How 2001: A Space Odyssey Became “the Hardest Film Kubrick Ever Made”

Stan­ley Kubrick­’s 2001: A Space Odyssey has been praised in all man­ner of terms since it came out more than half a cen­tu­ry ago. An ear­ly adver­tis­ing cam­paign, tap­ping into the enthu­si­asm of the con­tem­po­rary coun­ter­cul­ture, called it “the ulti­mate trip”; in the equiv­a­lent­ly trendy par­lance of the twen­ty-twen­ties, one could say that it “goes hard,” in that it takes no few bold, even unprece­dent­ed aes­thet­ic and dra­mat­ic turns. The new video essay from Just One More Thing even describes 2001 as “the hard­est film Kubrick ever made” — which, giv­en Kubrick­’s uncom­pro­mis­ing ambi­tions as a film­mak­er, is cer­tain­ly say­ing some­thing.

In one of the many inter­view clips that con­sti­tute the video’s 23 min­utes, Steven Spiel­berg recalls his con­ver­sa­tions with Kubrick in the last years of the mas­ter’s life. “I want to make a movie that changes the form,” Kubrick would often say to Spiel­berg. Arguably, he’d already done so with 2001, which con­tin­ues to launch its first-time view­ers into an expe­ri­ence unlike any they’ve had with a movie before. Unlike the more sub­stance-inclined mem­bers of his gen­er­a­tion, Spiel­berg went into the the­ater “clean as a whis­tle,” but “came out of there altered” nev­er­the­less. It did­n’t require drugs to appre­ci­ate after all; “that film was the drug.”

This isn’t to say that 2001 is pure­ly or even pri­mar­i­ly an abstract work of cin­e­ma. In col­lab­o­ra­tion with Arthur C. Clarke, Kubrick put a great deal of tech­ni­cal thought into the film’s vision of the future, with its well-appoint­ed space sta­tions, its arti­fi­cial­ly intel­li­gent com­put­ers, its video calls, and its tablet-like mobile devices. Work­ing in the years before the moon land­ing, says Stan­ley Kubrick: The Com­plete Films author Paul Dun­can, they “had to com­plete­ly visu­al­ize, and make real, things that had nev­er occurred.” Such was the real­ism of their spec­u­la­tive work (up to and includ­ing imag­in­ing how Earth would look from space) that, as Roger Ebert notes, the real Apol­lo 11 astro­nauts could describe their expe­ri­ence sim­ply: “It was like 2001.”

Con­ceived in the heat of the Space Race, the film envi­sions a great deal that did­n’t come to pass by the epony­mous year — and indeed, has yet to mate­ri­al­ize still today. “We haven’t quite got­ten to arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence as por­trayed,” says star Keir Dul­lea in a 50th-anniver­sary inter­view. “Almost, but not quite.” Still, even since then, the tech­nol­o­gy has come far enough along that few of us can pon­der the cur­rent state of AI with­out soon­er or lat­er hear­ing the omi­nous­ly polite voice of HAL some­where in the back of our minds. The saga of astro­nauts cur­rent­ly strand­ed on the Inter­na­tion­al Space Sta­tion does con­trast harsh­ly with 2001’s visions of sta­ble and well-func­tion­ing life in out­er space — but as a sto­ry, it might well have appealed to Kubrick in his Dr. Strangelove mode.

Relat­ed con­tent:

1966 Film Explores the Mak­ing of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (and Our High-Tech Future)

How Stan­ley Kubrick Made 2001: A Space Odyssey: A Sev­en-Part Video Essay

Dis­cov­er the Life & Work of Stan­ley Kubrick in a Sweep­ing Three-Hour Video Essay

“Kubrick/Tarkovsky”: A Video Essay Explores the Visu­al Sim­i­lar­i­ties Between the Two “Cin­e­mat­ic Giants”

How Stan­ley Kubrick Became Stan­ley Kubrick: A Short Doc­u­men­tary Nar­rat­ed by the Film­mak­er

Did Stan­ley Kubrick Invent the iPad in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.