. And especially this movie, I think I've only seen it twice before I started preparing it for this one because it brings things into my brain that I don't even know if I'm 100% ready for. Like you're talking about Donna man all the way through, where are we going?

What happens to this guy at the end? Does he get sent back as like this superhero or is he just dead and he saw the end of his life? You think of this stuff and you can, I don't know, go crazy. Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the next. 2010 movie they made. Yeah. Because I was, I really wanted to be left in my imagination when the star child turns and looks at the planet Earth.

I wanted to leave it at that. I just wanted to be able to have that image exist without any possible film follow-up. It's so interesting though, because, you know, obviously Clark wrote a novel while they were making this film. Yes. And in the novel, there's all kinds of explanations about why the monolith exists, who put it there, the meaning of the star child. Right. Yeah.

All of this discussion about sort of exploding the nuclear weapons in orbit and the intentions of the film. And I didn't learn about that until after I'd seen the movie many times. And it is a little bit of a letdown to learn details of intention. I think it's mundane. For me, that's mundane because... It's a mundane thing to start to explain and start to throughout other plot lines. Because in the abstract, when the star trial turns and those eyes are moving in the models, in the puppet's head, and almost looks at the audience. You know, it's just a moment that let sort of Stanley saying, we need to start looking within ourselves.

Yeah. You know, we can always be looking to the stars and ambition and exploration is great, but aren't we missing us? Shouldn't we start all of us looking more inward? And that's what that said to me, not the first time I saw the film, not the 25th time I saw the film, but eventually it started to make, it started to become very clear to me. Is that something you think about when you talk about intention for movies you've made? Because some directors, like Tarantino will never tell us what's in the briefcase, right?

he's probably the only one that knows in Pulp Fiction. And then there's other directors and writers of stuff. They'll be like, oh, here's what I meant. Here's what I think. I like the mystery, but where do you stand on this? I like the mystery, too. I don't think I've made enough movies with enough mystery that anybody said, but what does you really mean?

Everybody sees my movies and says, I get it. Okay. What are you doing next? That's not true. What is the most kind of confused people were after one of your movies where they were like, I think they were really confused in a good way and kind of a,

I think they were kind of confused at the end of Munich. You know, interesting. Because I showed the Twin Towers in the last shot. And I think they made a big link. And it wasn't, they should have been confused. I intended the link to what the never-ending cycle of violence,

the seemingly unsolvable cycle of violence is going did eventually lead to so there's a lot of people talking about the end of that movie a lot of people talk about the end of AI where David gets his mom back for like from dawn till

nightfall and that's it and what happens to David is he just going to sit in that bed until his batteries run down with Teddy and then what happens what happens to him is he going to be, is he going to become a deity for all the machines that found him? The super mecca that people often confusingly think are aliens.

They are not. They are the result of many iterations and generations of machine-built entities, sentient but completely built by other machines. is David going to become a kind of deity or or oracle for them? Because humans actually had their hands on David and created David. So David is the first iteration of who they have now become. That's one of the major reasons. I ask you about the link between 2001 and AI because it's so,

it's such an echo of the apes touching the monolith and the astronauts approaching the monolith. You know, it feels like. I told you this film had an effect on me in 2000. It worked. Close encounters definitely leaves you with some questions. It does. Especially like is Richard Dreyfuss' character ever going to be able to have a normal day ever again? And it's like, Richard Dreyf's character went up in the mothership, but then he came back down to make always with me.

He made always with me with Holly Hunter. So with sequels, for the most part, I, Sean and I both, I think pro sequels when it's like, we like these characters. Like Raiders is a great example. It's like, I get to hang out with Indiana Jones again. Awesome. But then there's other ones like, John. too. You didn't necessarily want to be in Jaws 2. You wanted to end.

You never saw it? Oh, I didn't see it for 20 years. We did rewatchable Zon. It's a very silly movie. It's silly and funny. They tried to get me to make it and I kept saying, we blew the shark up, guys. We blew the shark up. It's unmacable. The shark got blown up. And they said, where there's other sharks. There are no other sharks 26 feet long.

Only Jaws. You know, we've had this podcast since 2017. And we were trying to figure out these different structures, formats with it. And Jaws was ironically the one that we were kind of like, we'd been doing it for nine months.

Me and Sean and Chris Ryan did Jaws. And it was like the first one we were like, this is the pot. This is what it is. And one of the things that we loved to talk about like the Robert Shaw stories and what he was like on the set and him daring Dreyfus to climb up to the top.

Yeah. Is that story true? Yeah, he offered him money. But Richard didn't do it for the money. Richard did it because Robert dared him, and Richard is a very courageous person, and Richard is going to do, I mean, he's, Richard stood up to Robert. Right. I think there's a lot of exaggeration that's happened over the years, over the 50, 52 years. Richard and Robert admired each other. They respected each other as actors, and they respected each other as people.

But they had a routine, like Steve Martin and Marty Short, where they go on the road. They're always acting like their rivals and they're teasing each other and making jokes about each other. And they had a comedy act in a way. I think it's kind of pushed Richard, a driver pushed Richard a bit to the brink. And sometimes Richard put push Robert to the brink.

But you don't do that to other people unless underneath it is an enduring admiration. Right. And respect. And I think that's what gets overlooked after all these years. It serves the movie, though. really didn't like each other. That's not true.

But it really serves the movie. But it serves the movie. And I was happy about it. Yeah. Because when they got in front of the camera, they knew their business. They knew who they were to each other as Hooper and Quint. It probably also almost served a heart attack for you when you found out Dreyfus is going

to climb up 50 feet up in the air. Oh, we stopped him. Yeah. He said, no. No, Richard. Get down. It's funny, though, when Stephen was talking about, catching a Kubrick movie 30 minutes in and not being able to turn it off,

which is literally the premise of this show. That was the thing. I think Jaws is definitely one of those movies for us and for Chris, for millions of people where it doesn't, if you're in the eighth minute or the 90th minute, you're like, I just, I got to get to the end. I got to get to the Indianapolis. I got to get to, you know, I got to see that the shark popping out. Like, I just have to get to those moments.

That's very, it's hard, though, to make something where you can go back, not two times or five times, but 50 times. Like this movie they were talking about, it kind of demands several viewings. Like you were saying you'd only seen it a couple times beforehand, but if you watch it at different stages of your life, it tells you something different. You learn more about yourself when you watch it. You notice different things, different themes.

It's true. And you also get kind of seduced by the amazing musical choices. You know, he hired his composer when Stanley directed Spartagus, Alex North, one of the greatest Hollywood film composers ever, composed a brilliant score for Spartagus. It's one of the greatest scores that were written for a film, especially the main title that Alex North did. And so Stanley employed Alex to write the score, a film score for 2001 in the Space Odyssey.

And very quickly threw it out because it turned his movie too much into a movie. And so he went and did what he did best, Stanley, which is needle drops. But look who he went to. He went to Aram Cacciorian. He went to Penderaki. he went to Gorgiae or Leggetti

Yeah And and and he went to He went to both Strauss composers And so you've got the blue Danube playing When you suddenly go from A proto human taking a bone And throwing it in the air

And the camera follows the bone into the air And on its descent the bone Transitions into a space shuttle In the year 2001 It's unbelievable It's unbelievable unbelievably audacious. And then suddenly you hear

the Blue Danube Walsh playing and it completely relaxes you into accepting the possibility of a future like this one. Also, the most New York thing he did was just used the music and didn't tell some of those people, right? That became

I think an issue for a couple of them. They were like, wait a second, my music's in this? My music is like, yes. I'm Stanley Kubrick. I'm going to use your music. We'll figure it out later. We'll figure it out I couldn't think of another example of a movie before this that just transitions so radically, not just to the future, but to a completely seemingly unconnected phase of the movie.

It just feels like we've changed the tone, the style, the color, the location. Everything is just different. And you're expected to not only accept it, but understand what he's trying to tell you. It's amazing. Well, I wrote down the timing of the movie. So it launches the modern sci-fi boom, right? There's science fiction movies.

but they're all cheap and they're just, they're making them for less than a million bucks. This is the first one where somebody's like, I'm spending real money. You're pretty serious coin in science fiction.

Planet of the Apes released five days before this movie, though, which is very interesting. Oh my God. That they are so twin together and they both prominently feature apes, obviously. But didn't Planet of the Age outgrows 2001? It did.

Yeah. But maybe not over time, ultimately. Maybe not over time. But those two movies I see is very connected. Yes. It's a year before Apollo 13 and, and Neil Armstrong, everything. Yep.

It's hitting the psychedelic late 60s, like, perfectly. This is, like, right as this whole generation, this counterculture thing's happening. Whole generation of young filmmakers, including yourself, all waiting to be influenced by movies like this. You have that. The 70 millimeter, just like the big, awesome, this is like the perfect thing to go, which is, now, by the way, I don't know if you've heard, but it's now made a comeback. People go into movie theaters and seeing IMAX and awesome different things. It's made for, I wrote down nerds, philosophers, and movie junkies, but somehow became massive.

And then what we talked about earlier about life in the next century, what's going to happen? Like that 2001 is 33 years after they make this movie. But when you watch it, it feels like it's 130 years after 1968. And the movie's already outlived some of the sponsors. Pan American Airlines no longer exist. The other thing, Bell Telephone. Yeah. Right.

Howard Johnson's. Howard Johnson's is still around. I think that's still around in Spotty, but still around. But you've got a lot of things that don't exist anymore where the film is outlived the, some of what I think Stanley assumed would be around for millennium. These like bedrock corporations of our life. I think you assume those are bedrock corporations. So when you're watching this and you're thinking someday I'm going to make movies

and then you're seeing the special effects in this movie, like what is what's going through your brain? Well, when I first saw the movie, I didn't notice the special effects. I was in that story. I was part of that experience, so I wasn't picking it apart. I went back to see the movie two weeks later, and I went back to see the movie a week after that. So I saw the movie about four times in a month. And it was the second and third and fourth time that I started just marveling at how do they get that on the screen?

