2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick)

“A film is, or should be, more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.”

-Stanley Kubrick

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick)

Interviewer: Why does 2001 seem so affirmative and religious a film?

Stanley Kubrick: The God concept is at the heart of this film. It’s unavoidable that it would be, once you believe that the universe is seething with advanced forms of intelligent life. Just think about it for a moment. There are a hundred billion stars in the galaxy and a hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe. Each star is a sun, like our own, probably with planets around them. The evolution of life, it is widely believed, comes as an inevitable consequence of a certain amount of time on a planet in a stable orbit which is not too hot or too cold. First comes chemical evolution — chance rearrangements of basic matter, then biological evolution.

Think of the kind of life that may have evolved on those planets over the millennia, and think, too, what relatively giant technological strides man has made on earth in the six thousand years of his recorded civilization — a period that is less than a single grain of sand in the cosmic hourglass. At a time when man’s distant evolutionary ancestors were just crawling out of the primordial ooze, there must have been civilizations in the universe sending out their starships to explore the farthest reaches of the cosmos and conquering all the secrets of nature. Such cosmic intelligences, growing in knowledge over the aeons, would be as far removed from man as we are from the ants. They could be in instantaneous telepathic communication throughout the universe; they might have achieved total mastery over matter so that they can telekinetically transport themselves instantly across billions of light years of space; in their ultimate form they might shed the corporeal shell entirely and exist as a disembodied immortal consciousness throughout the universe.

Once you begin discussing such possibilities, you realize that the religious implications are inevitable, because all the essential attributes of such extraterrestrial intelligences are the attributes we give to God. What we’re really dealing with here is, in fact, a scientific definition of God. And if these beings of pure intelligence ever did intervene in the affairs of man, so far removed would their powers be from our own understanding. How would a sentient ant view the foot that crushes his anthill — as the action of another being on a higher evolutionary scale than itself? Or as the divinely terrible intercession of God?

-excerpted from The Film Director as Superstar by Joseph Gelmis

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick)

Q. Did you deliberately try for ambiguity as opposed to a specific meaning for any scene or image?

Stanley Kubrick: No, I didn’t have to try for ambiguity; it was inevitable…But it’s the ambiguity of all art, of a fine piece of music or a painting - you don’t need written instructions by the composer or painter accompanying such works to “explain” them. “Explaining” them contributes nothing but a superficial “cultural” value which has no value except for critics and teachers who have to earn a living. Reactions to art are always different because they are always deeply personal.

Q. The final scenes of the film seemed more metaphorical than realistic. Will you discuss them — or would that be part of the “road map” you’re trying to avoid?

Kubrick: No, I don’t mind discussing it, on the lowest level, that is, straightforward explanation of the plot. You begin with an artifact left on earth four million years ago by extraterrestrial explorers who observed the behavior of the man-apes of the time and decided to influence their evolutionary progression.

Then you have a second artifact buried deep on the lunar surface and programmed to signal word of man’s first baby steps into the universe - a kind of cosmic burglar alarm.

And finally there’s a third artifact placed in orbit around Jupiter and waiting for the time when man has reached the outer rim of his own solar system. When the surviving astronaut, Bowman, ultimately reaches Jupiter, this artifact sweeps him into a force field or star gate that hurls him on a journey through inner and outer space and finally transports him to another part of the galaxy, where he’s placed in a human zoo approximating a hospital terrestrial environment drawn out of his own dreams and imagination. In a timeless state, his life passes from middle age to senescence to death. He is reborn, an enhanced being, a star child, an angel, a superman, if you like, and returns to earth prepared for the next leap forward of man’s evolutionary destiny.

That is what happens on the film’s simplest level. Since an encounter with an advanced interstellar intelligence would be incomprehensible within our present earthbound frames of reference, reactions to it will have elements of philosophy and metaphysics that have nothing to do with the bare plot outline itself.

Q. What are those areas of meaning?

Kubrick: They are the areas I prefer not to discuss because they are highly subjective and will differ from viewer to viewer. In this sense, the film becomes anything the viewer sees in it. If the film stirs the emotions and penetrates the subconscious of the viewer, if it stimulates, however inchoately, his mythological and religious yearnings and impulses, then it has succeeded.

-1969, via Stanley Kubrick: Interviews

Stanley Kubrick on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick) (via)

“One day I said: ‘I got a joke for you - you’re dead.’ [Kubrick] said, ‘It’s not funny.’ I said: ‘Let me tell the joke. Steven Spielberg’s dead, too.’ He said, ‘Steven’s dead, oh, that’s funny.’ And I said: ‘You’re dead and you’re up in heaven and Steven Spielberg has just died and he’s being greeted at the gate by Gabriel and Gabriel says: ‘God’s really dug a lot of your movies and he wants to make sure that you’re comfortable. If there’s anything you need, you come to me, I’m your man.’ And Steven says, ‘Well, you know, I always wanted to meet Stanley Kubrick, do you think you could arrange that?’

And Gabriel looks at him and says: ‘You know, Steven, of all the things that you could ask for, why would you ask for that? You know that Stanley doesn’t take meetings.’ He says, ‘Well, you said that if there was anything I wanted.’ Gabriel says: ‘I’m really sorry. I can’t do that.’ So now he’s showing him around heaven and Steven sees this guy wearing an army jacket with a beard riding a bicycle. And Steven says to Gabriel: ‘Oh, my God, look, over there, that’s Stanley Kubrick. Couldn’t we just stop him and say hello?’ And Gabriel pulls Steven to the side and says, ‘That’s not Stanley Kubrick; that’s God — he just thinks he’s Stanley Kubrick.’

Stanley liked that joke.”

-Matthew Modine (via)

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick)

“I think that 2001, like music, succeeds in short-circuiting the rigid surface cultural blocks that shackle our consciousness to narrowly limited areas of experience and is able to cut directly through to areas of emotional comprehension. In two hours and twenty minutes of film there are only forty minutes of dialogue.

I think one of the areas where 2001 succeeds is in stimulating thoughts about man’s destiny and role in the universe in the minds of people who in the normal course of their lives would never have considered such matters. Here again, you’ve got the resemblance to music; an Alabama truck driver, whose views in every other respect would be extremely narrow, is able to listen to a Beatles record on the same level of appreciation and perception as a young Cambridge intellectual, because their emotions and subconscious are far more similar than their intellects. The common bond is their subconscious emotional reaction; and I think that a film which can communicate on this level can have a more profound spectrum of impact than any form of traditional verbal communication.

The problem with movies is that since the talkies the film industry has historically been conservative and word-oriented. The three-act play has been the model. It’s time to abandon the conventional view of the movie as an extension of the three-act play.”

-Kubrick, quoted in Stanley Kubrick: Interviews (1970)

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick)

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick)

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick)