2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey

After uncovering a mysterious artifact buried beneath the Lunar surface, a spacecraft is sent to Jupiter to find its origins - a spacecraft manned by two men and the supercomputer H.A.L. 9000.

 

“After 2001, science fiction is dead.”

Ridley Scott

 

“One day in the early 1960s, I had my palm read at a funfair. The palmist saw a rocket ship in my future. Then my agent called and said I’d been offered the lead in Stanley Kubrick’s next film. When I started reading the script, something felt terribly familiar. As a teenager, I had read The Sentinel, a short story by Arthur C Clarke – and that was the starting point for Kubrick’s film.”

Keir Dullea (Dave Bowman)1

 

“I was at college in Stevenage (about 15 miles away from St Albans in the early 1970’s). Our studio, we were studying graphic art, faced the entrance to the local corporation dump. One afternoon in 1974 a truck turned up after the dump was closed & left some crates in the entrance way. They contained 2 of the models used in 2001, the space wheel & one of the pods. Of course they may not have been the only ones but I believe they were genuine (the film had been made about 20 miles away at Boreham Wood the old MGM studios). By the time I got there the pod had been taken, the space wheel damaged & taken out its wooden case. I took pictures of it, its surface had been covered with bits of old plastic construction kits to make it look more technical when filmed. I desperately wanted to take it home, but I only had a motor bike & a room 8 feet by 10 so it was not really workable. It was smashed up by kids a few days later.”

Trevor Parsons2

 

 

“Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do
I’m half crazy all for the love of you
It won’t be a stylish marriage
I can’t afford a carriage
But you’ll look sweet upon the seat
Of a bicycle built for two”

HAL 9000

 

“Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky, and whirling there it became a space ship thrusting its way into the cosmos to fertilize it and produce at the end of the movie a lovely fetus, a boy of course, drifting around the Milky Way without (oddly enough) any womb, any matrix at all? I don’t know. I don’t even care.”

Ursula K. Le Guin3

  • 1Phil Hoad, “How we made 2001: A Space Odyssey”, The Guardian, March 2018.
  • 2Trevor Parsons, visual-memory.co.uk. 2015.
  • 3Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, Dancing at the Edge of the World, New York: Grove Press, 1989.
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UPDATED ON 25.02.2023