How did they do that? And who are these people? Who is Wally Veevers? Who is Douglas Trumbull? who is Colin Cantwell? I mean, who are these people? And because they all got kind of special effect supervisor credits on single cards. And I just wanted to get to know them.

So, of course, I went to Doug Trumbull when I made close encounters with a third kind. So then 14 years later, you have little kids riding their bike in the air. And it's like the greatest moment of every kid's generation. It's basically the same thing. Like, oh, my God, how did they do that? this has this movie has a lot of how did they do that yeah how do they do that i mean how did they how do they create weightlessness when he had to back he had to back the rover backwards with the exploding bolt door against the pod bay and then he had to get you know he he had to basically

hold his breath you know blow up the uh first of all he mechanically manually opened the pod bay doors because Howl wouldn't do it. Yeah. And then he had to turn the entire pot around. He had to back the pot up to the entryway. And he had to wait for the detonation. And when it occurred, he blew it toward camera completely weightless. And what I didn't realize until much later was he was on a wire.

But the wire was coming from the camera. Right. Because they didn't have wire removal. They didn't have digital wire removal in those days. Before a digital wire removal, We just put, the special effects guys would put a little Vaseline blur where the wire was to make it harder for the audience to see the wires. Films like War of the Worlds, the George Powell film, you see the wires on the triangle or, you know, you know, Martian ships. But in this case, because the wire came right from the noodle point of the lens, almost right to the side of the lens, it looked like he was completely weightless and bouncing around.

around like on a bungee inside that place. And when Stanley built an entire set, the set turned 360, but the actors just walked. Yeah, wasn't that flight attendant to walk upside down? They actually rotated the entire set. I got the idea in Poultergeist when I produced and had co-written Poultergeist. I wrote the story. I wrote the screenplay. I wanted Joe Beth Williams, the character,

to kind of weightlessly fly around a room. We built an entire bedroom, put it on the same kind of vertical carousel, and we just started revolving it, and Joe Beth just had to go like Gene Kelly did in Royal Wedding when he danced on the walls and the floor and the ceiling. Joe Beth just had to understand what down was, where up was and where down was so she could struggle and traverse the entire room

from the wall to the ceiling to the wall back to the floor again, which is exactly how Stanley also got the guys jogging in the ship with the Cacheturian music playing when they were jogging all around for exercise. Even some of the shots I'd feel like have drifted into other movies.

Like the thing you just mentioned about him flying around, bouncing around, it's a little like castaway with Hanks when the plane blows up and he gets sent back. But I thought of that when I was watching it.

Cure Delay did not enjoy shooting that sequence. I can't imagine. He only did it twice. For the record, he said that. He did not enjoy it. So here's what Kubrick said

about the ending in a 1980 phone interview with a journalist. I read this. Yeah, but go ahead. The idea was supposed to be that he is taken by Godlike entities, creatures of pure energy

and intelligence with no shape or form. They put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him. And his whole life passes from that point on in that room and he has no sense of time. And then maybe he's transformed into some kind of super being and sent back to Earth. We'll only have to guess what happens when he comes back. So he makes it seem like he doesn't die.

That's completely logical, but it's not very fun to think about. Like, this is an interesting thing where I'm also very interested in directorial intent. Like, what did the person who made this? Think about it. Why did they do it? I've spent the last 10 years asking filmmakers, like, why did you do this? However, with certain movies, this being one of them, I do not want an explanation of that room. I wish that I did not read that.

I'm actually quite surprised that he shared that. And it seemed like he shared that maybe shortly after the film had come out. And he was not as concerned maybe about being so mysterious at this particular period of time. Maybe it's, maybe it's what, it's 12 years after you made the movie. Do you get, like, you make a movie you send out in the world after 10 years. Like, yeah, fuck it, I'll tell you what happened. I'd like to think that Stanley said that because that's exactly what the movie doesn't mean, what Stanley never intended.

And he's throwing the world off. See, I love that. So he can keep the truth a little more contained. I think he's playing a little chess for them. Oh, he was a great chess player. Matter of fact, you know, the best gift I ever gave Stanley for his birthday was the first computer chess game. Ooh. Because Stanley, I played chess and San Diego.

Stanley played chess. I would never play with Stanley because I could only make four moves and he'd made me, checkmate me. But when I found out that in the 80s, they had made a little tabletop, electric computer chess game, I said to Stanley and Stanley called me back a week later. And he said, couldn't you have sent me a smarter one? That's a real careful what you wish for scenario, though, given what happens in the movie. Send me a smarter chess game because you kept beating it. The playoffs are here and you can predict all the action all the way to the finals with Fandul predicts. All you have to do is sign up, get your $25 bonus, predict the spread, the total points,

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See terms at fando.com slash predicts slash bonus dash offer dash terms. Let me ask you about the casting quick, because this movie does not have anyone who was a star at the time or became a major star, which is a little, I think if they're making this movie now, they're probably like, you've got to figure out if Gosling can do it or whatever.

Kubrick didn't want big name stars. He wanted like anonymous faces and anonymous expressions. That's right. And yet, like if Steve McQueen is in this movie, does it feel different or does he take you out of it? It would take me out of it if Steve McQueen were in 2001 of Space Odyssey. Yeah.

Because I would have too much baggage to unpack from all the movies I've seen, you know, from basically from, you know, the blob to bullet, which came out that year. So he's bringing the Steve McQueen IMDB baggage with them. Yeah, I thought it was really smart to hire Gary Lockwood and here Julia. Of course, was brilliant. Frank and Eleanor Perry's David and Lisa. And he had a wonderful career. And Gary Lockwood did some great stuff too. I really admired both of them.

but they were more like astronauts who were a little more, there was more anonymity in casting them. And William Sylvester was an American living in England working on stage and nobody had seen him in American movies. And...

Because you went both ways with this because like in Raiders, everyone knew who Harrison Ford was. You could have gone somebody more anonymous. But in E.T., it's basically people I didn't have a history with. So like, I'd never seen Henry Thomas. I'd never seen D. Wallace I'd seen because she'd been a couple things.

But you know what I mean? Like, you could have put big stars in that and you didn't. No, not really. I couldn't have put big stars in E.T. Because there were no... I mean, Drew Barabor became a big star about two months after E.T. open. And Henry did. Had a great career.

Henry Thomas. Dee, D. is great. She's a wonderful actor. I love her. But I wanted the same kind of anonymity. You know, I wanted the movie to... to be known, and I wanted them to be the characters that would become known. Look, I never thought E.T. would work.

I thought E.T. was going to be, I couldn't believe that they gave me $10 million to make the movie because I didn't think it would make any money back. Really? I thought it was going to be that parents were going to have to, you know, drop their kids off and say, you should go see E.T. It's healthy. It's good for you. I didn't know it was going to take off the way it did. I had no idea. We've also done E.T. on the show. Have you really?

You're the leader in directors. Really? We've done nine Spielberg movies. Yeah, you're the leader in the clubhouse right now. I love the Close Encounters one. Oh, thank you. That was a great one. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, you're the... You guys got it. Well, we still have... That's nice. That's nice to hear. Yeah, that is nice to hear. Yeah, we still have some left in your catalog, which is extensive. Well, ET and this film, too, like the star of the film's, E.T.

And HAL 9,000. And Jaws is the star. And Jaws is the star. He had done French Connection and stuff. and Richard had done American graffiti, and Richard had done the apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which was a huge critical hit. And Robert Shaw had done Man for All Seasons,

and he was well-known. He had done The Sting before a big, big hit movie, won the Oscar for Best Picture. But it was about three anonymous guys that divested themselves of who they were to all of us publicly and became those characters. I mean, that's the whole thing about good actors. Maybe even Steve McQueen,

I thought was a really good actor. I knew Steve pretty well. Maybe Steve could have done. 2001. I mean, a good actor is supposed to become an anonymous character based on what the writer and the director have offered us. And so I'm going to take that back.

I'm going to back, I'm going to kind of back it up a little bit by saying... I talked to you into it. You did. You love this. You can use movie stars in the film. And if the movie is compelling enough, you forget the filmography of the character in the film. The only reason I thought of him

was, he was, when we've talked about this, this is a big Tarantino point about how we don't have enough McQueen's now. People that didn't really need dialogue, but just seem like stars. They just, you could read their faces and something about them. You're like,

oh, that guy's a movie star. Well, also for such a film with so little dialogue, you know, that you need somebody. On the other hand,

though, like, he obviously is encouraging these actors to kind of drain some of their inherent charisma, and McQueen could so effortlessly communicate charisma. So maybe that isn't what he would have wanted

out of one of the astronauts. Yeah, okay, I'm going to go back to your point. You're right. McQueen, 2000, In 2001 of Space,

honestly. But maybe Hackman could have done it. I don't know. Hackman could have done it. So he was a legendary million takes guy? Who was that? Kubrick.

Yes. Where are you in the... Because we have like, you always hear stories about like Clint Eastwood's like, two takes, let's move on to the thing. Where are you in that scale? I'm six to eight. Probably six to eight takes.

What are you trying to accomplish in the six to eight? What are you trying to find out from the actors? Well, it varies because the number of takes I make depends on whether I feel that it is all the actors are going to be able to contribute or is it all I want or need the actors to contribute. I have to make that determination on every take. So I've done 30 takes before. I've done 30 takes with certain actors. But I've also done two takes with certain actors. Right.

It all depends. Anthony Hopkins on Amistad came over to me before we shot the movie. And he said, I'm going to give you a little insight into how I work. Take one, I'm just getting a feeling about how it's sounding and how it's feeling to me. Take two, I'm going to nail it. Take three, you can use parts of it. But after take three, you're not going to want to use any of those takes. And he told me ahead of time that he's good for about three.

Take two. Take two, Tony. We did a couple more takes, and that's something. I'm not. We did five, six takes, but Tony is one of the most intuitive actors, and his choices are almost gifts. I don't know where it comes from, but when he makes a choice and he finds a moment, the moment is not a moment that he has thought about a lot. It's a moment that comes to him.

