Transcript of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ With Bill Simmons, Steven Spielberg, and Sean Fennessey New

Welcome to The Rewatchables. I'm Bill Simmons. This is a special one. It's going to actually be a special summer for us. We are going to do a From Hell gimmick. We're going to rip through a bunch of my favorite dot dot dot from hells. We're talking about the roommate from hell. We're talking about the tenant from hell. We're talking about the little kid from hell. The Nanny from Hell. Uh, these are some of my favorite movies. They're ridiculous. They're just perfect for the Rewatchables. We can make fun of them, we can admire them, we can talk about how campy they are, we can talk about what they did right and wrong, and we're gonna do a lot of them. And guess what? Almost all of them are gonna be on Netflix, so keep an eye out for it. Uh, next week we're going to be doing Single White Female, which is on Netflix. Um, but a bunch of them will be on Netflix. We're going to be from hell at least through June and in part of July as well. So stay tuned for that. Coming up, me and Sean Fantasy got to do an entire Rewatchables episode with the greatest living director we have, Steven Spielberg.

Yeah, it's the three of us. It's me, Sean, and Steven Spielberg. And we're going to talk about 2001: A Space Odyssey. I can cram it into the from hell gimmick. Just by saying this is Hal, the computer from hell. It's a little bit of a reach, but to kick off From Hell, we'll do it that way. Anyway, this is, uh, really one of the great podcasts I've ever been a part of. Steven Spielberg was incredible. Can't wait for you to listen to it. Here it is, The Rewatchables, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Rewatchables, brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network, where you can find The Big Picture with Sean Fantasy. That's right. Steven Spielberg, not on Ringer Podcast Network. You— this is like your second podcast ever, right?

My second podcast where there's a couple of cameras around ever.

What do you think of this whole new world?

Well, it's, uh, guess what? Radio's back.

We're going to talk about one of your favorite movies ever, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is the oldest movie I think we've ever done the rewatch by one year. Yeah.

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Next! All right, so this movie is released April 2, 1968. What are you doing?

I'm in school. I believe I'm at Long Beach State in April of that year. Semester is coming to an end. Everybody's talking about this movie that is a drug trip. So the word around campus, or at least around my circles, and I'm a teetotaler. I don't— never done any of that at all. But I smoked cigarettes for a year. That was the worst thing I did in college. For one year? Yeah, I quit. One year and I quit. But everybody was talking about this kind of like Roger Corman's The Trip. And so the scuttlebutt on campus was, "This is trippy. This is gonna be like The Trip. This is gonna be like a really trippy film." So everybody was getting ready to get into a car and go down to, I believe it was the Pantages Theater, to see the film. So I think I saw the film probably the first week it opened. And I went with— 3 or 4 of my college friends, we all piled into a car, drove into Hollywood, and correct me if I'm wrong, it might have been the Pantages, it might have been another one of those big movie palaces in 1968.

But we parked, walked like 9 blocks to get to the theater, got into a line because in those days there was no such thing as buying your tickets ahead of time. And so we waited in line for a long time and everybody was being— I looked around, nobody was smoking grass 'cause there were cops up and down Hollywood. But when I walked into that theater, uh, and people started filling it up, it was filled with, with smoke. It was just filled with smoke.

Was that common?

Uh, I had never been to a movie where I smelled marijuana as, as thick as a London fog inside that movie palace, but Everybody was in the theater. A lot of guys, not as many women, more men. Everybody with long hair. Everybody making a lot of noise. I thought I wouldn't be able to hear the dialog. First of all, I didn't realize, because the movie hadn't started yet, that there was gonna be very little dialog. But it didn't matter. I was worried that there wasn't going to be room to hear the dialog, 'cause everybody's making so much noise in the theater. And then when the movie started, and thus spoke Zarathustra started, and it hits that tremendous chord. It shut everybody the F up. Everyone just got completely quiet. So as the music was decaying after that big explosive chord, I was aware that everyone was still. It was kind of in itself before the film started, mind-blowing. And then what began, I think, for a lot of people in that theater was a religious experience, um, fueled by whatever they were on. For me, it was not so much a religious experience, but one of the most audacious films I had ever watched in my life.

The audacity, and of course, we all knew Kubrick, and we all knew he was audacious, but the audacity and the risks he took telling that story, if you could even call it a story, set me back. And I think, you know, just rocked my world for sure. Rocked my cinema world.

Your career started in the next year.

Yeah, I got my contract to be a TV director at Universal the next year.

Correct. Pretty good start. And it really is like a before and after with movies, this '68, right? It feels like— I remember you said it in some interview, Steven, that you thought this was like the Big Bang Theory for a whole generation of filmmakers. But what was the before and after?

Well, it's like that year is Planet of the Apes, Rosemary's Baby, Bullet, a handful of other all-time classics.

I've seen them all.

Yeah, a couple. Yeah.

I've seen them all.

Yeah. Did you feel it in the moment? Did you feel like something is changing about this thing that I love?

Yeah, I did. I didn't feel that way until after Stargate, which we'll get to. But after Stargate, I felt that nothing would ever be the same.

Especially as you're watching people run out of the theater from Death.

But I'm watching the movie completely in a state of, you know, intoxication because Stanley intoxicated me. Or perhaps I was getting a contact high with all the smoke in the room. But I was completely intoxicated by what I experienced. And it wasn't a film, it was an experience. It was the most experiential thing I had ever seen since I was a little kid and got scared to death by The Greatest Show on Earth. And then later by Bambi, and then again by Snow White in reissues.

Well, what's crazy, it's 58 years old now, still kind of banging. Like, when you think of, like, some of the other movies from back then, feel like they happen in the '60s. Yeah, this is like, you know, it's obviously, it's slow by today's standards and things like that, but for the most part, those special effects, the feeling of like being in space, just like, is this what it's actually like to be in space? Like, that couldn't have existed in a movie before.

Also, you have to remember how big the screen was. Mm-hmm. The screen was so big. During Stargate, I just have to say that a person in the theater, several people in the theater got up and started walking into the screen. And that was, by the way, you can probably look it up in the LA Times. It was reported that people were walking into the screen. In those days, at least in that theater, the screens were like louvers. They were vertical strips of reflective material. And, um, and a couple of the people in the film during Stargate were reported to have walked actually into the screen and disappeared backstage.

Did you find anybody was not feeling it or walking out? Because there was reports of it being divisive when it was released.

No, because— no, everybody, everybody I saw the movie with that day were all probably under 35 years old. So I don't know anyone that I wasn't— I was unaware of it. Look, half the audience could have walked out and I would not have noticed.

Right.

I looked dead center, dead left to center, dead right of center because that was my field of vision. And I was completely, you know, I guess completely magnetized by what was happening.

Yeah, because there was a story when it had its big premiere, they were counting how many people walked out and it was like 241 people. And the writer Arthur Clarke was there who worked on it with them. And he was like, This is a disaster. This is devastating. But young people were what saved this movie.

Yeah, listen, a lot of people walked out of the sneak preview of Goodfellas, one of the greatest films I've ever seen, and one of the greatest films Marty's ever made. And yet, I didn't go to the preview, but Brian De Palma was there, and he just said there were a lot of walkouts from that because of the violence, but the movie went on to become a piece of our collective history.

So you said, Nobody could shoot a picture better in history than Kubrick.

Well, in what context did I say that? I don't know.

Okay. No, I don't want to start for something—

You said it. I want to— If I said it, I'm sure there was a context for saying it. I'm not sure it was a declarative statement.

Well, explain the shooting part. Like, what made him so special, like, as you saw his different catalog?

Well, I think because Stanley, in all the films— For one thing, he started out as a— still photographer for Look magazine. So he had an audacious, rambunctious, ambitious eye, and his compositions and his choices of what to show, what pictures to take, already set him apart. I mean, if he wanted to become a war correspondent like Bob Capa, Robert Capa, he could have become that too. Um, uh, but he turned that still eye into 24 frames of stills a second and became one of the greatest, I think, professors we've had you've ever had, my generation that always looked up to him as one of our greatest teachers. And what made him that way was he knew how to tell a story. He knew how to tell a story unconventionally. He knew how to shock the audience, and he knew how to make them laugh. Dr. Strangelove is one of the greatest black comedies ever created for the screen. And with 2001: A Space Odyssey, he was also— he was also a wizard technologically. He was almost an engineer. His mind had a kind of OCD quality where when he focused in on something, um, um, he was doing it for himself, and we were the beneficiaries of whatever reason he was creating these incredibly advanced, uh, spacecraft.

That no one had ever seen before in anybody else's films. Those spacecraft alone were kind of works of art, I always felt. And those spacecraft, especially the Jupiter mission craft, is what inspired Ralph Macquarie and myself to create the mothership in Close Encounters. Inspired George Lucas with the Imperial Star, you know, Starship Destroyer. Yeah. And included— and certainly, certainly, um, inspired Ridley Scott in creating the space freighter Nostromo. These, these wouldn't have existed unless Stanley came— had come first.

Yeah, it seems like the lesson is, if you're gonna do this, we're going all out. Like, even in the research where they told him it would take him like 13 years to, to basically create this universe and have people do the painting. He's like, well, I'll get 13 people and it'll take one year each. I'll be done in a year. And it was just, I don't know who else was even like that in the '60s.

It seemed like he had incredible patience and spent 4 years developing, writing, and then making the movie. Long period of editing, which there's not a lot of information about the period of time when he was editing the film together and what it ultimately became. If you read about him first reaching out to Arthur C. Clarke and the idea that he has for the movie, it changes a lot.

