17 little known facts about 2001: A Space Odyssey

According to Arthur C. Clarke, Stanley Kubrick wanted an insurance policy from Lloyd’s of London. He sought protection against losses if extraterrestrial intelligence were discovered before the movie release. Lloyd’s refused.

The total footage shot was 200 times the final length of the film. Stanley Kubrick had several tons of sand imported, washed and painted for the moon surface scenes.

Production details

The carry-on bags belonging to Russian space scientists with whom Dr. Floyd shares a drink are marked Aeroflot in Cyrillic. It remains the Russian national airline today.

A working title was Voyage Beyond the Stars. When Fantastic Voyage was released, Kubrick reportedly disliked the film. He did not want his work to sound similar. He chose 2001 because it is the first year of the 21st century and the 3rd millennium.

The main Discovery set was built by aircraft manufacturer Vickers-Armstrong. It was a 12-meter by two-meter drum designed to rotate at five km per hour. It cost $750,000.

The entire film contains only 205 special effects shots. For comparison, Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope had 350 and Episode III – Revenge of the Sith had over 2,200.

Sound and dialogue

There is no dialogue in the first 25 minutes of the movie. It ends when a stewardess speaks at 25:38. There is also no dialogue in the last 23 minutes. The movie contains around 88 dialogue-free minutes.

Rock band Pink Floyd was approached to perform music for the film. They turned it down due to other commitments.

Aside from the film’s music, no sound is heard in the space sequences. There is no sound in space.

Characters and makeup

Frank Poole and Dave Bowman watch a television interview on BBC 12. This was a play on the fact that only BBC 1 and 2 existed during production. The presenter is Kenneth Kendall, the first newsreader seen on British TV in 1955.

Kubrick originally asked Stuart Freeborn to create human-like makeup for the early man scenes. He could not photograph them in full length without an X-rating because they were naked. Kubrick used the hairy monkey model instead. Humans in costumes played all roles except for two baby chimpanzees.

HAL 9000 never says “Good Morning, Dave” despite it being a famous quotation. Originally, HAL was to be called Athena and have a female voice.

Music and editing

Kubrick originally commissioned a complete original score from composer Alex North, who had previously scored Spartacus. After months of work, North’s entire score was discarded without his knowledge. Kubrick chose to use the temporary classical music tracks he had been editing to, including Johann Strauss’s The Blue Danube and Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra. North did not learn his score had been dropped until the premiere.

The famous match cut from a bone thrown into the air to an orbiting nuclear weapon satellite is widely considered one of the greatest edits in cinema history. It compresses four million years of human evolution into a single cut.

Kubrick personally destroyed nearly all of the props, sets, and special effects machinery after production wrapped. He reportedly did not want other filmmakers to reuse them and produce inferior work. This decision means that very few original artefacts from the film survive today.

Special effects and technology

The film’s special effects took eighteen months to complete. Many of the techniques were invented specifically for this production. Kubrick and effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull developed the slit-scan photography process used for the Star Gate sequence, creating the appearance of travelling at immense speed through an abstract corridor of light and colour.

The tablet computers used by astronauts aboard the Discovery spacecraft are strikingly similar to modern iPads. Samsung cited 2001 as prior art during its patent dispute with Apple in 2011, arguing that the film had anticipated tablet design decades earlier.

To simulate zero gravity inside the spacecraft, Kubrick commissioned a 30-ton rotating set nicknamed the “ferris wheel.” It was 12 metres in diameter and could rotate at up to 5 kilometres per hour. The camera was mounted to the set so it rotated with the actors, creating the illusion that they were walking in a complete loop inside the centrifuge.

No computer-generated imagery was used in the film. Every visual effect was achieved through practical means including front projection, model work, rotoscoping and hand-painted animation cels. The film won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects and remains a benchmark for practical effects work.

Reception and legacy

This was the last movie made about men on the moon before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked there. Conspiracy theorists claim the moon landing was a hoax directed by Kubrick using leftover props from this movie.

At the premier, 241 people walked out. Rock Hudson asked what the film was about. Arthur C. Clarke stated that if people understood the film completely, the creators had failed. They wanted to raise questions rather than answer them.