It's intuitive. It's right. It's in the, it fits the shoes. of the character. He's walking in. And then that's it. He's giving you his best shot. I love shit like this. Like our favorite one ever is Nicholson and a few

good men when they did all the Colonel Jessup courtroom scenes and he was done. And they're like, you can, all right, now you can go. We can use a stand-in. We're going to get the other one. And he's like, no, no, I'm going to stay. I'm going to just keep doing this over and over again. And they're like, really? It's like, yeah. No, I love it. He loves to act.

Also, it's fun. You get actors that have done, you know, three, 100, 400 performances on stage, they want to do a lot of takes. Right. You know, because every night they bring something else to the theater. They bring something else to the character. They find other ways of expressing things that don't throw the other characters off that aren't going to sabotage the company because they suddenly come up with a better idea

than the playwright. They're not going to do that. Or some of them, most of them are not going to do that. But I find that if an actor who's had a lot of stage experience, it really desires more takes. And I'm fine. And if an actor comes to me and says, when I work with Leo, Leo likes to watch his own takes when I did Catch Me if you can with the Caprio. He likes to go to the monitor after every take and look at the takeback. And it gives him ideas.

And he says, let me have one more. Let me have one more. So I might do 9, 10, 11 takes because Leo feels he hasn't explored it sufficiently. So I will wait for Leo to tell me when he thinks he's got it. I'm not going to be a big overseer. you know, as a director and say, no, I think it was great on tape four, we're moving on.

If I got a schedule problem, if I'm losing the light and we're racing the light, yeah, I'm going to be a little more come on. I hope you felt that enough because we're not doing it again. We can't do it again. But short of that, I'm going to let an actor tell me when they think they've given me their best

take. Leo, grinds tape. Who knew? Not surprising. Grin and tape, like a quarterback. It's like Patrick Mahomes. and other people are just like whatever Stephen let's I trust you you're one of the greatest structures ever sometimes I have to especially in the this later area of my career I've got to sometimes go to an actor and say

you know if you want another take you can ask me for another take just because I'm expressing joy that I love what you just did it doesn't mean that there's something I haven't seen yet that you know you haven't given yet so if you so I have to go to the actors and say don't be intimidated you know, because I made E.T.

Tell me that you, and your childhood was informed by it, tell me if you think you have more to give. Don't take cut, print as an answer. I don't know if our guy Stanley was doing that. Seemed like he had a different manner. Yeah. In terms of approaching actors.

Making the movie we mentioned, he spent five years developing it, got involved with Arthur C. Clark, kept doing it. And I'll save people. there's a lot of great research on this. There's been documentaries, multiple books. Yes.

But he, the most interesting thing of all that stuff, the clip notes, Clark had the book ready to go, and he's like, you can't do it until the movie comes out. And he's like paying him on the side because he was banking on the money from the book. He said, no, no, no, you got to wait. You got to wait until the movie comes out. And then movie came out, releases the book. But that's a lot of trust you got to do.

So they worked on the script together. And it seemed a little to-moving. and the research. Between them? Yeah, like working on the script and stuff. I don't know if it was perfect, but it got to where I needed to get to. I don't know anything about their working relationship,

but they were both, they were not hive minds. They were not hive-minded. They were single-minded visionaries who I'm sure had alternative points of view and common points of view. But whatever the magic was between Clark and Kubrick, man, we're so grateful to both of them.

Have you ever had somebody like that that you were just like partners on this thing where you had to sketch out this whole thing and spending, you know, months and months and years with one person? I have a deep partnership with Tony Kushner and I have an equally deep partnership with David Kep. And it has been just, I'm just lucky that they're on this planet to tell stories with me. Can you talk about like the relationship that you have with a writer like that, who you return to over and over again? And what happens when they have an idea that you don't like or how do you come to a common ground? Well, it depends. I mean, both, they're two completely different people, number one. Tony Kushner is a Tony Award winning Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and an academy, multiple Academy Award nominated screenwriter.

David Kep is one of the most commercial screenwriters in Hollywood history. Yeah. And they both have different ways of working, which I really love. And I've got to be the flexible one here. I have to be the chameleon that doesn't, I'm not asking them to conform to the way I work. I will conform to what makes them great writers. And so I have to listen more than I talk sometimes. But it's just when you, I've always said, look, I always said that Shakespeare said it first, he said it best.

He said the play is the thing. And without a screenplay, I'm nothing. I'll just take my iPhone and take a lot of really nice still photographs. But without a screenplay, I absolutely am lost. And so for me, the writer is the most important person in my life. Interesting. This is a funny one too, though, because you and Kubrick are somewhat alike. in this way, all of his movies are based on something.

He was always on the hunt, it sounds like, for material, for something that could make for a good story, but then you have to shape the story. In this case, he approaches Clark, and he has the original idea, but the Clark story, The Sentinel, is a huge inspiration for the idea that he has, and so they take parts of an pre-existing story,

and then they fold it into one section of this smaller movie. It's this really unique version of story, synthesis that, again, like, I was trying to find some other examples of a movie like this. There's just not any other movies like this. Yeah, there aren't. There aren't. Can you ask me this? Did Arthur Clark's book, Rondavu with Rama, happened before?

I think it follows. Yeah, it's after. I think it's 73. Okay. Because that had similar themes. Yeah. So, yeah. When they were working, this, Kubrick wrote the Clark's agent about his workload because they weren't

getting along. And he said, I get up at 7 a. hit the studio about 8.15, beginning a day that generally ends around 8.30 p.m. I go home, say good night to the children, have dinner, work on the novel, and go to bed around midnight. I do this seven days a week. Who said that when? Kubrick. That's like me prepping for pods.

Like you watch the entire Kubrick catalog to get ready. He really sounded demanding and was just, that was it. He's working on something. That's what he's doing. Interesting now, Polanski asked him if he'd ever taken drugs, and Stanley said, I never had, I never will, not because he had a problem getting high, but because he didn't know the source of his creative gift and didn't want to fuck with it.

Oh. I love that. I love that he acknowledges that he had a creative gift. Yeah. I mean, a lot of filmmakers are shy about even confessing that they have any gift at all. Those who have been really successful, I don't know anybody in my circle.

I mean, I paint models. with directors at Guillermo del Toro's house every weekend. And not once during those model painting and making sessions that anybody refer to themselves as gifted. Well, it's interesting that he knew he had something and probably didn't want to veer from it both in the structure of his day-to-day life. Maybe he drank some wine, I don't know, but it really sounded.

We talk about, I mean, we talk about, we certainly talk about stuff we've done and how much fun it is to make movies and cook up stuff that never existed five seconds ago and suddenly you get an idea of where that idea come from, what came from being born and living and experiencing everything, and that's where your ideas come from. But we never look at each other like I think Guillermo Titooro is a genius,

but Garbo will never refer to him that way, nor will I ever say to Garmo, you're a genius, because it's going to make all of us blush. I mean, that's something that we don't talk about. We don't think of ourselves, any of us that way. We think of ourselves as people that love doing what we do, but it's the hardest thing we've ever done. There is nothing harder, I can imagine, except raising children.

Then in my profession, there's nothing harder than directing a movie. I'm the opposite. I tell Sean, I'm a genius all the time. That's actually true, yes. I've been working with them for almost 15 years. So they do the premiere for this movie, and it goes badly. and Kubrick's wife said, Stanley was tearing himself to shreds.

He's saying, oh, my God, they really hated it. He was heartbroken, couldn't sleep, couldn't speak, couldn't do anything, was shattered, felt terrible. And then what we talked about, the young people started to come out. Did you ever have an experience like that when you released a movie and you were like, oh, my God, they hated it

and just went into a spiral? No, I've never gone into a spiral. Usually when I have a movie that opens, I go away somewhere. where nobody can find me and where I can't read anything. I try to go away. I go because it's my excuse for taking a vacation. The film gets released and then I go somewhere.

And it's been really therapeutic and it's good. And I know if something's not going well. Of course, I know when something's, I didn't before the Internet. It was harder to find out before the Internet. You had to have somebody call you and, you know, the person that calls you and says your film's a bomb. It's not a person you're going to want to have dinner with the next week. But now if your film is a huge success or is a middling success or isn't a success at all, it gets you. It just osmoses through the current social state of the art that we're all enveloped in.

But I still can get away, and so I don't have to stress out. This is a little bit of a confusing one with 2001 because critically it's very split. And there are some extremely sharp elbowed, kind of nasty reviews about the film. I have a couple of those. Yeah. Pauline Kail, not a fan. Very toughness. And then there's some that are very laudatory right out of the gate. Yes.

And then the movie, it seems like in the first week, it does okay business. Yes. It's not a bomb, but it just does okay. And then it seems like you said, like it seemed like people caught on one week in. Something else really helped that movie catch on. The marketing department and MGM. and I want to give Stanley credit for this, but suddenly, I don't think Stanley actually came up with this slogan,

but the market department at MGM put on all the posters and all the billboards. 2001, a space odyssey, the ultimate trip, and appealed to the psychedelic generation. Did he anticipate, though, that this was going to be a drug trip movie when he was making it? I asked him that question, and he, actually said he doesn't think the movie is a drug trip movie and he sort of is

I'm not saying he's in denial of that because I don't really know if that's the reason it eventually did so well and people saw it I think it's I think drugs notwithstanding the film itself is a drug you don't need to smoke marijuana

to get off on 2000 in Space Odyssey and like me who's never taken drugs I went to that movie and that was a drug and to this day it continues to be something that every year I need a little bit of a 2001 fix. Right. And me. Well, he wins his only Oscar that he won for a movie, which was visual effects, nominated for

director, screenplay, art direction. Yes. Do you remember who wins that year? For Best Picture? In 68? Yeah. No. Oliver, with an exclamation point.

Oh, Oliver. Oliver. Yes, Oliver. You mean? We did it in the 60s. we put exclamation points in our titles. Oliver. Of course,

that was Carol Reed's first Oscar. Yeah. Painful one for me, one of my favorite directors ever. It's one of my favorite musicals ever, though. It's one of my favorite musicals. I love that fan of musical. I'm not a fan of Oliver.