Yeah, in the progression it does. And, and, uh, I've— I knew Arthur. I, I, I had the honor of meeting and having lunch with Arthur C. Clarke, um, when I was shooting, um, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. We, we, we stopped— we were shooting in Kandy, Sri Lanka, and, and we stopped in Colombo before it changing airplanes to fly back to the UK to continue shooting the film. And he lived there for decades, right? And he lived in the botanical gardens where David Leaner shot Bridge on the River Kwai. And he invited us all to lunch at his house. And I had a great conversation with him about 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Wow. So he had the kind of filmmaking where he might take 5 years before he made his next movie.

Yes.

You're more prolific than that. Is that there's two types of directors?

I wouldn't call it prolific. I'm more impatient. Stanley was prolific. I was impatient. I just love telling stories. And I'd love— I just— if I get a story and it gets into my bananas, I just have to make— I just have to tell the story. I got to get it out. I got to exercise it.

So you never could have had the type of career where you would have spent 4 years between projects. You would have gone nuts.

No, I've spent 3 years between 2 projects, and I went a little nuts. But the great thing about that, I went a little bit nuts not directing, but I was raising a family, and that was keeping me completely preoccupied, so it was okay.

Yeah. So you didn't actually talk to him until 1980?

I met him on the set of The Shining in 1980, when they had just finished dressing the big Overlook Hotel grand room with the double staircase and the fireplace and the table with the typewriter on it. That's where I first met him.

Did he invite you to the set? What led you to going there?

Yeah, who reached out to who?

No, what happened was I was about to make Raiders of the Lost Ark, and I was gonna build the Well of the Souls on the same set that he had already built, the Overlook Hotel. Yeah. And I was scheduled to move when he struck his set, when he was done shooting with it, we were gonna build our set. And so I was gonna scout the set anyway, but Stanley happened to be there doing his— still photographs. And he had a camera with a periscope lens, and he had a tabletop model of the set that he was actually standing in when I first met him. And Douglas Twitty, our production manager, brought me over at Stanley's— I asked to meet Stanley, and Stanley said, "Yeah, he'd meet me." And when I met Stanley, I was surprised he knew anything I had done, and he just wanted to talk about Duel. The movie I made— the TV movie I made with Dennis Weaver about the truck chasing the car. Thank you. And that's what he wanted to talk about. And then we didn't talk for long because he was busy, but he said, "Why don't we talk more?

Come over to the house for dinner tonight." And so I got a chance to meet Christiane and Jan Harlan and Vivienne and his daughters. And that was the beginning of our relationship.

Sean, you never claim him as a New Yorker. I think most people mistakenly think he's from England.

He's Bronx through and through.

He's totally Bronx through and through.

He sounds like a WFAN caller. I mean, he really is, uh, it's an unusual thing because he obviously looms over film history as this great intellectual and dynamic powerhouse, but he really just is a fast-talking New Yorker.

Yeah, yeah.

What was the biggest thing you learned during all your conversations with him, just about him as a talent?

Um, well, what I learned was he was a human being. And I also learned he was not a recluse as he's so often been accused of. And I think it's the most unfair thing about Stanley's reputation is that people think he's like Howard Hughes. He never, you know, he never left his house, didn't speak to people, didn't go out anywhere. Stanley used the telephone and Stanley used all kinds of means of communication. If Stanley had been born now, he would've reinvented the iPad and the iPhone to his needs. He would've bent it toward his visionary needs.

You could argue he invented it in the movie theater. He puts one in his movie theater.

He kind of did. He sort of did. You know, but Stanley really, really was social in the sense that if he liked somebody's movie, he would surprise a director and call them and just say, "Hi, it's Dennis Kubrick here. I just saw your picture. I loved it. Where'd you get the idea?" And start a conversation.

Was he the number one, "Holy shit, this guy likes my movie," director? 'Cause, like, you're that now.

He was the number one, "Holy shit, that guy loves my movie," director. And I'll tell you the story quickly, is Albert Brooks was a friend of mine. Of mine, called me up and he said, "Did you give Stanley my phone number?" And I said, "Yeah, because he asked for it." "Why?" I said, "Because he called me at 3 o'clock in the morning to tell me how much he loved Lost in America." And then Stanley and Albert began a friendship from that moment.

Can you imagine getting a call from him at 3 in the morning?

Was it 3 in the morning though? 'Cause he was in England and he was calling LA?

Yeah, probably.

Stanley was never aware of times. He called me at the strangest hours. He just didn't have that kind of— I mean, I'll never understand Stanley. I don't have to. I was not in his family circle. But I feel that Stanley allowed me to be a colleague. And the greatest honor he afforded me was he let me into his professional circle, and he treated me like a colleague. And he was very generous with his compliments when he saw a movie I made and liked it. And we had a— real rapport and talked often on the phone.

I mean, he basically handed AI over to you.

Well, he asked me to direct it for him to produce. And then after that didn't work out, only because Stanley really wound up directing it, directing it with a lot of memos he was sending me. He was sending me many faxes about, you know, "Hey, it'd be great if you put the camera here. Here's a couple storyboards." And I finally, after 6 months of this, said to Stanley, "Let's reverse roles. I'll co-produce it with you." "and you direct it 'cause this is your baby. This is your vision." And he agreed, and then he got distracted by Eyes Wide Shut, and then sadly, tragically, in 1999, he passed.

Well, when you were talking to him about that movie, did he see a very clear link between 2001 and A.I.?

We never— He never made the link there. He did— We did a couple of times. The only link he made was the clear and present danger He thought it was a cautionary tale about unrestricted machine sentience. He was really, really concerned about machine learning and machines teaching machines to teach machines. And that was his—

Just like rats.

That was, I think, the main link between 2001 and his version of AI.

I mean, you could argue 2026 is the most relevant year we've had for this movie since 1968. These are all the conversations everyone's having right now. What happens if the machines learn too much? And these are things that have been in movies now for 6 decades. Um, Sean, can you think of anybody who could have gone Strange Love, 2001, Clockwork Orange, and Barry Lyndon all in a row in 10 years?

No, I mean, obviously that's the thing I think that continues to attract film fans, especially young film fans, to him is that each movie feels so dramatically different. And so you start trying to comprehend how one person can bounce around between genre, style, time period. Um, the other thing is that all the movies, once you've seen them, I think multiple times, you realize they are all sort of the same in some ways too. Even this movie, which is a little bit quieter than some of his films, they're all about like controlled chaos. There's always something very intense and dangerous and manic happening inside the middle of the story, even if this film is a little more leisurely or quiet, or there's not as much dialog as you said. But I'm, you know, his flexibility and versatility, I think maybe accounts for those long stretches of time too between projects where he's trying to figure out what can I do that would interest me maybe for a 5-year period if I'm really going to spend this much time developing something. But I don't know. My experience with him is the same as like, I think millions of movie freaks, which is that you're 13 years old and you find one of these films.

Usually it's either this one, Clockwork Orange, or The Shining. And then you just launch yourself into his entire filmography, which feels very conquerable to young people too.

Hopefully it's not Eyes Wide Shut at 13 years old. No, well, you never know.

You never know. Um, that wasn't around when I was 13, but, uh, I saw The Shining when I was 10.

My dad took me. Probably Probably a wee bit too early for me, but holy mackerel. And that became— Everybody, I think, has their entry point with his career, and that was mine.

Yeah, I think everybody does. And I think the thing that Stanley does to all of us is if we're just surfing the channels and we come across Stanley, one of Stanley's movies, 30 minutes in, I dare anybody to switch it off. Even if you have a meeting at 7 o'clock the next morning and it's already midnight, I don't know how you get your finger on that off switch. I don't know how you do that. Yeah. I don't care what the movie is. You know, from Killer's Kiss to Eyes Wide Shut, whether you love these films more than others of his or not, you completely become, you know, you become a zombie. You become a Stanley zombie. And you just stare at— You walk straight ahead, and you sit there, and you wait till it's over.

Do you remember the first one of his that you saw?

I think the first movie I saw was— I know the first movie I saw in a movie theater was Dr. Strangelove. That was the first one. The other films I saw were in art houses later in my life. For instance, you know, Killer's Kiss and those, and Paths of Glory, I saw on television, actually, for the first time. But I caught up with Stanley in terms of going on a regular basis to his films right around, I would think, Clockwork Orange.

What do you think the equivalent is in 2026 of this movie coming out? Like a movie where the people watching it could just walk into the movie? I don't even know. Like, like some of the effects that he has in here were so far ahead of anything else, and I don't even know how to wrap my head around it.

I don't know if it's a movie so much. It may be the Sphere in Las Vegas, maybe the equivalent of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Oh, that's a good call.

I just went for the first time. It was fascinating. We were there together.

But I mean, Stanley Kubrick with 2001 created, I think, the first 3D experience. The first— not 3D in terms of interocular, but I'm talking about wraparound, 3-dimensional sight and sound. And even though the screen did have its boundaries and you could look off the screen, top, bottom, left, right, it didn't matter because it had enough of a fold around the audience that the audience was really— enrapt by the experience, and 2001 was the perfect film for it. And also, 2001 also does something with suspense. The middle part of that film is as suspenseful as anything Alfred Hitchcock ever made. Mm-hmm. I feel that film is the most suspenseful movie Stanley ever made. The whole section with Bowman and Poole going out to replace the AE-35 antenna unit. And what happens to Poole, and then what Bowman has to do when HAL decides that the human beings are too flawed to really successfully carry this mission through to completion and has to take over command of that ship.

When you first saw it, did you feel like you grasped all of these details and the— construction that he was building, or was it repeated viewings and trying to study it to understand what he was doing? Because it's a film that can be confusing on first viewing.

