The making of “2001: A Space Odyssey”
www.imaginaryworldspodcast.org/2001–a-f…
Stanley Kubrick didn’t know what he wanted, but he knew what he didn’t want. Which means his production staff had to give him a lot of choices, and he shot a lot of scenes that were never used – expensive!
In a sense, Kubrick’s process matched Arthur C. Clarke’s vision of the evolution of humanity. Clarke’s vision was it was that we didn’t just invent tools. Instead, we invented tools and then the tools changed us, and we changed the tools to match our new needs, in a continuous feedback loop and cycle.
Kubrick was originally going to have a score for the movie, but ended up dumping it at the last minute and just using the classical music that he had left on the soundtrack as a placeholder.
Kubrick’s perfectionism continued throughout his career. In “The Shining,” he did 127 takes of a single scene, which made the Guinness Book of World Records and drove actress Shelley Duvall mad.
2001 originally had a voice-over, which, like the original soundtrack, was scrapped. The movie is designed to be enigmatic, to ask questions that don’t necessarily have answers. That’s a contrast to science fiction movies and TV today, where every detail needs to be explained and contradictions are considered by fans to be deep flaws.