Don't earn that one on 4K? No, I don't. I can tell you what. Another podcast will tell you why I love that movie. I love the choreography, especially by One of White in that movie. I can talk to you about that later. So, 10 million dollar budget for,

for 2001. Yeah. Double what they gave them. I think he jacked it up. They gave him like 4.5. It's like, I have about 10. Did you ever jack it up higher than that on a movie? Well, Jaws was budgeted for $3.5 million,

and it cost 10 because it went over schedule 100 days. They were okay with that trade. Well, no, they weren't okay with that. Eventually they were great. They were okay with that the second day of release. But not until. They got you back by making seven sequels. Are we done with Jaws sequels?

How many have we had four? I think we have three, right? Three sequels. Was it four or three? Three. The last one was a three-d-movie. Yeah. Jaws, too, was solid.

It wasn't bad. Second biggest movie in 1968. Was what, 2001? Yeah, that was great. We mentioned Pauline Kale said it was the biggest amateur movie of the mall and there's only one hour's worth of a good movie here. LA Times guy loved it.

Roger Ebert, four stars. we always do a Roger Eber review. Oh, great, great. The film creates its effects essentially out of visuals and music. It's meditative. Does not cater us, wants to inspire us,

enlarge us. It goes on. He loved it. We're going to do some categories. Okay. Hold on, buckle up. You can see, but he has photographic recall

of the sequences. He's going to be fine in this. This is not going to be a problem. So I'm going to give you some choices for most rewatchable. All right. Most rewatchable scene. This is,

the premise of the podcast, you're hopping into a movie. And it's like, oh, shit, this scene's coming. I got to... This is 2001. Yeah. The most rewatchable scene in 2001. I'm going to give you some choices. Dawn of Man, the beginning with the apes, leading onto the leopard, which, holy shit,

the leopard scene, we didn't even talk about that yet. These are people in monkey costumes, and they're just planning a play-acting leopard jumping out, and this is something that happened? Yeah. was that I I just couldn't believe it I thought I don't know how I thought

they did this but they did it the way with a real leopard and a guy in a gorilla suit yeah well and Kubrick was like I hope this works

I hope the guy in the grillessuit got got a stunt adjustment unbelievable so we got that such a great choice because it's just

jolt you awake in the movie we get the ape figuring out that bones could be a weapon leading into the big fight with the two gangs

we get Floyd and the astronauts checking out the buried artifact. Big sit down with the Russians, which is our second summit of two rival gangs. Jogging scene into the eating scene

into the Howe interview? How does the lip reading thing? Yeah, that's my favorite scene in the movie. Okay, explain. My favorite scene in the movie is where they, for one thing, these guys should have known that Hal 9,000 could read lips.

I mean, they should have known that. After all, you know, he holds up a sketch he made, and he says, that's a very good rendering, Dave. So he's already comments about Dave Bowman's artwork. Dave's got to realize that he's got tremendous visual acuity. So when they rotated the pod, you know, rotate pod, rotate pod please, Hal. rotates around.

The best moment in that movie, though, is cutting to Hal's eye. The eye that Peter Jackson, I understand, has in his archive. Oh. What? Yeah, I hear that Peter Jackson has the prop eye. That foretells a response to one of the categories.

Oh, my God. Yeah. And I think that's my favorite scene of the movie because I didn't see it coming. I must say, like Bowman and Pool, I did not see that coming. It's funny what, that they didn't use the NFL coaches calling in the play. Covering the mouth.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was their big mistake. That's Bowman's play sheet. What was he? He forgot what they were supposed to be running there.

What formation were they're supposed to be using? That's such a great moment of trusting the audience to understand what is happening. Yes. It's not over-explained what's transpiring. But because of the way he shoots the astronauts and then does that cut that you're describing, we get it. We get it in a very clear way. But here's what also happens. he strategically places that scene

just before the intermission. So you go black and it says intermission on the screen. For maximum impact. How a tax pool is he's trying to fix the pod. Dave tries to disconnect how. Just what do you think you're doing, Dave? That's my other favorite scene.

Stop, Dave. I'm afraid. Oh, I love that. Daisy, Daisy. We get the Stargate approach, which is, I think, in the running for the let's get stoned and watch this later. Greatest scenes of all time, I'm sure.

That's been... Yeah, that's... The reason I go for the... I'd love... Because I love Cal so much as a character, my favorite moment, and the movie is a character moment. But my favorite visual effect in the film

is the slit scanner they used that Doug Trumbull created with Stanley Kubrick who conceived this amazing idea to do this Stargate effect. It's out of control. And then the ending would be... even now. Yeah.

Then the ending, Boema goes through the stages of life, the music, all that stuff. What do you have, Sean? For most rewatchable.

I think one that we didn't mention is when they land on Clavius and are witnessing the monolith and that like selfie moment that they're taking. Is that the first selfie? Right before that Sonic note hits. You know,

that's such a bracing. The film is so quiet at so many times and it jostles you. Yes. So, And I always like to watch that scene because he, at a certain point, he puts the camera on the astronaut's shoulders. And it turns into a horror movie. It's before Hal even shows up in the movie.

It's true. But the movie gets very scary intense. And you described it as like a Hitchcockian thriller. Like it is so you are waiting to find out what's going to happen. And then we get this sonic hit. And then it just cuts into the future and we don't know what's happened. No. That's the other, that's his conceptual audacity, Stanley Kubrick's.

You go from the high-pitched, a mission of a, a sound that makes everyone hold their space helmets because it's going right through their suits into their ears. And you go right from that, which is hurting the audiences ears, at least in the panaceous theater it was, with that the monaural, or the stereo sound system they had in those days, it hurt the ears. And then it goes into complete silence. And then suddenly it's quiet. And you see, you know, Jupiter Mission 18 months later. And then this huge ship comes in, which I think inspired George to do the first shot of Star Wars with that huge imperial destroyer

coming over the top of the screen. I think I like when he disconnects, tries to disconnect how I think it's my favorite part. But I will say in the 4K era, I haven't seen this movie in a theater because it was Kim. But in the 4K, just when they're landing on the space station,

the detail of everything is Amazing. It's amazing. It's amazing. Everything they crevice. Every crevice. I just don't understand how they did it.

I don't either. Do you remember the scene where the shuttle that takes, that takes, you know, Haywood Floyd to Clavius, the shuttle. When it lands, it's on some kind of a huge, almost like a mono. It's like an elevator. It's like an elevator. And it starts coming down. Now you see what it looks like. And if you look very carefully, for me, it looks like an Egyptian sculpture of an Egyptian head with the two eyes, which are the windows, the red window lights.

But the windows are spaced equally apart. And there's a flat nose in the center. And it looks like an Egyptian head. And there's something, just something about the way you could anthropomorphize on what all. All of these designs remind us of the ships and the shuttles they were using. And all the opening dawn of man sequence and all the space stuff, they're meant to be these kind of reflections of each other of like ancient history and evolution of man.

And the original monolith was a tetrahedron. It was more of a pyramid. It was not this kind of large rectangular shape. It was originally that way. Yeah. And so this idea of the development in Egyptian societies and then what that meant to technology and evolution as people, like all of this stuff kind of mixing together in the story and that, whether that's intentional or not, you feel that because you're thinking about all

this stuff as you're watching the movie. When I asked Stanley about what I thought was the Egyptian sculpture coming down, Stanley looked at me. He didn't look at me. We were on the phone. And he said, is that what do you think it looks like to you? Wow. Stanley sometimes answered questions with questions.

He was really interesting about that. We had a kind of real interesting report. This is how you guys are together. Oh, is that so, Bill? What do you mean, Bill? What's the most 1968 thing about this movie? You mentioned Pan Am and the grip shoes and Howard Johnson's, which you say it's still around.

I'm not positive. It might be in middle America, maybe. Maybe somewhere on the East Coast. It's around or in Ohio or Indiana, possibly. What was the other one that doesn't exist? anymore? Bell telephone. Bell telephone doesn't exist anymore.

My two would be the intermission, which just doesn't happen anymore. And then just starting a movie with three minutes of a black screen and weird music, nobody would do that. And it doesn't say overture, it doesn't present that we're all going to

sit here quietly. It just starts. Right, right. It's such like a it's such like a 1960s, 70s choice. I just don't ever think that would happen. Because there were these big road show epics that made, you know, arguably one of the greatest movies ever made, Lawrence Arabia, you know, Ben Hur followed all that road show. You started out with an overture.

And then the titles come on. Dr. Javago starts out with an overture in a dark theater. The titles go out, West Side Story, starts with an overture. And then the titles come on. And one film after the other, you know, that said, this is worth, this is, we're going to give you more bang for your buck. You're paying more money to see these. movies than you do for on a double bill movie movie house yeah this is a single bill

experience it's one night like going to a play you're going to see a movie it's going to be longer than two hours and there's going to be a prologue of music there's going to be a long main title sequence there's going to be an intermission and we're going to pipe you out with a medley of themes as you get up and the lights come up and you leave the theater simpler times It's wonderful. But that's called exhibition. Yeah. That's called presentational style.

Right. That's stylish. I miss that. What was your 1968? Most 1968 thing about the movie? I have a couple. I mean, Steven's just the story that he told at the very beginning, the idea of a movie becoming a phenomenon because people are smoking marijuana in a movie theater.

Like, that just could not. That's so perfectly 1968. Yeah, sure. I mean, the idea that 2001 is a long ways away is very 1968. We're approaching almost double the time. That's the other thing that's telling it wrong. Right. We're not even close to that technology.

In some cases, the one thing that really strikes me is, so it's a movie made entirely without digital effects in which handmade tools are used to explore a film about man discovering the utility and danger of those tools. There's something fascinating because we just literally don't make movies this way anymore. There are no films of this scale and size that would be made entirely by hand. And the fact that this films, not every film from 1968 still looks this good. If you look at the ape costumes in this movie versus the ape costumes and Planet of the Apes, they're not close.