It was— To say the least. Absolutely repeated viewings. I mean, I've seen 2001 countless times. I can't tell you how many times I've sat there beginning to end. I finally saw it for the first time in 70mm in New York City in 2001 when it was reissued on that— special year. Um, but I can watch it over and over again, and I, I don't claim to have understood it metaphysically or, or, or philosophically, or even completely when I first saw it, but it kept bringing me back, and the layers continued to expose themselves to me. And then when I got to meet Stanley, I got to talk to Stanley about the film, I knew enough about it at that point that I didn't sound like a clown talking to him about his own work. But the thing about the picture is it's an anti-emotional film that's truly a deeply empathic picture, but it's kind of anti-emotional. Poole and Bowman, Gary Lockwood and Keira Dullea, play it like, You know, they don't laugh, they don't smile, there's nothing, you know. You know, Poole is getting a little— He's on the sun deck, you know, in an adjustable kind of bed, and he's getting some rays, good vitamin C.

And a recording comes from his mother and father wishing him happy birthday, and he takes it in his stride. He doesn't smile, he doesn't blink, he's not warm, he just— listens and says, and he asks HAL to adjust the chair. Right. You know, in full recline after his parents sing happy birthday to him badly. And so the most emotional, and we've all heard this spoken, but it's true, the most emotional character is HAL 9000. The computer that was built in 1992 in, I believe, Urbana, Illinois. And that was the most emotional character in the entire piece. The movie begins with a pretty good character played by William Sylvester, you know, Heywood Floyd, Heywood R. Floyd. And he's warm, and he's commanding, and you listen to him. He's got that great scene in the kind of Hilton, the space station. Next to what— on the wall, it says Hilton 5. And he's meeting with a Russian delegation that he knows. I think the Russian's name is Shmirnov or Shmirnikov, possibly. I don't really know. Talking about, you know, one of their landers was denied landing rights at Clavius Moonbase and he wants to know why. And there's a rumor the Russians hear that there's some kind of an epidemic.

But that, of course, is the COVID story. Which I immediately stole when I made Close Encounters, and used phosgene gas as the COVID story to clear the civilians away from Devil's Tower so they could have this first communion between an off-world civilization and the human race.

So how many movies did this directly influence, you think? 'Cause you obviously— Every movie. Star Wars, your movie.

Yeah, like— Every film. Every film.

It's funny, like, growing up with it because You know, the, the theme of the movie, if you're a kid, is computers are going to take over. Computers someday. Watch out. Watch out the moment they get too much.

That's true.

You know, and it's like, all right. And then in the '80s, we start getting the home computers. Like, this is nice. This is great. Then the internet comes in the '90s. This is fun. I can talk to my family. And now we're in this stage. Yeah. It's like, uh-oh, did we go too far?

No. And remember the great movie that Walter Parks made called War Games?

Oh, yeah.

And before that, there was Colossus, The Forbin Project. Yeah. Where computers, you know, machines were threatening to take over the world. Now, that's an old sci-fi trope, and it's fine because all science fiction eventually comes true. Yeah, it just does.

Yeah. One thing that struck me thinking very hard about this movie was there are dozens, maybe hundreds of sci-fi movies that come before this. But almost all of them, and especially the American films, are all about what will happen when either an alien species or robots come to Earth. And this is not that. This is a kind of post-Earth exploration of life. You know, it's about something completely different. And just to conceive that very small but critical thing makes the movie feel so different than everything that came before it.

2001 made me feel as big as a grain of sand. You know, I felt no more aware— When I was done seeing the film for the first time, I was no more important than any of the stars in that sky that were, by the way, hand-painted by Doug Trumbull and his team. It made me feel really small in a good way because, you know, you could look up at the night sky and feel pretty small and diminished if you don't have the contamination of a big city spoiling your view. But if you get out there, You go out into the desert or into the country where there's no city lights and you really see that awesome vista, you see the entire— our entire Milky Way, you can get the same feeling every single time you watch 2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley created that. And when you think about some of his concepts, they found a monolith buried on the moon and had been buried there for 4 million years. Right away, that makes us all feel—

Yeah.

Like a greater intelligence before we ever had evolved into, you know, a race of Homo sapiens had already been here once and possibly had seeded the planet with the life that we claim is generated from whatever your belief system is. And so 2001, even if you've seen it 50 times, the movie can still, I think, shock you.

Well, it does seem like—

Do I sound like an ad to get people to see 2001? No, I love this.

Sean and I are having the best time ever.

This is what I wanted.

Well, it feels like there's two types of people, right? There's the people who are like, I really want to know what's out there.

Yeah.

What? Like, tell me more. Like, let's talk. And then there's the other people who are like, I'm afraid to know what's out there. And I think I'm in that camp.

The latter.

Yeah. Really? Yeah. The sci-fi stuff has always kind of freaked me out.

Wow.

And especially this movie. I think I've only seen it twice before I started preparing for this one because it brings things into my brain that I don't even know if I'm 100% ready for. Like, you're talking about Donavan all the way through. Where are we going? What happens to this guy at the end?

Yeah.

Does he get sent back as, like, this superhero, or is he just dead and he saw the end of his life? You think of this stuff and you can, I don't know, go crazy.

Yeah. I'm not a big fan of the next 2010 movie they made.

The sequel.

Yeah. Because I was— I really wanted it to be left to my imagination when the Starchild turns. And looks at the planet Earth. I wanted to leave it at that. I just wanted to be able to have that image exist without any possible film follow-up.

It's so interesting though, because, you know, obviously, Clarke wrote a novel while they were making this film.

Yes.

And in the novel, there's all kinds of explanations about why the monolith exists, who put it there, the meaning of the Starchild.

Right.

Yeah. All of this discussion about sort of extraterrestrials exploding the nuclear weapons in orbit and the intentions of the film. And I didn't learn about that until after I'd seen the movie many times. And it is a little bit of a letdown to learn details of intention.

I think it's mundane. For me, that's mundane because it's a mundane thing to start to explain and start to throughout other plotlines. Because in the abstract, when the Star Child turns and those eyes are moving in the model's— in the puppet's head, and almost looks at the audience, you know, it's just a moment that let— sort of Stanley is saying, "We need to start looking within ourselves." You know, we can always be looking to the stars, and ambition and exploration is great, but— Aren't we missing us? Shouldn't we start, all of us, looking more inward? And that's what that said to me. Not the first time I saw the film, and not the 25th time I saw the film. But eventually, it started to make— It started to become very clear to me.

Is that something you think about when you talk about intention for movies you've made? Because some directors, like Tarantino, will never tell us what's in the briefcase, right? He's probably the only one that knows of Pulp Fiction. And then there's other directors and writers of stuff. They'll be like, oh, here's what I meant. Here's what I think. I like the mystery. But where do you stand on this?

I like the mystery, too. I don't think I've made enough movies with enough mystery that anybody said, but what did you really mean? Everybody sees my movies and says, I get it. Okay, what are you doing next?

That's not true.

What is the most— what's the most kind of confused people were after one of your movies where they were like, I wonder?

I think they were really confused in a good way, in I think they were kind of confused at the end of Munich. Mm. Interesting. Because I showed the Twin Towers in the last shot, and I think they made a big link. And they shouldn't have been confused. I intended the link to what the never-ending cycle of violence, the seemingly unsolvable cycle of violence is going— did eventually lead to. So, there's a lot of people talking about the end of that movie. A lot of people talk about the end of A.I., where David gets his mom back for, like, from dawn till nightfall, and that's it. And what happens to David? Is he just going to sit in that bed until his batteries run down with Teddy? And then what happens to him? Is he going to be— Is he going to become a deity for all the machines that found him, the super mecha that people often confusingly think are aliens. They are not. They are the result of many iterations and generations of machine-built entities, sentient but completely built by other machines. Is David going to become a kind of deity or oracle for them because humans actually had their hands on David and created David.

So David is the first iteration of who they have now become.

That's one of the major reasons I ask you about the link between 2001 and AI, because it's so— it's such an echo of the apes touching the monolith and the astronauts approaching the monolith. Right. You know, it feels like—

I told you this film had an effect on me. 2001.

It worked.

Yeah.

Close Encounters definitely leaves you with some questions at the end. Especially, like, is Richard Dreyfuss's character ever gonna be able to have a normal day ever again in his life?

Richard Dreyfuss's character went up in the mothership, but then he came back down to make Always with Me. Yeah, Always with Me with Holly Hunter.

So with sequels, for the most part, Sean and I are both, I think, pro sequels when it's like, we like these characters. Raiders is a great example. It's like, I get to hang out with Indiana Jones again? Awesome. But then there's other ones like Jaws 2. Like, you didn't— You didn't necessarily want to be in Jaws 2. You wanted the story to end.

You never saw it? I didn't see it for 20 years.

We did rewatchables on it. Like, a motherfucker. We had a lot of fun with it.

It's a very silly movie.

It's a silly movie. They tried to get me to make it, and I kept saying, we blew the shark up, guys. We blew the shark up. It's unmakeable. The shark got blown up. And they said, well, there's other sharks. There are no other sharks 26 feet long. Only Jaws.

You know, we've had this podcast since 2017, and we were trying to figure out these different structures, formats with it. And Jaws was ironically the one that we were kind of like— we'd been doing it for 9 months. Me and Sean and Chris Ryan did Jaws, and it was like the first one where we're like, this is the pod.

This is what it is.

This is what's— and one of the things that we loved talking about, like the Robert Shaw stories and what he was like on the set and him daring Dreyfuss to climb up to the top.

Yeah.

So that— is that story true?

Yeah, he offered him money, but Richard didn't do it for the money. Richard did it He did it because Robert dared him, and Richard is a very courageous person. And Richard is going to do— I mean, he's— Richard stood up to Robert. Right. I think there's a lot of exaggeration that's happened over the years, over the 50, 52 years. Richard and Robert admired each other. They respected each other as actors, and they respected each other as people. But they had a routine, like Steve Martin and Marty Short, where they go on the road. They're always acting like they're rivals, and they're teasing each other, and making jokes about each other. And they had a comedy act in a way. I think it kind of pushed Richard— Robert pushed Richard a bit to the brink. And sometimes Richard pushed Robert to the brink. But you don't do that to other people unless underneath it is an enduring admiration and respect. And I think that's what gets overlooked after all these years.

