Trivia for the movie – 2001 A Space Odyssey
Memorable Movie Quotes
HAL: It can only be attributable to human error.
HAL: Look Dave, I can see you’re really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.
Trivia
The main Discovery set was built by aircraft manufacturer Vickers-Armstrong inside a 12-meter by two-meter drum designed to rotate at five km per hour. It cost $750,000.
Stanley Kubrick had several tons of sand imported, washed, and painted for the moon surface scenes.
According to Douglas Trumbull, the total footage shot was some 200 times the final length of the film.
All of the special effects footage had to be printed on the original negatives. Stanley Kubrick thought using copies of the negatives would harm the visual quality of effects shots.
Marvin Minsky, one of the pioneers of neural networks who was also an adviser to the filmmakers, almost got killed by a falling wrench on the set.
According to Arthur C. Clarke, Stanley Kubrick wanted to get an insurance policy from Lloyd’s of London to protect himself against losses in the event that extraterrestrial intelligence were discovered before the movie was released. Lloyd’s refused. Carl Sagan commented, “In the mid-1960s, there was no search being performed for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the chances of accidentally stumbling on extraterrestrial intelligence in a few years’ period was extremely small. Lloyd’s of London missed a good bet.”
Vivian Kubrick the daughter of Stanley Kubrick plays Dr. Floyd’s daughter.
Though almost invisible when watching the film on a TV screen, the three satellites in the first space sequence bear German, French, and Chinese markings.
There is no dialogue in the first 25 minutes of the movie (ending when a stewardess speaks at 25:38), nor in the last 23 minutes (excluding end credits). With these two lengthy sections and other shorter ones, there are around 88 dialogue-free minutes in the movie.
According to Katharina Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick provided the breathing heard in the spacesuits.
Was voted the 26th Greatest Film of all time by Entertainment Weekly.
The animal used in the “Dawn of Man” sequence, the one that looks like a black pig with a trunk, is a tapir.
Aside from the film’s music, no sound is heard in the space sequences. This is because technically in space, there is no sound.
Poole (Gary Lockwood) was filmed wearing a helmet on the bridge of Discovery because Stanley Kubrick initially had doubts over the scientific possibility of a person’s survival for even an instant in a vacuum; however, data published at the time indicated that such survival was indeed possible, which allowed the Emergency Air Lock re-entry sequence to be filmed and for scenes to be shot of the astronauts without their helmets.
In the premier screening of the film, 241 people walked out of the theater, including Rock Hudson who said “Will someone tell me what the hell this is about?” Arthur C. Clarke once said, “If you understand ‘2001’ completely, we failed. We wanted to raise far more questions than we answered.”
The silverware used at the station and in the Discovery was designed by renowned Danish architect Arne Jacobsen in 1957 and is still available for sale 50 years after first being produced.
HAL sings “Daisy Bell” (or “A Bicycle Built for Two”) as he is shut down. One of the earliest pieces of electronic music, this was the first song ever programmed into a computer to be played back using a simulation of speech synthesis. The machine was an IBM 7094 that was located at Bell Labs in 1961. Furthermore, the lyrics include the phrase “I’m half crazy.”
Goofs
After Dave Bowman takes his food out of the food slot, two of the containers in his tray exchange positions by themselves. When he first removes the tray, there is a dark red container all the way to the left and a grayish one next to it. When Dave makes his way to the table to eat, the red one and the gray one have switched places.
When Bowman reenters the ship, he is exposed to vacuum for no more than 10 seconds before operating the repressurization valve. Scientific evidence shows that this would indeed be survivable without grievous harm, notwithstanding the sensational depictions in other movies.
On one of the computer monitors in Bowman’s pod (visible in the widescreen version only), scratches and a rather obvious film-edit splice can be seen, giving away the fact that the computer graphics are rear-projected film clips. The same scratched-up section of animation is seen in two or three subsequent shots of the pod’s control panel.
To come up with a convincing effect for the floating pen in the shuttle sequence, Kubrick decided to simply use a pen that was taped to a sheet of glass suspended in front of the camera (in fact, the shuttle attendant can be seen to “pull” the pen off the glass when she takes hold of it). If you watch carefully around the upper left corner of the screen just before she catches the pen, you can see the glass briefly reflecting light as it rotates to give the floating effect to the pen. (On the BluRay release, the sheet is clearly visible through most of the scene. Even swirl marks and what looks like a palm-print can be seen.)
When the Earth Shuttle stewardess enters the passenger cabin and moves towards Heywood Floyd, she stumbles on the walkway. The nature of the misstep reveals that she is not weightless.
As the moon shuttle lands it kicks up swirling clouds of dust. In the vacuum of space the dust would shoot out straight, as with the real-life Apollo Lunar Modules.
Box Office Info In USA
Budget $10,500,000
Gross $190,700,000
Filming Dates: December 29, 1965 to July 7, 1966
Filming Locations
Shepperton Studios, Shepperton, Surrey, England, UK (studio)
Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, England, UK
Isle of Harris, Western Isles, Scotland, UK
MGM British Studios, Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, England, UK (studio)
Monument Valley, Arizona, USA
Monument Valley, Utah, USA
South Harris, Western Isles, Scotland, UK