One looks like it's aged badly. The other looks really good. But the space effects and the ship effects and the models in this movie and those hand-painted stars that you talked about, they look as good as any movie that is out right now. It's amazing. And, you know, they had a whole department that did nothing but put black paint on white stars. because when one of the, when the Jupiter mission ship passes

and starts blocking out stars, it's done in two different passes. They shoot the stars first with a camera moving basically to allow the mothership, let's say, to come into the frame. You know, Kubrick had an entire department

of young people that did nothing but blot out the stars with black paint to make it look like it was being occluded by the ship that's entering frame crazy i mean it's it's a handmade movie guys it's a handmade film and the last handmade film i saw was giermo del toros pinocchio yes that's stop motion animation is that's the last vestige of the handmade movie even when we're working with ardman at dreamworks releasing ardman's movies the last couple movies they made were they look like they were, you know, done with, you know, armatures and stop motion. But the last couple were done on the computer.

Did you have a most 1968 thing about this movie? No, the only 1968 thing about this movie was the, how can I say this? I'm trying to find the right word. had nothing to do with 1968. There was no 1968 when you're watching 2001. The whole year went away. Whatever the year stood for, whatever it was relevant about that year,

for two and a half hours is irrelevant while you're watching or 139 minutes. I think I saw the 161 minute version. I'm not sure I did, but I think I saw in the first week the longer version. Yeah, because he ended up before you cut up to 15 minutes. Right. But 1968 was completely obliterated by 2001.

We haven't mentioned that either, though, that this is a very tumultuous time in America at least. Number one, tumultuous. Yeah, very violent year and very complicated. Vietnam is raging. Yeah. RFK, Martin Luther King. And this is like it's kind of a retreat from that,

but also kind of that call to the self and to think about who you are in the world. It's true. And I think Stanley, look, Stanley knew history. And he watched the news. He knew he was really up on every current event, which also undermines the fact that people think he was a recluse. You know why Sean hates the year 2001?

Why? So it was the year Tom Brady got the Patriots starting job, and ended up winning six Super Bowls for the Patriots. I do hate that. Don't you, yeah, I do. You're not a Patriots fan. You're not a Patriots fan. I know.

I'm a New Yorker. I'm sadly a Jets fan. Our next category, don't judge us, but we love the movie Boogie Nights. It's the Floyd Gondoli Butter in My Ass and Lollipops in My Mouth Award for something I just enjoy. Something about this movie.

We didn't give this one to you. Shonen Arkin, yours. Here's mine. According to his brother-in-law, Kubrick was adamant that the trims that he made, the 19 minutes, would never be seen, and he burned all the negatives afterwards. And this is like a famous thing,

which I guess I didn't fully know about. that he would just get rid of everything because he was so so horrified that anybody would take anything from a movie and put another movie. He burned all the models. He makes the movie and then destroys all the other pieces of it so it could never come back in any way.

This is like me deleting sports tweets. This is crazy. What he's doing is he's striking the sets. Right? Yeah. Do you care about what happens to stuff from your movie after the movie? I save everything. I mean, I have a huge, huge collection of

props from all of my films. That's really smart. I don't know if you've noticed what's happened in that world. There's the whole prop auction world. But I save everything not to give it to Heritage Foundation to sell. I save everything in an archive. So can you have like a little mini hall of fame at this point? No, but if the Academy Museum needs anything that I've got, anything in my collection.

Jaws is on display right now, right? Jaws is on display right now at the Academy Museum. What's the single greatest thing you have from one of your movies? The single greatest thing. I think, well, it's not one of my movies. I think the greatest thing I possess in terms of Hollywood icons is I've got Rosebud, the sled from Wells' movie. I saw it.

You saw it. You did see it. I saw it in my office. I had a heart palpitation. Well, I moved to New York. As of January 1st, we became residents of New York State. And I've moved everything to New York City. So that lives with me in New York.

Oh, wow. I saw it just the last minute then, I guess. Yeah, you did last minute. What did you have for Floyd? I just love when a movie refuses to explain itself. We're in a time of ultimate lore where we have to, it's not just that there are wider worlds that are explained and there's rationale for character choices,

but a character's specific trauma tends to explore and explain the reason for the movie's existence. This movie is completely disinterested in that. And I wish that we had more, like, The fact that this movie endures and lets us spend two hours sitting in a room trying to figure out what we think it's about, how it makes us feel. That's one of my favorite things about movies. And is this maybe the single, like the signature example of,

well, what do you think at the end of the movie? It's the opposite of sports, right? Sports we have wins and losses. And we could argue about stuff like who is the MVP of stuff like that. This movie, you could come away. Like my son, my son's getting into movies and he's watched this four times. He loves this movie. And we've had like real talks about what do you think at the end and just these variables to it that I don't feel like happens as much with movies anymore.

You almost have to go backwards. This movie has so much room for every single person who sees this movie to personally put their imprimatur on to it. It allows, Stanley left so much room, just like interpretive impressionistic art, even expressionist art. He left so much room for us to draw our own conclusions and make ourselves a part of his vision. But then he said, oh, you think I'm done doing this? Here's the shining. That's right. And it all started over again, didn't it? I mean, room 237, an entire documentary about how to interpret the shining. That's absolutely right. I'm not even sure. What's your interpretation of the shining?

Do you have one? Of The Shining? Well, I recreated some of the Shining and Ready Player 1. I'd love that movie. It took me a while to love it. I didn't love it when I first saw it. Do you believe in the... I'll tell you a story about Stanley.

I haven't told the story very often publicly. I'll tell you a story about Stanley. When I saw the movie, it came out. I had finished Raiders. I was in England and I went out to eat with Stanley and he wanted to know what I thought was shining and because Stanley is,

he's not brutally honest he's really careful about his honesty but he's honest he'll tell you if he doesn't like something and I'll tell you why it didn't work for him and I said to Stanley he said, did you like the shining? I said yeah I really liked it a lot and he stopped me right there

he says no you didn't. I said, why? He says, I can tell. You didn't like it a lot. You might have liked it, but you didn't like it a lot. What did you really think of the Shining? And I told him that there were certain things that confused me because I was in love with the book.

I loved when the heaters, the generators blew up. I mean, I love the topiary animals coming to life. You know, there's a lot of things in the book I loved. And I just said, And he said, is there anything that you would tell me other things that you didn't like, you didn't like it because I didn't include those things that I cut out of the book. And I said, Stanley, I like the movie. I'm not saying I didn't like it.

But what I had liked it more had Jack Torrance had an encounter with those topiary animals that were reanimated? Yeah, that would have been fun set piece. That would have been fun. And Stanley said, what did you think of Jack? And of course, I love Jack Nicholson. He's one of my favorite actors of all time. Always will be. But I said, but I thought Jack was kind of big.

He was big. The character was big. You know, he was doing big, big things. And Stanley said, okay, so you didn't love Jack. I said, no, I'm not saying I didn't love Jack. I'm just saying that Jack was, I thought you let him have his head, so to speak, you know. And he went running, not for the bar and he went running for the hills. He really expressed himself.

It was very kabuki. And Stanley laughed. And he said, okay, I want you to, without thinking, name your top 10 favorite actors of all time. Go. And I reeled off 10 names. And the second I got to the last name, he said, where's Cagney? I said, what, Stanley? He says, where's Cagney on your list?

If James Cagney isn't at the top of your list, you're not going to understand what Jack and I did. with his character. You're not going to get it. If you did not put Cagney at the top of your top ten list. End of conversation. That was it. Jesus.

James Cagney. That's great. But do you see the wisdom of that? Yeah. Of course. I mean, that's brilliant. But were you listing more naturalistic, leading men? I don't even remember the names that I said

because he had me on the spot. Yeah. I mean, he was, look, Stanley is witty and he's funny. The other thing that people don't give him credit for is he's got a devilish sense of humor. And he's a really funny guy. He's a great lapper. But he kind of pushes you in that kind of a way. So when Stanley asked me a question, when he says, jump, I don't say hell high.

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Visit Wayfair.caiFair.ca every home. What's age the best is the next category. What is it? What's age the best? So we've talked about some of the stuff, but what do you think is the single thing that's age the best from this movie? What is age the best?

Aging like a fine wine. Like all these years later, wow. How 9,000 is age the best? I think that's the correct answer. I agree. That's number one. This is like probably the easiest what's age the best we have. There are hundreds of things in this movie, though.

Oh, yeah. I have a bunch of go. Ripped through a couple. I mean, wanted to establish the sci-fi blockbuster as a Hollywood staple. Yep. Video phones. Voice print identification. Artificial intelligence.

Video tablets. Zero gravity toilet. The growing concern or belief that alien life exists, relevant to your film. The presence of brands everywhere. Also, I've thought of Minority Report when I was watching this as well, something you did in that movie. The Kubrick, one thing that really sticks out to me is that foreboding and mysterious style, that a movie without a narrative engine, can still draw you in has aged very, very well. And also famous people watching videos of themselves

of when the astronauts are watching the news segment about them and the interview with them, which is such a social media thing right now. I thought that that was so clever. And him kind of seeing the future on that one in particular made me laugh. You had a lot of what I had. I also would add a mysterious government cover-up of something unsettling. Sagewell. A movie that pulled off

no dialogue in the first 25 minutes or the last 23 minutes, just as an achievement, seems, I can't imagine anyone even trying to pull that off now. Not just for Fifi. Right. Space Audity from David Bowie

came from this movie. That's right. The solo astronaut space traveler movie gimmick, which then eventually became the Martian Project Hail Mary, like just sending people out by themselves. I feel like this probably invented this. This story is aged the best.