It serves the movie.

I think they really didn't like each other. That's not true.

But it really serves the movie.

But it serves the movie, and I was happy about it. Yeah. Because when they got in front of the camera, they knew their business. They knew who they were to each other as Hooper and Quint.

It probably also almost served a heart attack for you when you found out Dreyfuss was gonna climb up 50 feet up in the air.

Oh, we stopped him.

Yeah, he was like, "Oh, yeah, we stopped him." "No, Richard, get down!" It's funny though, when Stephen was talking about catching a Kubrick movie 30 minutes in and not being able to turn it off, which is literally the premise of this show. That was the thing. I think Jaws is definitely one of those movies for us and for Chris for millions of people where it doesn't, if you're in the 8th minute or the 90th minute, you're like, I just, I gotta, I gotta get to the end. I gotta get to the Indianapolis. I gotta get to, you know, I gotta see that the shark popping out. Like I just have to get to those moments. That's very, it's hard though to, to make something where you can go back not 2 times or 5 times, but 50 times. Like this movie that we're talking about, it kind of demands several viewings. Like you were saying, you'd only seen it a couple of times beforehand, but if you like watch it at different stages of your life, it tells you something different. You learn more about yourself when you watch it.

It's really— you notice different things, different themes.

It, it, it's true. And you also get kind of seduced by the amazing musical choices. You know, he hired his composer when Stanley directed Spartacus. Alex North, one of the greatest Hollywood film composers ever, composed a brilliant score for Spartacus. It's one of the greatest scores ever written for a film, especially the main title that Alex North did. And so Stanley employed Alex to write the score, a film score for 2001: A Space Odyssey. And And very quickly threw it out because it turned his movie too much into a movie. And so he went and did what he did best, Stanley, which is needle drops. But look who he went to. He went to Aram Katchatorian. He went to Penderecki. He went to Gorgé Leghetti, or Leghetti.

Yeah.

And, uh— And he went to both Strauss composers. And so you've got the Blue Danube playing when you suddenly go from a proto-human taking a bone and throwing it in the air, and the camera follows the bone into the air, and on its descent, the bone transitions into a space shuttle in the year 2001. Unbelievable. It's unbelievably audacious. And then suddenly you hear— the Blue Danube Waltz playing, and it completely relaxes you into accepting the possibility of a future like this one. Mm.

Also, the most New York thing he did was just use the music and didn't tell some of those people, right? That became, I think, an issue for a couple of them. They were like, "Wait a second, my music's in this?" My music's in this? I'm Stanley Kubrick. I'm gonna use your music. We'll figure it out later.

I couldn't think of another example of a movie before this this that just transitions so radically, not just to the future, but to a completely seemingly unconnected phase of the movie. It just feels like it's a, you know, we've changed the tone, the style, the color, the location. Everything is just different, and you're expected to not only accept it but understand what he's trying to tell you.

It's amazing. Well, I wrote down the timing of the movie. So it launches the modern sci-fi boom, right? There's science fiction movies, but they're all cheap and they're just, they're making them for less than a million bucks. This is the first one where somebody's like, I'm, I'm spending real money and putting serious coin inside.

Planet of the Apes released 5 days before this movie though, which is very interesting. Oh my God, that they are so twin together and they both prominently feature apes.

But didn't Planet of the Apes outgross 2001?

It did, yeah, but maybe not over time ultimately.

Maybe not over time.

Those two movies I see as very connected.

Um, it's a year before Apollo 13 and, and Neil Armstrong, everything. Yep. It's hitting the psychedelic late '60s, like, perfectly. This is like right as this whole generation, this counterculture thing's happening. Whole generation of young filmmakers, including yourself, all waiting to be influenced by movies like this. So you have that, you have the 70mm, and just like the big awesome— this is like the perfect thing to go, which is now, by the way, I don't know if you've heard,, but it's now made a comeback. It has. People going to movie theaters and seeing IMAX and awesome different things. It's made for— I wrote down nerds, philosophers, and movie junkies, but somehow became massive. And then, uh, and then what we talked about earlier about life in the next century, what's going to happen like that. 2001 is 33 years after they make this movie, but when you watch it, it feels like it's 130 years after 1964.

And the movie's already outlived some of the sponsors. Pan American Airlines—

Yeah, long gone.

Airways no longer exists. The other thing, Bell Telephone. Yeah, right. No longer exists.

Howard Johnson's?

Howard Johnson's is still around. I think that's still around, and spotty, but still around. But you've got a lot of things that don't exist anymore where the film has outlived some of what I think Stanley assumed would be around for millennia.

These, like, bedrock corporations of our life.

I think he assumed those were bedrock corporations.

So when you're watching this and you're thinking, "Someday I'm gonna make movies," and then you're seeing the special effects in this movie, like, what's going through your brain?

Well, I didn't— When I first saw the movie, I didn't notice the special effects. I was in that story. I was part of that experience, so I wasn't picking it apart. I went back to see the movie 2 weeks later, and I went back to see the movie a week after that. So I saw the movie about 4 times in a month. And it was the second and third and fourth time that I started just marveling at how did they get that on the screen? How did they do that? And who are these people? Who is Wally Beavers? Who is Douglas Trumbull? Who is Colin Cantwell? I mean, who are these people? And because they all got kind of special effects supervisor credits on single cards. And I just wanted to get to know them. So, of course, I went to Doug Trumbull when I went to— when I made Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

So then 14 years later, you have little kids riding their bike in the air, and it's like the greatest moment of every kid's generation. It's basically the same thing. Like, "Oh my God, how did they do that?" This movie has a lot of "How did they do that?" Yeah.

How did they do that? I mean, how did they create weightlessness when he had to back the rover backwards with the exploding bolt door against the pod bay? And then he had to get— You know, he had to basically hold his breath, you know, blow up the— First of all, he mechanically— manually opened the pod bay doors because HAL wouldn't do it. Yeah. And then he had to turn the entire pod around. He had to back the pod up to the entryway, and he had to wait for the detonation. And when it occurred, he blew toward Lambert completely weightless. And what I didn't realize until much later was he was on a wire, but the wire was coming from the camera. Right. 'Cause they didn't have wire removal. They didn't have digital wire removal in those days. Before digital wire removal, we just put— the special effects guys would put a little Vaseline blur where the wire was to make it harder for the audience to see the wires. Films like War of the Worlds, the George Pal film, you see the wires on the triangular— Martian ships. But in this case, because the wire came right from the nodal point of the lens, almost right to the side of the lens, it looked like he was completely weightless and bouncing around like on a bungee inside that place.

And when Stanley built an entire set, the set turned 360, but the actors just walked.

Yeah, watching that flight attendant walk outside the—

That's how she does it. They actually rotated the entire set. I got the idea in Poltergeist When I produced and had co-written Poltergeist, I wrote the story, I wrote the screenplay. I wanted JoBeth Williams, the character, to kind of weightlessly fly around a room. So we built an entire bedroom, put it on the same kind of vertical carousel, and we just started revolving it, and JoBeth just had to go like Gene Kelly did in Royal Wedding when he danced on the walls and the floor and the ceiling. Jo Beth just had to understand where she— what down was, where up was and where down was, so she could struggle and traverse the entire room from the wall to the ceiling to the wall back to the floor again, which is exactly how Stanley also got the guys jogging in the ship with the cachaturian music playing when they were jogging all around for exercise.

Even some of the shots, I feel like, have drifted into other movies, like the— when, when the thing you just mentioned about him flying around, bouncing around, it's a little like Castaway with Hanks when the plane blows up and he gets sent back. Yes, but I, I thought of that when I was watching it.

Um, Keir Dullea did not enjoy shooting that sequence.

I can't imagine.

He only did it twice. He did not enjoy it.

So here's what Kubrick said about the ending in a 1980 phone interview with a journalist.

I read this. Yeah, but go ahead.

The idea was supposed to be that he is taken by godlike entities, creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form. They put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him. And his whole life passes from that point on in that room and he has no sense of time. And then maybe he's transformed into some kind of super being and sent back to Earth. We'll only have to guess what happens when he comes back. So he makes it seem like he doesn't die.

That's completely logical, but it's not very fun. Fun to think about. Like, I, it's, this is an interesting thing where I'm also very interested in directorial intent. Like, what did the person who made this think about it? Why did they do it? I've spent the last 10 years asking filmmakers, like, why did you do this? However, with certain movies, this being one of them, I do not want an explanation of that movie. I wish that I did not read that. I wish that I did. I'm actually quite surprised that he shared that. And it seemed like he shared that maybe shortly after the film had come out, and he was not as concerned maybe about being so mysterious at this particular period of time.

But maybe it's— maybe it's what, 13— it's 12 years after he made the movie. Do you get like— you make a movie, you send out in the world, after 10 years you're like, ah, fuck it, I'll tell you what happened.

I'd like to think that Stanley said that because that's exactly what the movie doesn't mean, what Stanley never intended, and he's throwing the world off.

I see. I love that.

So he can he can keep the truth a little more contained.

You think he's playing a little chess with us?

Maybe. Oh, he was a great chess player. Matter of fact, you know, the best gift I ever gave Stanley for his birthday was the first computer chess game. Ooh. 'Cause Stanley— I played chess and Stanley played chess. I would never play with Stanley because I could only make 4 moves and he'd mate me, checkmate me. But when I found out that in the '80s they had made a little tabletop electric computer chess game, Um, I sent it to Stanley, and Stanley called me back a week later, and he said, uh, couldn't you have sent me a smarter one?