Care DeLay said that during the New York premiere, all these people walked out, including Rock Hudson, who left early and was heard to mutter, what is this bullshit? Well, someone tell me what the hell this is all about? Rock Hudson just furious. The Who contacted Kubrick about directing Tommy after this movie, and he said no, because he was doing,

he was doing him Clockbook Orange Brilliant of Who to tap into Stanley for that Well, they were upset so the next

album they did Who's Next was them urinating on a monolith That that is the best using classical music over a real score And then

we got to talk about the moon stuff with that ends up circling back in the shining but the way he films outer space and then we go to the moon the next year

and then the conspiracy starts that he might have filmed the moon landing and it didn't happen. And then he has fun of it and The Shining and Danny's wearing an Apollo 13 chair. And all these people think he filmed the moon landing. What are your thoughts on this? Well, because Stanley was always, he was great inside of a joke. He was terrific and creating, putting himself inside of any kind of what you could call a, you know, a conspiracy theory.

and I think Stanley really enjoyed I didn't, by it, we never talked about this, Stanley. So you think he loved that people thought this and he's like, I'm leaning into this to fuck with them? I think he loved the moon landing was fake and Stanley directed the fake moon landing. I think not ever, having spoken to him about this,

knowing Stanley as little as I do, or as much as I do, I think he would love that. There are sequences in the movie. The moon surface, clavious landing, where you're like, this is a little too, close to the imagery that we saw one year later.

It definitely feels like it is inspired by. Now, he also, at least what I read, was kind of slavish to accuracy and details of what certain things would have been like, too. And then we did obviously have a lot of footage of space at this point. So he's working with materials to replicate something that he thinks is real. But it is eerie if you look at the Aldrin and Armstrong photos, especially the high-resolution photos that we see now that have been sort of like developed in the aftermath of the land. ending. How similar they are a lot of stuff in the movie. My hottest take is we did land on the moon, but they also had Stanley filmed or used space stuff just because they couldn't have actually shown video and they did the hybrid model.

Great Shot Gorder Award for the most cinematic shot, named after the great Gordon Willis. We call it Great Shot Gordo. Oh, that's a good title for that. Yeah, I've heard that before. I have the ape in slow motion learning how to use a weapon and how he filmed that would be my favorite. What do you have, Sean? I think the match cut that Stephen described earlier is probably the number one answer.

The one I like the most is the floating pen and I liked learning about how they did that shot. He never really cracked it. I know how they did the shot, but you just took my answer. Oh, okay. That was what I was going to say with the floating pen was one of my favorite shots.

They simply put a very large piece of circular glass and the pen, you can tell when the flight attendant takes the pen off, she doesn't take it out of midair, it pops into her finger because it's been stuck with a very light tape or a little light adhesive onto the glass. But the glass is slowly turning on a motor. It's not hand-turning because that would be uneven.

You could tell it it was a human turning it. So there's a little motor turning the glass. Apparently, double-sided tape had just been invented and they adhered it with double-sided tape. But let me tell you my other favorite shots. My other favorite shots is everything at the Donner Man involving the first time ever front projection screen were used to make you think you were actually outside. You never saw a process shot, a process shot like that before in the history of movies. Stanley got this Scotch 3 sort of 3D front projection material that when you,

put a projector right next to your camera lens. It can't be too far away from the center of your camera lens. But when you put another lens next to this lens, and you project that image, probably taken with a hazelblad or some very large, negative strip of film. And those were still photographs. Those weren't movies.

It was still photographs of sunsets of different parts of the world. And when you project that against the screen, its return is so bright. You can almost with a light meter read an F-11 or an F-16 just from the return of that light. Wow. It made, and that's why when the, when the tiger or the leopard, the leopard, you can see the front projector reflected in the leopard's eyes,

that thing, that's chetoyance, that's inside the eyes of the leopard. That is actually, the leopard got it in the way of the light. You see that in the forest outside when you take a light and you see animals running around the forest. Well, that's the only giveaway during the dawn of man that there was some technique being used to create those vivid backdrops.

It's such a happy accident because then it makes you wonder why there's something so animated about that leopard, you know? It's like they have something up on these apes which are humans in ape costumes. Right. Exactly. So what I made close encounters the third kind, I got the same front projection. Doug Trumbull

brought that front projection material into the studio. Yeah. And there's one, a couple scenes when I have my actors against the front projection material. And Doug Trumbull and Richard Eurisich and his whole special effects group

had to generate the effects first and then project the effects. It was mainly lightning in clouds. And that was done in the cloud tank in close encounters. We had a cloud tank. And it made very realistic clouds. And we put lights behind

inside the water behind the actual paint that was being jetted with great force into the water which creates cumulus clouds. And we had lights behind it. And when he photographed that in 65 millimeter, we had a 65 millimeter or 70 millimeter projection onto our front projection material. And it made it look like we were really outside during a distant electrical storm. I think Sean's going to explore. I'm in heaven, yeah.

I think Sean just passed out. But I learned so much from Doug. I mean, Doug Trumbull taught me so much about special effects, which, of course, he and Stanley had devised. You have a Hall of Fame, great shot order, award winner, Brody. Got the beach. Trombone shot. Yeah, that was.

Which you can recreate at the Academy Museum right now. You can. You can do that with your own iPhone. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. When did you think of that one? I thought of it.

I didn't even realize it been done before because I don't remember it being done before, but later Brian De Palma was the world. one because he knows Hitchcock better than anybody. Brian said, you stole that from Vertigo. I said, no, I didn't. He said, yeah, Hitchcock did that in Vertigo. That's easy. You start with 100 million mirror lens.

You put on a dolly, and as you're dolling in, you're zooming back. Come on, that's been done before. But I didn't know that. I did it first in Sugar Land Express, not as effectively. When the snipers are getting the beat on the police car with my main principal characters approaching the house where they supposedly the the the the the the the foster child is there that lu jean poplin's child is in the house i did it the first time there it didn't work as well and then i was able to use it effectively in jaws wow uh quick ones sarah Connor award for wood modern technology

ruin this movie we've talked about it i think one of the things that makes this movie great is they had to think outside the box and he did you know so i it wouldn't ruin it but i think it would hurt the legacy of the greatness today's technology? Yeah. You say if he had the same digital tools that we have today? I just feel like part of the legend of this movie is, it's like watching somebody make a world-class meal

based on like some leftovers and the leftover groceries, you know what I mean? Like the stuff we had back then. And now if he had all this AI stuff, yeah, it would be cool, but I don't know. Would you have people dotting out stars? No, you wouldn't. You'd lose that stuff.

If you didn't, if you used AI, you would, you would unemployed about 400 people, wouldn't have jobs. Yeah. I, it's funny, you know, Project Town Mary's come up a couple of times and they shot that movie as,

very practically, relatively speaking, they built sets and they shot on sets, which is not common for movies like this nowadays. And I hope that there's like a little bit of a turn back to that because the practical stuff is what's, like the movie doesn't really make sense as an idea if it's just made with digital effects.

Like, that's part of why. I think one of the reasons why it endures and feels so different from other things is that there's so much handmaid. Same goes for Star Wars. I mean, when you watch a New Hope, everything is tactile. You feel like everything feels worn and lived in and real. And that stuff matters. It's just there's a lot of virtue in analog.

When you look at TCM as much as I watch it, you see a lot of virtue in, like in, for instance, San Francisco. You see the San Francisco earthquake, the great quake. And you see it being done in analog, meaning they actually had to build big models, probably an inch and a half to the foot, and have them collapse. When you see the Clark Day movie about the Chicago fire, they had to burn several acres

in order to make it appear as if it was all the Chicago burning after Mrs. O'Leary's cow knocked over the lantern. You know, I watched those films in the context, text of the age and error they were produced. But I appreciate them as much as watching effects in a modern day in Avatar, I'll say today. I appreciate those handmade effects as much as I appreciate the genius digital motion capture work that Jim Cameron's done consistently with his avatar films.

Kid Cutty Pursuit a Happiness Award for Best Needle Drop. That has to be the opening credits. Oh, by far. You named it. That's it. Unbelievable. Come on. The Sean Fantasy Award for stealth homage

that gives every movie nerd a criteria orgasm. Yes, this award is named after me. And what is the category? It's your category, but what is it again? It's an homage that's in the film to a previous film or an aspect of film history. That's only a psycho like Sean or you would notice.

There's a great one in this one. Okay, let's hear it. I will say that this movie might be number one for the inverse of this award, which is people who have borrowed from this movie. And that there are several, there are inspirations, there are, you've talked about some of them, some of them in your films.

There are parodies up the wazoo of this movie. It's appeared on The Simpsons several times, Mad Magazine, Airplane 2. But there's one in the film that is Kubrick winking at himself, which is that in Dr. Strange Love, Major Kong says, fire the explosive bolts.

And in 2001, the entry hatch sign reads, caution colon explosive bolts. Oh. Which is his own little... I never saw that. You know something? Look at Sean teaching you about movies. Hey guys, I'm just saying that I'm having such a good time talking to both of you about

this movie. But that one insight just makes this day for me. That's great. It really does. Best moment in the history of the category. Criteri orgasm right there. We just saw it. I only have a couple

What's Age the Worse. We mentioned the intermission, which nobody would do anymore. Especially, it just would never happen. So this is a good one. They mentioned BBC 12. There were only two BBC channels at the time.

A little Kubrick joke. Kubrick joke basically saying that England would surpass America with the number of channels in the future. So I researched how many BBC channels there are now in 2012. How many are there now? we have BBC 1, 2, 3, and 4. We have BBC News, BBC Parliament,

CBBC, which is children's content, CBB's preschool programming, BBC Scotland, and BBC Albo, which is Scottish Gaelic Language Service. So only 11, so he was wrong. Sorry, Stanley. Missed it. There's still time.

By one. One short. Sorry, buddy. You mentioned the sequel as a Woodsage is the worst. Couldn't agree more. I don't really have it. have any other ones, see you? Well, just the idea that we could shut down AI, I think, maybe, under some debate right now, you know?

The whole thing about shutting things down, you know, when I made Ready Player 1 and I had a great time making, it was a hard movie to make, but I had a great time with the outcome of the movie in terms of what it said at the very end. You know, after all this stuff and the kids win the Oasis, they, you know, they get the Easter egg and they're happily askons, kissing in a chair. and the narrator comes over and he says, and furthermore, they're going to close the oasis two days a week so people can really connect with each other and get on with normalized. That was the whole reason I think I made that movie to basically say that sometimes we have weekends. Weekends, we're supposed to take our weekends off,

but there are no weekends in terms of the amount of demand on our, time in our lives and demanding that we make our identities known and shared with strangers, why can't there be one or two days that we take off from that and get back down to having picnics outside somewhere? That's a great idea. I wish I could just put my phone in the ocean, but I can't. My kids are going to hate me for that so much when they hear this, when they listen to this podcast, say, come on, dad.