That's a real careful what you wish for scenario, though, given what happens in the movie.

Sent me a smarter chess— electronic chess game because you kept beating it.

The playoffs are here, and you can predict all the action all the way to the finals with FanDuel Predicts. All you have to do is sign up up, get your $25 bonus, predict the spread, the total points, even the game-winning moments that make the playoffs from opening tip to the final buzzer. Stay locked in with every pass, every play, every moment that moves us closer to crowning a champion. Sign up now for your $25 bonus on FanDuel Predicts, offered by FanDuel Prediction Markets LLC, a registered futures Commission merchant. 18+ bonus is non-withdrawable, expires 7 days after receipt. Trading derivatives involve significant risk and may not be suitable for all investors. Manage your activity with our consumer protection tools. Restrictions apply. See terms at fanduel.com/predict/bonus-offer-terms. Let me ask you about the casting quick, because this movie does not have anyone who was a star at the time or became a major star. Which is a little— I think if they're making this movie now, they're probably like, "You gotta figure out if Gosling can do it," or whatever. Kubrick didn't want big-name stars. He wanted, like, anonymous faces, anonymous expressions. That's right. And yet, like, if Steve McQueen is in this movie, does it feel different, or does he take you out of it?

It would take me out of it if Steve McQueen were in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Yeah. Because I would have too much baggage to unpack from all the movies I've seen. Right. You know, from basically from, you know, The Blob to Bullet, which came out that year.

So he's bringing the Steve McQueen IMDb baggage with him.

Yeah, I thought it was really smart to hire Gary Lockwood and Keir Dullea. Keir, of course, was brilliant in Frank and Eleanor Perry's David and Lisa. And he had a wonderful career. And Gary Lockwood did some great stuff too. I really admired both of them. But they were more like— They were like astronauts who were a little more there was more anonymity in casting them. And nobody had— William Sylvester was an American living in England working on stage, and nobody had seen him in American movies. And, um—

'Cause you went both ways with this. 'Cause, like, in Raiders, everyone knew who Harrison Ford was. You could have gone somebody more anonymous. But in E.T., it's basically people I didn't have a history with. So, like, I'd never seen Henry Thomas. I'd never seen— D.Wallace I'd seen because she'd been in a couple things. But you know what I mean? Like, you could have put big stars in that and you didn't.

No, not really. I couldn't have put big stars in E.T. because there were no— I mean, Drew Barrymore became a big star about 2 months after E.T. opened. And Henry did— had a great career. Henry Thomas. Dee's great. She's a wonderful actor. I love her. But I wanted to do it I wanted the same kind of anonymity, you know? I wanted the movie to be known, and I wanted them to be the characters that would become known. Look, I never thought E.T. would work. I thought E.T. was gonna be— I couldn't believe that they gave me $10 million to make the movie because I didn't think it would make any money back. Really? I thought it was going to be— the parents were gonna have to, you know, drop their kids off and say, "You should go see E.T. It's healthy. It's good for you." I didn't know it was gonna take off the way it did. I had no idea. Idea.

Um, I've also done E.T. on the show.

Have you really?

Oh, we've done— you're the leader in, in directors. You've really— we've done 9 Spielberg movies. Yeah, you're the, you're the leader in the clubhouse.

I love the Close Encounters one.

Oh, thank you.

That was a great one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're the, uh—

you guys got it.

We, well, we still have—

you've got it. That's nice, that's nice to hear.

Yeah, that is nice too. Yeah, we still have some left in your catalog.

Well, E.T.

and, and this film too, like the star of of the films E.T. and HAL 9000.

And Jaws is the star of Jaws. And Roy Scheider was the star. He had done French Connection and stuff. And Richard had done American Graffiti. And Richard had done The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which was a huge critical hit. And Robert Shaw had done A Man for All Seasons, and he was well known. He had done The Sting before. Big, big hit movie. Won the Oscar for Best Picture. But it was about 3 anonymous guys that divested themselves of who they were to all of us publicly and became those characters. I mean, that's the whole thing about good actors. Maybe even Steve McQueen, I thought was a really good actor. I knew Steve pretty well. Maybe Steve could have done 2001. I mean, a good actor is supposed to become an anonymous character based on what the writer and the director have offered us. And so, I'm gonna take that back. I'm gonna back— I'm gonna kind of back that up a little bit by saying—

I'll say I talked you into it.

You did.

You love this.

You can use movie stars in a film, and if the movie is compelling enough, you forget. Forget the filmography of the character in the film.

The only reason I thought of him was he was— and we've talked about this. This is a big Tarantino point about how we don't have enough McQueens now, people that didn't really need dialog but just seemed like stars. They just— you could read their faces and something about them.

You're like, "Oh, that guy's a movie star." Well, also, for such a film with so little dialog, you know, that you need somebody. On the other hand, though, like, he obviously is encouraging these actors to kind of kind of drain some of their inherent charisma, and McQueen could so effortlessly communicate charisma. So maybe that isn't what he— yeah, maybe that's not one of the aspects.

Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna go back to your point. You're right, 2001: A Space Odyssey. But maybe Hackman could have done it.

I don't know.

Yeah, Hackman could have done it. Yeah. So he was a, he was a legendary million takes guy. Who was that?

Kubrick. Yes.

Um, what's— where are you in 'Cause we have, like, you always hear stories about Clint Eastwood's like, "Two takes, let's move on to the thing." Where are you in that scale?

I'm 6 to 8. Probably 6 to 8 takes.

What are you trying to accomplish in the 6 to 8? What are you trying to find out from the actors?

Well, I'm— It varies 'cause the number of takes I make depends on whether I feel that it is all the actors are going to be able to contribute Or is it all I want or need the actors to contribute? I have to make that determination on every take. So I've done 30 takes before. I've done 30 takes with certain actors. But I've also done 2 takes with certain actors. Right. It all depends. Anthony Hopkins on Amistad came over to me before we shot the movie, and he said, "I'm gonna give you a little insight into how I work." "Take 1, I'm just getting a feeling of— about how it's sounding and how it's feeling to me. Take 2, I'm gonna nail it. Take 3, you can use parts of it, but after take 3, you're not gonna want to use any of those takes." And he told me ahead of time that he's good for about 3. Take 2.

Take 2, guy.

Take 2, Tony.

Yeah. And we did a couple more takes than that. Sometimes we did 5, 6 takes, But Tony is one of the most intuitive actors, and his choices are almost gifts. I don't know where it comes from, but when he makes a choice and he finds a moment, the moment is not a moment that he has thought about a lot. It's a moment that comes to him. It's intuitive. It's right. It fits the shoes of the character he's walking in. And then, And that's it. He's giving you his best shot.

I love shit like this. Our favorite one ever is Nicholson in A Few Good Men when they did all the Colonel Jessup courtroom scenes and he was done and they're like, all right, now you can go. We can use a stand-in. We're going to get the other one. He's like, no, no, I'm going to stay. I'm going to just keep doing this over and over again. And they're like, really? He's like, yeah, no, I love it.

He loves to act.

Also, it's fun. You get actors that have done 300, 400 performances on stage, they want to do a lot of takes. Right. You know, because every night they bring something else to the theater. They bring something else to the character. They find other ways of expressing things that don't throw the other characters off, that aren't gonna sabotage the company because they suddenly come up with a better idea than the playwright. They're not gonna do that. Or some of them. Most of them are not gonna do that. But I find that if an actor who's had a lot of stage experience really desires more takes. And I'm fine. And if an actor comes to me and says, "I want—" When I worked with Leo, Leo likes to watch his own takes. When I did Catch Me If You Can with DiCaprio, he likes to go to the monitor after every take and look at the take back. And it gives him ideas. And he says, "Let me have one more. Let me have one more." So I might do 9, 10, 11 takes because Leo feels he hasn't explored it sufficiently. So I will wait for Leo to tell me when he thinks he's got it.

I'm not gonna be a big overseer, you know, as a director, and say, "No, I think it was great on take 4. We're moving on." If I got a schedule problem, if I'm losing the light and we're racing the light, yeah, I'm gonna be a little more cut. "Come on. I hope you felt that enough because we're not doing it again." We can't do it again. But short of that, I'm gonna let an actor tell me when they think they've given me their best take.

They're like, "Leo grinds tape. Who knew?" Not surprising. Grinding tape like a quarterback. He's like Patrick Mahomes. And other people are just like, "Whatever, Stephen. I trust you.

You're one of the greatest directors ever." Well, sometimes I have to, especially in this later era of my career, I've got to sometimes go to an actor and say, "You know, if you want another take, you can ask me for another take." Just because I'm expressing joy that I love what you just did, it doesn't mean that there's something I haven't seen yet that you know you haven't given yet. So if you— So I have to go to the actors and say, "Don't be intimidated, you know, because I made E.T. Tell me that you, um, and, you know, and your childhood was informed by it. Tell me if you think you have more to give.

Don't take 'Cut, print' as an answer." I don't know if our guy Stanley was doing that.

Seemed like he had a different manner. Yeah. In terms of approaching actors.

Uh, making the movie, we mentioned,, and he spent 5 years developing it, got involved with Arthur C. Clarke, kept doing it. And I'll say, I'll save people. There's a lot of great research on this. There's been documentaries, multiple books. Yes. Um, but he— the most interesting thing of all that stuff, the Cliff Notes, Clarke had the book ready to go, and he's like, you can't do it until the movie comes out. And he's like paying him on the side because he was banking on the money from the book. So no, no, no, you got to wait. You got to wait until the movie comes out. And and movie came out, releases the book. But that's, that's a lot of trust you got to do. So they worked on the script together and, um, seemed a little tumultuous in the research, like that between them. Yeah, like working on the script and stuff. I don't know if it was perfect, but it got to where it needed to get to.

I don't know anything about their working relationship, um, but they, they were, they were both, uh, they were not hive minds. They were not hive-minded. They single-minded visionaries who I'm sure had alternative points of view and common points of view, uh, but whatever the magic was between Clarke and Kubrick, man, we're so grateful to both of them.

Have you ever had somebody like that, that you were just like partners on this thing, where you had to sketch out this whole thing and spending, you know, months and months? Absolutely.

I, I have. I, I, I, I have I have a deep partnership with Tony Kushner, and I have an equally deep partnership with David Koepp. And it has been just— I'm just lucky that they're on this planet to tell stories with me.

Can you talk about the relationship that you have with a writer like that who you return to over and over again? And what happens when they have an idea that you don't like?

Or how do you come to a common ground? Well, if there's an— It depends. I mean, both— they're two completely different people, number one. Tony Kushner is a Tony Award-winning, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and an Academy— multiple Academy Award-nominated screenwriter. And David Koepp is one of the most commercial screenwriters in Hollywood history. Yeah. They both have different ways of working, which I really love. And I've gotta be the flexible one here. I have to be the chameleon that doesn't— I'm not asking them to conform to the way I work. I will conform to what makes them great writers. And so, I have to listen more than I talk sometimes. But it's just— I've always said, look, I've always said that Shakespeare said it first, he said it best, Yes. He said, "The play is the thing." And without a screenplay, I'm nothing. Um, um, I'll just take my iPhone and take a lot of really nice still photographs. But without a screenplay, I absolutely am lost. And so, for me, the writer is the most important person in my life. Interesting.

This is a funny one too, though, because you and Kubrick are somewhat alike in this way. All of his movies are based on something. He's always, he was always on the hunt. It sounds like for material for something that could make for a good story, but then you have to shape the story. In this case, he approaches Clark and he has the original idea, but the Clark story, the Sentinel, is a huge inspiration for the idea that he has. And so they take parts of a preexisting story and then they fold it into one section of this smaller movie. It's this really unique version of story synthesis. That, again, like, I was trying to find some other examples of a movie like this. There's just not any other movies like this.

Yeah, there aren't. There aren't. Can you answer me this? Did Arthur Clarke's book Rendezvous with Rama happen before—

I think it follows. —2001, or did it follow?

I think it's '73. Okay. Because that had similar themes. Yeah. So when they were working on this, Kubrick wrote to Clarke's agent about his workload because they weren't getting along. And he said, I get up at 7:00 AM, hit the studio about 8:15, begin a day that generally ends around 8:30 PM. I go home, say goodnight to the children, have dinner, work on the novel, and go to bed around midnight. I do this 7 days a week.

Who said that? When?

Kubrick. That's like me prepping for pods. Yeah, like you watching the entire Kubrick catalog to get ready. Oh my God. Um, he really sounded, uh, demanding and was just— that was it. He's working on something. That's what he's doing. Interesting, though. Polanski asked him if he'd ever taken drugs, and Stanley said, I never had and I never will. Not because he had a problem getting high, but because he didn't know the source of his creative gift and didn't want to fuck with it.

Oh, I love that. I love that he acknowledges that he had a creative gift. Yeah. I mean, a lot of filmmakers are shy about even confessing that they have any gift at all. Those who have been really successful, I I don't know anybody in my circle— I mean, I paint models with directors at Guillermo del Toro's house every weekend, and not once during those model painting and making sessions has anybody referred to themselves as gifted.

Right? Well, it's interesting that he knew he had something and probably didn't want to veer from it, both in the structure of his day-to-day life Maybe he drank some wine. I don't know. I don't know.

We talk about— I mean, we talk about— We certainly talk about stuff we've done and how much fun it is to make movies and cook up stuff that never existed 5 seconds ago, and suddenly you get an idea. Where did that idea come from? Well, it came from being born and living and experiencing everything, and that's where your ideas come from. But we never look at each other like we're— I think Guillermo del Toro is a genius, But Guillermo will never refer to him that way, nor will I ever say to Guillermo, "You're a genius," because that's— it's gonna make all of us blush. I mean, that's something that we don't talk about. We don't think of ourselves, any of us, that way. We think of ourselves as people that love doing what we do, but it's the hardest thing we've ever done. There is nothing harder I can imagine, except raising children, than in my profession. There's nothing harder than directing a movie.

I'm the opposite. I tell Sean I'm a genius all the time.

That's actually true. Yes. I've been working on that.

For almost 15 years. So they do the premiere for this movie and it goes badly. And Kubrick's wife said Stanley was tearing himself to shreds. He's saying, oh my God, they really hated it. He was heartbroken. He couldn't sleep, couldn't speak, couldn't do anything, was shattered, felt terrible. And then what we talked about, the young people started coming out. Did you ever have an experience like that when you released the movie and you were like, oh my God, they hated it, and just went into a spiral?

Um, no, I've never gone into a spiral. Usually when I have a movie that opens, I go away somewhere where nobody can find me and where I can't read anything. I try to go away. I go because it's my excuse for taking a vacation. The film gets released, and then I go somewhere. And it's been really therapeutic, and it's good. And I know if something's not going well. Of course, I know when something's— I didn't before the internet. It was harder to find out before the internet. You had to have somebody call you. And the person that calls you and says, "Your film's a bomb," is not a person you're gonna want to have dinner with the next week. But now, if your film is a huge success, or is a middling success, or isn't a success at all, it gets to you. It just osmosis through the current social state of the art that we're all enveloped in. But I still can get away, and so I don't have to. To stress out.

This is a little bit of a confusing one with 2001 because critically it's very split and there are some extremely sharp-elbowed, kind of nasty reviews about the film.

Yeah, Pauline Kael, not a fan.

Very tough reviews. And then there's some that are very laudatory right out of the gate. Yes. And then the movie, it seems like in the first week it does okay business. Yes. It's not a bomb, but it just does okay. And then it seems like you said, like, it seemed like people caught on.

One week in. Something else really helped that movie catch on. The marketing department at MGM— and I want to give Stanley credit for this, but sadly, I don't think Stanley actually came up with this slogan. But the marketing department at MGM put on all the posters and all the billboards, "2001: A Space Odyssey, the ultimate trip." Mm. And appeal to the psychedelic generation.

Did he anticipate, though, that this was going to be a drug trip movie when he was making it?

I asked him that question, and he actually said he doesn't think the movie is a drug trip movie. And he sort of is— I'm not saying he's in denial of that because I don't really know, you know, if that's the reason it eventually did so well and people saw it. I think it's— I think drugs notwithstanding, the film itself is a drug. You don't need to smoke marijuana to get off on 2001: A Space Odyssey. And like me, who's never taken drugs, I went to that movie, and that was a drug. And to this day, it continues to be something that every year I need a little bit of a 2001 fix in me.

Well, he wins his only Oscar that he won for a movie, which was visual effects. Nominated for director, screenplay, art direction, Yes. Do you remember who wins that year for Best Picture? Uh, in '68? Yeah. No. Oliver! with an exclamation point. Oh, Oliver! Oliver!

Yes, Oliver. You mean we did it in the '60s?

We put exclamation points.

Oh my goodness, Oliver! Of course, that was Carol Reed's first Oscar.

Yeah, yeah. So painful one for me. One of my favorite directors ever.

But it's one of my favorite musicals ever. Is it? It's one of my favorite musicals. I love that.

I'm not a fan of— don't own that one.

No, I don't. I can tell you another podcast. I'll tell you why I love that movie, why I love the choreography, especially by Ona White in that movie. I can talk to you about that later.

$10 million budget for 2001. Yeah, double what they gave him. I think he jacked it up. They gave him like $4.5. He's like, I have about $10. Did you ever jack it up higher than that on a movie?

Well, Jaws was budgeted for 3.5 million and it cost 10 because it went over schedule 100 days. They were okay with that trade. Well, no, they weren't okay with that. Eventually they were okay with that the second day of release, but not until they got you back by making 7 sequels.

Are we, are we done with Jaws sequels?

How many have we had? 4? I think we've had 3, right? Was it 4 or 3?

3 sequels. Yeah, yeah. Jaws 2 was solid. It wasn't bad. Second biggest movie in 1968.

What, 2001? Yeah, that was great.

We mentioned Pauline Kael said it was the biggest amateur movie of them all, and there's only 1 hour's worth of a good movie here. LA Times guy loved it. Roger Ebert, 4 stars. We always do a Roger Ebert review when we do the rewatchables. Great. Yeah. The film creates its effects essentially out of visuals and music. It's meditative, does not cater us, wants to inspire us, enlarge us. Goes on. He, he loved it. Um, we're gonna do some categories. Okay, hold on, buckle up.

You can see, but he has photographic recall of the sequences. He's going to be fine in this. This is not going to be a problem.

I'm going to give you some choices for most rewatchable. All right, most rewatchable This is the premise of the podcast. You're hopping into a movie and it's like, oh, shit, this scene's coming. I got to—

this is 2001. Yeah. The most rewatchable scene in 2001.

I'm going to give you some choices. Dawn of Man, the beginning with the apes leading onto the leopard, which— holy shit, the leopard scene. We didn't even talk about that yet. These are people in monkey costumes and they're just planning a play-acting leopard jumping out. And this is something that happened. Yeah, was that— I, I just couldn't believe it. I thought— I don't know how I thought they did this, but they did it with a real leopard and a guy in a gorilla suit. Yeah, well, and Kubrick was like, I hope this works. I hope the guy in the gorilla suit got, uh, got, uh, got a stunt adjustment. Unbelievable. Um, so we got that, which is a great choice because it just jolts you awake in the movie. Uh, we get the ape figuring out that bones could be a weapon leading into the big fight with the two gangs. We get Floyd and the astronauts checking out the buried artifact. Big sit-down with the Russians, which is our second summit of two rival gangs. Jogging scene into the eating scene into the Hal interview.