And they hear that? Say, dad, you are a square. The Steven Seagal Award for Most Unbelievable anecdote from the actual film shoot. So they had a dead horse painted like a zebra for the shot of the leopard next to the zebra. And apparently the horse had been dead for a few days and was really starting to smell. That was the thing that happened. Okay. Casting what ifs.

Kubrick wanted Sterling Hayden for Floyd and MGM vetoed it. Yes, I know. I know. They wanted Henry Fonder, George C. Scott, landed where it landed. he... I read Holden as well. Yeah, I read Holden also. Yeah, I read that too.

Which is... Holden would have been good for Floyd. Floyd, that's what I was thinking too. But Holden would have been like Janet Lee and Psycho, you know what I'm saying? He never reappears in the movie again, you know? And it would be sort of front-loading a movie that

really needs to, you know, start with a clean slate. He looked at a bunch of actors, famous ones for the Moonwatcher, the lead ape. including your guy Robert Shaw. Really? Now, where are these facts from? This is why they're half at half-ass internet research.

They're just on Wikipedia and random articles about the movies. So we've learned as the years go along. We never totally know what to believe, but we talk about them anyway. Okay, so you'll, you wink at me if it's, if it's urban legend. Just give me a little. We don't know. That's the thing of the internet. You never know.

What's the most, what's the biggest urban legend about Jaws, right, of Lost Arc E.T. What's the one that's taken hold that you're like, why is that a thing people think? The biggest Herbert Lentgen's that is occurring right now involves my movie coming out, Disclosure Day. Yeah. That somehow,

I have made this movie in concert with, you know, deep state, you know, factions that are hoping this movie is going to be a, I remember there's a moment in 2007. Space Odyssey where he talks about the grave dangers of social dislocation and that my movie is going to somehow, you know, make it easier for people to accept the fact that we have been actively interacting in secret with extraterrestrials for eight to nine decades. Am I starting to believe that? Yes, I am. However, I am not. I made this movie independent of any influence except You know, what I know and what I've been following for the last seven decades. So you're saying you didn't do it with them, but maybe they have a point.

Yeah, it's going to do. So not working with Deep State, but you see it. Okay. Kubrick rejected Martin Balsam for Hal. Oh, Martin Balsam. Yeah, but he was a little New Yorkish. Yeah. I can see that.

And then Pink Floyd was approached to perform music, and they turned it down due to other commitments. Yeah. Wow. I find that hard to believe. I missed out on that one. Yeah, that's on the fringe of I'm not sure how true that is. Dion Waiter's Award,

so that's like somebody who's not the star of the movie but comes in hot for like 10, 15 minutes. I think it's Hal. I think Hal's the... Who do you have? I have Daniel Richter as Moonwatcher, the chief ape. Because that's an amazing performance

that he gives in that suit. I don't know. I think it's Vivian Kubrick, who wants a Bush baby and whose father calls her squirrel. Word. She is my number two on my list. Recasting Couch,

director or city. So we wouldn't put any name actors in this. No, we wouldn't. Okay. No. Half Ascernate research. I'll blow through some of these really fast. It's interesting that one of the astronauts that Hal kills

is named after my cameraman, Janusz Kaminsky. Kaminsky is one of the astronauts. I was a soccer dad with him for years. Were you really? Yeah. We thought it was so funny. With Bruce.

Yeah. Well, no, it was his daughter with Helena. With Helena. Yeah, yeah, yeah. My daughter's always teammate for years. And we always thought it was so funny. He would take, like, photos at the games of these seven-year-old girls. They were like the most beautiful.

Great Shot Gordos. You've ever seen of these photos that he would take. I think when I first met Janusz, I don't know what I said it to when I said, hey, do you know you're in 2001 of Space Odyssey? Right. Well, he would disappear because he was going to make movies with you. That's right. Exactly.

Yeah, he's not here. He's making movies with me. So, Kubrick was so dissatisfied with the script that he approached some other writers, all of whom turned him down. On 2001. Yeah. Wow. Because he was disloyal. There's a lot of stuff about this.

He's a great writer himself, as you know, Stanley writes a lot of his own movies. 205 special effects shots in this movie. Now, you know what a paltry amount of shots that is compared to a streaming movie on Netflix? Yeah. Today. Two and five, a lot back then. Not a lot now. Not a lot now.

Not a lot now. I mean, one of the reasons for that is because so many of the shots are so long, there's just not a lot of cutting in the movie. So if he is getting a special effect shot, if they put a tremendous amount of time into what you're looking at and holding on it. But remember what Stanley was trying to create. He was trying to, he was trying to, he was trying to, he was trying to. to lure us into a, I guess, not a heightened state. He was trying to lure us into a kind of state of mind where we're going to be relaxed and we'll start to accept anything.

I mean, you know how long? I mean, I know he cut about two minutes from the jogging. Right. When pool is jogging in his daily workout, he cut about two minutes out of that jog. What makes the jog work, though, is the Cacciaturian score. Yeah. You know, and it just lulls you.

You don't lean forward at that moment watching 2001. You sit back and you, I was thinking, how long is this shot going to go on? And what's the point of it? And will there be a point of it? And when there wasn't a point of it, the joke was really on me. Because the point is he's creating a state of mind for the audience to start to accept things that are going to be a little more conventional. in terms of suspense and betrayal and all of the other great neat things that happened in the movie. Patience.

Yes, patience. So Samsung battled with Apple about the origin of the computer tablet. And one of their cases was this movie. They were like, look at this. This was 1968. You didn't invent anything. Look at that. It goes way back there.

So that happened. Only a cut. There was a stuntman that they forgot to put air holes in his suit and he almost got asphyxia. did that happen. The Ferris wheel cost $750,000 that you mentioned. That's a big line item on a movie that costs only 10.

Well, a lot in its era tens a lot in 16. Then Ligetti's permission was not granted for this movie and he didn't know his music was in there and they had to settle it after. There's a lot more. I mean, there's been books

that weren't about this movie. Documentaries, there's been multiple Kubrick books so you can dive into if you want. Apex Mountain. So this is something we do where we try to figure out shots are in left.

But the actual apex of somebody's career was where they had like the most juice possible. Where it was like not only were they at the peak of their powers, but they're at the point of their career where they could have done anything. Right. Right. That's like the ideal. I have lived to see you explain this to Steven Spielberg. This is incredible. I would say so for you, you have multiple apexes, but in 82 when you have E.T. and Poltergeist, at that point, you could have probably go.

in any studio on the planet been like, I'd like to do this. And I'd been like, here's a check, Steven. That's an example,

right? So for Kubrick, yeah. Okay. I'm with you. I'm, I'm, I'm trailing behind you, but I am behind you still.

So for Kubrick, what was the moment where he had the most of everything going at the same time as the director? Was it this movie? Yeah,

I would say this, this is the movie where he had it together. This is the movie that made Stanley famous, not just among critics and journalists and people that write about film, but this is the movie where the public discovered him. Would you put space movies for the apex of space movies?

Well, this is certainly the, this was certainly the Big Bang. Yeah. For every single movie about serious science fiction, where science is being emphasized, even Jurassic Park where science creates, the credibility for an audience to believe that yes, dinosaurs can come back. We have a category called Cruz or Hanks.

You've worked with both. You know both of these guys. Yeah, I love them both. What's the question? If you have Cruz or Hanks in this movie, who would you pick? Hanks. It has to be Hanks. He made Apollo 13.

Right. He's the astronaut guy. Sean can't believe I asked you this. It's wonderful. If he could be an astronaut, Tom, he would give it all up to be an astronaut. I think the answer is both. I think Bowman is Cruz. And I think, I think Floyd is Hank's.

Can I give you Cruz as the lead ape? How amazing that would have been. Cruz, just like throwing himself into it. A very physical performer. Teaching himself how apes walked for like nine months to prepare for 10 minutes. I think it would have been cool for any of the movie stars to, look, Daniel Craig was a stormtrooper. in Force Awakens you. Right, right. We have another category

called Spielberg or Scorsese that we have to do since you're here. I mean, I think it's here for this one. I got to clear my palette for this one. I think you won this one. Wait, I mean, hold on. What was the biggest battle we had of that category? Usually it's pretty apparent. Oh, of all time? I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, this one is a no-brainer. This one is a nice one. Yeah. Pickin' Nits. So this is where we pick little Nits in the movie. Okay. The ape costumes in 4K. Sure. It feels a little 1968-ish. Like, you could really, a couple times it feels like,

yeah, that's probably a guy there. But I mean, for 1968, amazing. We accept that they're not real apes. But also, there were apes in Planet of the Apes just a year before, coming out the same year as 2001 Space Odyssey. So it was the year of the ape. And by the way, they're not apes. They're proto-humans.

Yeah. Yeah. Would Hal actually be able to their lips? Are we? Like, even now in AI, would we actually get there? Absolutely. You think so? Yeah, I think that's a walk in the park for AI. They're reading our lips right now.

Hopefully not. The film never actually tells us what year it's set. So is 2001 when they go and they get the when they're taking the selfie and they get the crazy noise? Or was it 18 months later? Which year was 2001? Well, I've given that a little bit of thought.

I think 2001 is the, it's not a year. I don't think it's a year specific to anything. I don't think it takes place in a year. 2001 is about the millennium. So it is. So it doesn't matter. Okay. I had one more, but did you have, that answer?

That's a great way to think about it. You just solved it. Did you have a nitpick before we go? Yeah. If Hal's so advanced, why can't he anticipate Dave's move to remove his central function? You know, Hal's flaws, I think, are often overlooked. And, like, the question of, did he react this way and turn against the astronauts because of some sort of emotional crisis that he has because he feels fallibility around this plan? Like, what is actually the reasoning for that?