Hal does the lip reading thing. Yeah, that's my favorite scene in the movie. Okay, explain. My favorite scene in the movie is where they— for one thing, these guys should have known that HAL 9000 could read lips. I mean, they should have known that. After all, you know, he holds up a sketch he made, and he says, "That's a very good rendering, Dave." So he already comments about Dave Bowman's artwork. Dave's gotta realize that he's got tremendous visual acuity. So when they rotated the pod, you know, rotate pod, rotate pod, please, Hal. Eh, rotates around. The best moment in that movie, though, is cutting to Hal's eye. The eye that Peter Jackson, I understand, has in his archive. Oh, what? Yeah, I hear that Peter Jackson has the prop eye.

That foretells a response to one of the categories. Oh my God.

Yeah. And I think that's my favorite scene of the movie because I didn't see it coming. I must say, like Bowman and Poole, I did not see that coming.

It's funny that they didn't use the NFL coaches calling in the plays.

Covering the mouth. Yeah, yeah.

Holding the clipboard against their mouth, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That was their big mistake. That's Bowman's play sheet. What was he— he forgot what they were supposed to be running there. What formation were they supposed to be using? That's such a great moment of trusting the audience to understand what is happening. It's not overexplained what's transpiring, but because of the way he shoots the astronauts and then cuts cut and does that cut that you're describing, we get it. We get it in a very clear way.

But here's what also happens. He strategically places that scene just before the intermission. So you go black and it says intermission on the screen.

For maximum impact. Hal attacks Poole as he's trying to fix the pod. Dave tries to disconnect Hal.

Just, what do you think you're doing, Dave? That's my other favorite scene. Stop, Dave. I'm afraid. No, I love that.

"Da-zy, da-zy." We get the Stargate approach, which is, I think, in the running for the "Let's get stoned and watch this later" greatest scenes of all time, I'm sure.

That's been— Yeah, that's— The reason I go for the— I love— Because I love Cal so much as a character, my favorite moment in the movie is a character moment. But my favorite visual effect in the film is the slit scanner they used that Doug Trumbull created with Stanley Kubrick. Who conceived this amazing idea to do this Stargate effect.

It's out of control. And then the ending—

It's out of control even now.

Yeah. Then the ending, Bohma goes through the stages of life, the music, all that stuff. What do you have, Sean? Uh, I think— For your most rewatchable.

I think one that we didn't mention is when they land on Clavius and are witnessing the monolith and that, like, selfie moment that they're taking. And that was great. Right before that sonic node hits. You know, that's such a brace yourself moment. It's— the film is so quiet at so many times and it, it, it jostles you. Yes. So abruptly. Um, and I always like to watch that scene because he, at a certain point, he puts the camera on the astronaut's shoulders and it turns into a horror movie. It's before Hal even shows up in the movie. It's true. But the movie gets very scary intense and you described it as like a Hitchcockian thriller. Like it is so— you are waiting to find out what's going to happen. Yes. And then we get this sonic hit and then it just cuts into the future and we don't know what's happening.

No, that's the audacity. That's the other— that's his conceptual audacity, Stanley Kubrick's. You go from the high-pitched emission of a sound that makes everyone hold their space helmets because it's going right through their suits into their ears, and you go right from that, which is hurting the audience's ears, at least in the Pantages Theater it was, with that— the monaural or the stereo sound system they had in those days. It hurt the ears. And then it goes into complete silence. And then suddenly it's quiet. And you see, you know, Jupiter Mission 18 months later. And then this huge ship comes in, which I think inspired George to do the first shot of Star Wars with that huge Imperial destroyer coming over the top of the screen.

I think I like when he disconnects, tries to disconnect HAL. I think it's my favorite part. But I will say, in the 4K era, I haven't seen this movie in a theater because it was— but in the 4K, just when they're landing on the, uh, on the space station. Yeah, the detail of everything is amazing. Like, you can see every— everything they crevice, every— I just don't understand how they did it.

I don't either. Do you remember the scene where the shuttle that takes, that takes from, you know, Heywood Floyd to Clavius, the shuttle, when it lands, it's on some kind of a huge, almost like a mono— it's like an elevator. It's like an elevator. And it starts coming down. Now you see what it looks like. And if you look very carefully, for me, it looks like an Egyptian sculpture of an Egyptian head with the two eyes, which are the windows, the red window lights. But the windows are spaced. Equally apart, and there's a flat nose in the center, and it looks like an Egyptian head. And, and, uh, and there's something, just something about the, the way you could anthropomorphize on what all of these designs remind us of in the, of, of the ships and the shuttles they were using.

And all the, the, the opening Dawn of Man sequence and all the space stuff, they're meant to be these kind of reflections of each other, of like ancient history and evolution of man. And the original monolith was a tetrahedron. It was more of a pyramid. It was not this kind of large rectangular shape. It was originally that way. Yeah. And so this idea of the development in Egyptian societies and then the, you know, what, what that meant to technology and evolution as people, like all of this stuff kind of mixing together in the story and, and that whether that's intentional or not, you feel that because you're thinking about all this stuff as you're watching the movie.

When I asked Stanley about about what I thought was the Egyptian sculpture coming down, Stanley looked at me. Actually, he didn't look at me. We were on the phone. And he said, "Um, is that what you think it looks like to you?" Wow! Stanley sometimes answered questions with questions. He was really interesting about that. We had a kind of real interesting rapport. Sean does that. Yeah, we had it. You both, this is how you guys are together. Oh, is that so, Bill?

Yeah, yeah. "What do you mean, Bill?" Uh, what's the most 1968 thing about this movie? You mentioned Pan Am and the, and the grip shoes, uh, and Howard Johnson's, which you say is still around. I'm not positive. I know they've—

it might be in Middle America, maybe, maybe somewhere on the East Coast. Yeah, or in Ohio or Indiana, possibly.

What was the other one that doesn't exist anymore? There's— well, Pan American doesn't exist anymore. Um, my two would be the intermission, which just doesn't happen anymore, and then just starting a movie with 3 minutes of a black screen and weird music. Yeah, nobody would do that.

And it doesn't say overture. It doesn't— no, it doesn't present that we're all going to sit here quietly. It just starts, right?

Right. It's such like a— it's such like a 1960s, '70s choice.

I just don't ever think that would happen because there were these big roadshow epics that made, you know, arguably one of the greatest movies ever made, Lawrence of Arabia, you You know, Ben-Hur followed all that roadshow. You started out with an overture, and then the titles come on. Doctor Zhivago starts out with an overture in a dark theater. The titles go out. West Side Story starts with an overture, and then the titles come on. And one film after the other, you know, that said, "This is worth— We're gonna give you more bang for your buck." You're paying more money to see these movies, than you do for— in a double bill movie house. Yeah. This is a single bill experience. It's one night, like going to a play. You're gonna see a movie. It's gonna be longer than 2 hours. And there's gonna be a prolog of music. There's going to be a long main title sequence. There's going to be an intermission. And we're gonna pipe you out with a medley of themes as you get up and the lights come out up and you leave the theater. Simpler times. It's wonderful. But, but, but that's called— that's called exhibition.

Yeah, that's called presentational style, right? That's stylish. I miss that. What was your 1968 most—

1968? I have a couple.

I mean, Steven, just the story that he told at the very beginning, the idea of a movie becoming a phenomenon because people are smoking marijuana in a movie theater, like, that just could not— that's, that's so perfectly 1968. Sure. Um, I mean, the idea that 2001 is a long ways away, uh, is very 1968. You know, we are approaching almost double the time. That's the other thing Stanley got wrong, right? We're not even close to that technology. Close in some cases. Um, the one thing that really strikes me is, so it's a movie made entirely without digital effects in which handmade tools are used to explore a film about man discovering the utility and danger of those tools. There's something fascinating because we don't— we just literally don't make movies this way anymore. There are no films of this scale and size that would be made entirely by hand. And the fact that this film— it— not every film from 1968 still looks this good. If you look at the ape costumes in this movie versus the ape costumes in Planet of the Apes, they're not close. One looks like it's aged badly, the other looks really good.

Yeah, but the space effects and the ship effects and the models in this movie, and those hand-painted stars that you talked about, they look as good as any movie that is out right now. It's amazing.

And, you know, they had a whole department that did nothing but put black paint White Stars because when the Jupiter mission ship passes and starts blocking out stars, it's done in two different passes. They shoot the stars first with a camera moving basically to allow the mothership, let's say, to come into the frame. Kubrick had an entire department of of young people that did nothing but blot out the stars with black paint to make it— to make it look like it was being occluded— occluded by the ship that's entering frame. Crazy. I mean, it's a handmade movie, guys. It's a handmade film. And the last handmade film I saw was Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio.

Yes, that's stop-motion animation. Is that the last vestige of the handmade movie?

Yeah, even when we were working with Aardman at DreamWorks, uh, releasing Aardman's The last couple movies they made were— they looked like they were done with armatures and stop motion, but the last couple were done on the computer.

Did you have a most 1968 thing about this movie?

Uh, the only— no, the only 1968 thing about this movie was the— was the, uh, how can I say this? I'm trying to find the right word. Um, 2001 had nothing to do with 1968. There was no 1968 when you're watching 2001. Right, true. The whole year went away. Huh. Right. Whatever the year stood for, whatever was relevant about that year, for 2.5 hours is irrelevant while you're watching, or 139 minutes. I think I saw the 161-minute version. I'm not sure I did. I did, but I think I saw in the first week the longer version. Yeah, 'cause he ended up cutting out stuff. Before he cut it to 1:39. Right. But 1968 was completely obliterated by 2001.