And then how does he not anticipate after that that? That obviously, Bowman is going to try to take him offline. There's some questions around that. How, a little over-a-in-in-in-in. I can join you in that nitpick a little bit. When Hal knows that Bowman is inexorably approaching his last mile, the green mile, he's going to get, he's going to be executed. Why doesn't Hal turn off all the lights?

Why doesn't how not everything has manual override? That's true. Why didn't he turn off the lights? Why doesn't he close certain. ports and where there's no manual override controls. And I have an answer for that. I think that Hal somehow knew being so sentient that he was a bad boy and needs to be severely punished.

How wanted to be shut down? It's like Grady saying to Jack Nicholson what he should do to his children because Grady did it to his. He needs to correct them. How knew he needed to be correct. And at that moment, Bowman was Jack Torrance. Wow. Love it.

That was amazing. Did you have another nitpick from this? No, it's almost a perfect film. Okay. I had one more. This movie was rated G? What were we doing in 1968? What's really in it, though?

I mean, what's, we were talking before we started recording. It's scary. Could you bring a kid to see this movie, I guess? Would you bring, I would your daughter now, five? She's going to be five. No, I wouldn't bring a kid to see, 2000 on Space Outsi, even today. I'm going to go PG for this one.

But I'm not sure what that was about. I think the film, I would have gone PG for it with it, too. It's a PG. The most violent thing in the movie is probably the Tepir being beaten in that little quick cut with the bones, right? I mean, obviously we see pool floating and being killed, but, you know. Don't forget, Jaws was PG. So maybe 2001 should have stayed a G.

By comparison. If you're grading on the curve of that era between 65. for two hours and I'm going to do my imitation of Quint getting chew to death. I'm ready for it. I'm not doing it. Just do it. Just do it. If he ever comes back, I'll do it the second time.

I will come back for certain. If you come back and do Jaws with us, I will do Quint. I'd love to do Jaws with you. That'd be fun. All right. He just promised. Just one Oscar who gets it. Kubrick.

Best director. For director. Best director. Would you go Best Film or Best Director? I would go Best Film and Best Director. Just two Oscars. Probably an answerable question. I would also have given Doug Trumbull an Oscar along with Stanley for special effects.

Okay. Probably answer to questions. You mentioned this. Why did Hal break down? This is a big part of the dialogue about this movie. Was it legitimate? Was he faking it? Kubrick, we know not to trust him whenever he talks about this movie, but he said Hal had an acute emotional crisis because he could not accept evidence of his own fallibility.

So my take is that he had these two things, right? he's supposed to be all knowing everything, but he's also smart enough to know when he's being lied to and told that he's basically lying to them about the mission and these two things kind of short-circuited him? No, the reason I think that Hal did what he did

was how he was a narcissist. He was a complete narcissist. Listen to how he brags about, you know, his product, his design. He brags about where he was born. He brags about how smart he is. He brags about the fact that no 9,000 computer has ever made a mistake. He's a narcissist. He's so smug when he wins that chess match. Good game, Dave. You know, I think that the intention, I think that's right. I agree with you. And also that he is obviously inspired by his creator. I mean, the narcissism of the human

race and could only cut these machines could only come from you're actually right that's right because you are a mirror of who you who created you you know uh the creature certainly in gerbos movie which i think is the best frankestine movie ever made the creature was a reflection of victor was victor unanswerable the first shot of the three astronauts we see sure looks a lot like the moon landing as shun mentioned it's still a tiny bit unanswerable do you have it I have one good one. Do you have any other ones? I mean, I think who delivered the monoliths is like the ultimate question of the movie.

Yes. That's the most unanswerable thing. That's definitely an answerable question. All right. Here's my good one. Did this movie ruin the name Hal? I don't know. Because we had Hal Holbrook, Hal Ashby, and Hal Lyndon.

When was the last time you met anyone under 40 named Hal? Craig, do you know any Howes? I don't know any Howls. Could this have been? the end of the house? I think Hal was such a villain and so scary in this movie, that was it. Hal was out. You know, I love a hell, though.

I love when Falstaff is calling him Hal. You know, I love Henry or a Harold can be a Hal. That's a great name. It's a great nickname. No House. I don't, I never even thought to name one of my boys' hell. Just gone. Not because of How, 9.

It was too tied to the computer and the whole thing. All right. The one piece of memorabilia you'd want from this movie, Quick story in this, Gene Siskel, loved this movie, and he really wanted the monolith, and he asked Kubrick about getting it, and Kubrick said it didn't exist, and that they threw it away. And it's gone. Wow. But what would be your answer for this? Well, I actually bought the one piece of memorabilia I wanted from this movie. That's never been uttered on this show before.

Yeah, you just trumped us. I have David Bowman's space suit, which I've donated to the Academy Museum. I don't possess it. I bought it and I donated it to the museum. Yeah. Wow. That's good.

Well, you said Peter Jackson owns Hal's eye. I understand Peter Jackson owns Hal's eye. That would have been my answer. But see, there's all these stories of him burning all of these things after they finish the shoot. And you said that's him striking the set. But they make it seem as though he was burning costumes and all the models and everything. So how did some of these things survive?

You know, to me, Stanley isn't, what I know of Stanley is, he doesn't remind me of somebody that would do all that, that would burn all these props and costumes. He also wasn't sentimental at all. So he was not himself, unlike myself. I'm a collector of a lot of memorabilia, also a lot of my own memorabilia.

Stanley is not sentimental. He's not going to be collecting his own memorabilia. My only other in Ansible is just because he was from New York. Jets fan? Kubrick could have explained a lot with some of the darkness in the movies. Although they did win in 69. The season is the year that they won the Super Bowl. Maybe that was it.

That's why I decided to move to England. Coach Finstock, Mr. Miyagi Award for Best, Worst, Life Lesson from this movie. I guess it's keep questioning what's out there. Oh, yeah. The best life lesson in this movie is, you know, never ever close your mind off to an impossible possibility. That's better than mine.

I don't have a follow up. Yeah, that's, I can't do better than that. I can't, we only have two more categories left. I love these categories. You're great. We had more. I cut them down. I didn't know how long we had you.

I would have thrown more of you. Best double feature choice. And you could put either this is first or second with the other one. You want to go first? Well, my pick would be AI for all the reasons that I talked about. Interesting. And the lineage and the relationship that you both have and the movies I feel like are talking to each other.

Wow. It's a pretty good run. Good choice. Mine would be George Powell's Destination Moon, made I think in 52 or 50, 51, 51, 50. because it was the most scientifically realistic film about man's first trip to the moon, not taking into account, you know, George Melier's film, the first film, which was more of a pageant, less of a science project, but Destination Moon, which also is a tremendous exercise in suspense,

echoes a lot of what then became, in Stanley's vision, 2001, a Space Odyssey. But to me, that was the first breakthrough movie that makes an audience actually believe that someday we will be able to land on the moon. Can I tell you something? Destination Moon finally being issued on Blu-ray in June. It is. Wow. Great.

See? Full circle. My double future choice is Disclosure Day, opening on June 12th. There we go. Steven Spielberg. And I've seen it. Backup choice would be The Shining. I don't know why, but I think it would be really,

and you'd watch 2001 first than The Shining, but I'd be really interested to just watch both and see what, is there any stuff that he took or things? You know what I mean? Just watching it fresh for five hours. But I think the connection between that movie, The Shining in 2001, is a connection Stanley has made with all of his films,

is what I said when we first sat down and talked about Stanley audacity. Yeah. Audacious choices. Who won the movie? Stanley Kubrick. Craig, you're up. What did you think of this movie?

It came out... Where you were you born? 1994. All right, so you're 26 years late. Don't screw this up, Craig. No, no, no. This is the third time I've seen it. I saw it first in film school when I was 19,

and then I saw it again in my mid-20s, and now the third time in my mid-30s, or early 30s. And I have to say my maturity has affected how much I appreciate this movie. I have to admit, When I saw it when I was 19, I think I was a little bit underwhelmed, and I think I didn't, I didn't like the lack of clarity at the ending.

I didn't enjoy that it was just like ambiguous and essentially, you know, was left up for interpretation, and I have completely pivoted. And now that is why I appreciate the movie, believing, you know, the ambiguity, letting yourself use your life experience to kind of inform what you think about the movie is why I think it's so good. And just the attention to detail on the craft and the more movies I've watched over my life, you just appreciate it so much more and how mesmerizing the visuals are.

It almost feels like, I mean, these big synchronized spacecraft sequences, you almost feel like you're watching like with these big musical numbers behind it when the scenes end and they kind of go to black for a second, these vignettes. You almost want to applaud. It's like you're at a magic show

when you like turn to the person next to you and you go, wow, how did they do that? Yeah. I love it. The one thing that you guys didn't mention that I think is the reason why the movie is so successful and so perfect. Howell's voice, the choice of how's soft but chilling tone, I think, makes the entire film.

I have to concur. That's a good point, Craig. I thought you would open the pod by saying open the pod bay doors, Stephen. I thought you could have, we're literally, we're in the pod bay right now. It's so comforting but also ominous and you know there's something beneath it that is chilling. I'm just going to walk up the wall later. Just do 360 around there. Well, that's it.

You just completed your first rewatchables. A long one. You gave us two hours, too. That was amazing. Wow. I would have thrown in more categories. This was so much fun. Sean passed out twice.

You have Disclosure Day coming. I'm elated. We're running this on June 1st, so you have Disclosure Day coming 12th. 12 days later. Yes. And then are you thinking about the next movie already or no? No, I'm just thinking about Disclosure Day. That's all I got on my mind right now.

And you promised you'd come back. Except today. And now all I'm thinking about is 2000. You want a space odyssey. But you promise you'd come back for Jaws at some point. Let's do Jaws. I would love to do it. That was on tape.

We videotaped this. It doesn't have to be the 50 year anniversary. That's behind us. Let's do it. And I'll do my quint getting an impersonation at some point. I want to see that. I definitely want to see that for it. Steven Spielberg, an absolute honor.

Thank you, Bill. Thanks for being here. Thank you, Sean. Thank you, Sean. Thank you. Thank you. And that's it for the rewatchables. What an honor to be here with you guys.

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