We haven't mentioned that either, though, that this is a very tumultuous time in America.

Number one tumultuous. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

A very violent year and a very complicated— Vietnam is raging.

Yeah.

RFK, Martin Luther King. And this is like, it's kind of a retreat from that, but also kind of that call to the self and to think about who you are in the world.

And I think Stanley— Look, Stanley knew history, and he watched the news. He knew. He was really up on every current event, which also undermines the fact that people think he was a recluse.

You know why Sean hates the year 2001? Why? Because it was the year Tom Brady got the Patriots starting job and ended up winning 6 Super Bowls for the Patriots.

I do hate that. Sean's a Jets fan. Yeah, I do hate that.

Oh, so you're not a Patriot fan? Not a Patriots fan.

I know I'm a New Yorker. I'm sadly a Jets fan.

Um, our next category— don't judge us, but we love the movie Boogie Nights. Um, it's the Floyd Gondoli Butter in My Ass and Lollipops in My Mouth Award for something I just enjoy, something about this movie. We didn't give this one to you. Sean and I are gonna do ours. Here's, here's mine. According to his brother-in-law, Kubrick was adamant that the trims that he made, the 19 minutes, would never be seen. And he burned all the negatives afterwards. And this is like a famous thing, which I guess I didn't fully know about, that he would just get rid of everything because he was so, so horrified that anybody would take anything from a movie. He burned all the models. He burned all the models in the movie. He makes the movie and then destroys all the other pieces of it so it can never come back. This is like me deleting sports tweets.

This is crazy. Well, what he's doing is He's striking the sets. Right. Yeah. Do you—

you didn't— do you care about what happens to stuff from your movie after the movie?

I save everything. I mean, I have a huge, huge collection of props from all of my films. That's really smart.

I save everything. I don't know if you've noticed what's happened in that world. There's the whole prop auction world.

But I save everything not to give it to Heritage Foundation to sell. I save everything in an archive. And I—

So, could you have, like, a little mini Hall of Fame at this point?

No, but if the Academy Museum needs anything that I've got, anything in my collection— Joe West was on display right now. Jaws is on display right now at the Academy Museum.

What's the single greatest thing you have from one of your movies?

The single greatest thing, I think— well, it's not one of my movies. The single greatest thing I possess in terms of Hollywood icons is I've got Rosebud, the sled from Wells's movie. I saw it. You saw it? I saw it. You did see it?

I saw it in my office. I had a heart palpitation.

Oh, my God. Well, I moved to New York. As of January 1st, we became residents of New York State, and I've moved everything to New York City, so that lives with me in New York.

Oh, I saw it at just the last minute then, I guess.

Yeah, you did. Last minute. What did you have for Floyd?

I just love when a movie refuses to explain itself. That there is— we're in a time of ultimate lore where we have to— it's not just that there are wider worlds that are explained and there's rationale for character choices. But a character's specific trauma tends to explore and explain the reason for the movie's existence. This movie is completely disinterested in that. And I, I wish that we had more, like, the fact that this movie endures and lets us spend 2 hours sitting in a room trying to figure out what we think it's about, how it makes us feel. Um, that's just my, that's one of my favorite things about movies. Um, and this is this maybe the single, like, the signature example of— well, what do you think at the end of the movie?

It's the opposite of sports, right? Sports, we have wins and losses, and we could argue about stuff like who is the MVP of stuff like that. This movie, you could come away— like, my son's getting into movies, and he's watched this 4 times. He loves this movie. And we've had, like, real talks about, what do you think at the end? And just these variables to it that I don't which I don't feel like happens as much with movies anymore. You almost have to go backwards.

This movie has so much room for every single person who sees this movie to personally put their imprimatur onto it. Mm-hmm. It allows— Stanley left so much room, just like interpretive impressionistic art, even expressionist art. He left so much room for us to draw our own conclusions and make ourselves a part of his vision.

But then he said, "Oh, you think I'm done doing this? Here's The Shining." That's right. And it all started over again, didn't it? I mean, Room 237, an entire documentary about how to interpret The Shining. That's absolutely right. I'm not even sure. What's your interpretation of The Shining?

Do you have one? Of The Shining? Well, I recreated some of The Shining in Ready Player One. I love that movie. It took me a while to love it. I didn't love it when I first saw it.

Do you believe in the—

I'll tell you a story about Stanley. I haven't told the story very often publicly. I'll tell you a story about Stanley. When I saw the movie, it came out, I had finished Raiders, and I was in England, and I went out to eat with Stanley. And he wanted to know what I thought of The Shining. And because Stanley is— He's not brutally honest. He's got— He's really careful about his honesty, but he's honest. He'll tell you if he doesn't like something, and he'll tell you why it didn't work for him. And I said to Stanley, he said, "Did you like The Shining?" I said, "Yeah, I really liked it a lot." And he stopped me right there. He says, "No, you didn't." I said, "Why?" He says, "Because I can tell you didn't like it a lot." You might have liked it, but you didn't like it a lot. What did you really think of The Shining? And I told him that there were certain things that confused me because I was in love with the book. I loved when the heaters, the generators blew up. I mean, I loved the topiary animals coming to life.

Right. You know, there's a lot of things in the book I loved. And, but I just said, And he said, "Is there anything that you— Tell me other things that you didn't like. You didn't like it because I didn't include those things that I cut out of the book?" And I said, "Danny, I liked the movie. I'm not saying I didn't like it. But would I have liked it more had Jack Torrance had an encounter with those topiary animals that were reanimated?" Yeah, that would've been a fun set piece. That would've been fun. And Stanley said, "What'd you think of Jack?" And of course, I love Jack Nicholson. He's one of my favorite actors of all time. Always will be. But I said, "But I thought Jack was kind of big. He was big. His character was big. You know, he was doing big, big things." And Stanley said, "Okay, so you didn't love Jack." I said, "No, I'm not saying I didn't love Jack. I'm just saying that Jack was— I thought you let him have his head, so to speak." And he went running, not for the barn. He went running for the hills.

He really expressed himself. It was very kabuki. And Stanley laughed, and he said, okay, I want you to, without thinking, name your top 10 favorite actors of all time. Go. And I reeled off 10 names. And the second I got to the last name, he said, where's Cagney? I said, what's that? He says, where's Cagney on your list? If James Cagney isn't at the top of your list, you're not going to understand what Jack and I did with his character. You're not going to get it if you did not put Cagney at the top of your top 10 list. End of conversation. That was it. Jesus. James Cagney.

That's great. But do you see the wisdom of that?

Yeah, of course. I mean, that's brilliant. But were you listing more naturalistic leading men?

I don't even remember the names I said because he had me on the spot. I mean, he was— Look, Stanley is witty, and he's funny. The other thing that people don't give him credit for is he's got a devilish sense of humor, and he's a really funny guy. He's a great laugher. So, but he kind of pushes you in that kind of a way. So, when Stanley asked me a question, when he said, says jump, I don't say how high, you know?

Right. What's aged the best is the next category. What is it? What's aged the best? So we've talked about some of the stuff, but what do you think is the single thing that's aged the best from this movie? What is aged the best? Aging like a fine wine, like all these years later.

Wow. How 9000 has aged the best.

I think that's the correct answer. I agree. That's number one. This is like probably the easiest what's aged the best we We have—

there are hundreds of things in this movie though that—

oh yeah, I have a few. Go through a couple.

I mean, one, it established the sci-fi blockbuster as a Hollywood staple. Yep. Um, video phones, voice print identification, artificial intelligence, video tablets, zero gravity toilet, the growing concern or belief that alien life exists, relevant to your film. Um, the presence of brands everywhere. Also, I've thought of Minority Report when I was watching this as well, something you did in that movie. Um, the Kubrick— one thing that really sticks out to me is that foreboding and mysterious style that a movie without a narrative engine can still draw you in has aged very, very well. Um, and also, uh, famous people watching videos of themselves of when the astronauts are watching the news segment about them and the interview with them, which is such a social media thing right now. I thought that that was so cool. Clever. And him kind of seeing the future on that one in particular made me laugh.

You had a lot of what I had. I also would add a mysterious government cover-up of something unsettling. Mm-hmm. Sage Will. Uh, a movie that pulled off no dialog in the first 25 minutes or the last 23 minutes, just as an achievement, seems— I, I can't imagine anyone even trying to pull that off now.

Not since Fifi, right?

Space Oddity from David Bowie came from this movie. That's right. The solo astronaut space traveler movie gimmick, which then eventually became The Martian, Project Hail Mary, like just sending people out by themselves. Yes. I feel like this probably invented this. This story has aged the best. Uh, Keir Dullea said that, uh, during the New York premiere, all these people walked out, including Rock Hudson. Who left early and was heard to mutter, what is this bullshit? Will someone tell me what the hell this is all about? Rock cuts are just furious. Uh, The Who contacted Kubrick about directing Tommy after this movie, and he said no because he was doing A Clockwork Orange.

Brilliant of The Who to tap into Stanley for that.

Well, they were upset, so the next album they did, Who's Next, was them urinating on a I thought that was the best. Um, using classical music over a real score. And then we gotta talk about the moon stuff with— that ends up circling back in The Shining, but the way he films outer space, and then we go to the moon the next year, and then the conspiracy starts that he might have filmed the moon landing and it didn't happen. And then he has fun of it in The Shining, and Danny's wearing an Apollo 13 shirt. And all these people think he filmed the moon landing. What are your thoughts on that? What are your thoughts on this?

Well, because Stan Lee was always— He was great inside of a joke. He was terrific in creating, putting himself inside of any kind of what you could call a, you know, a conspiracy theory. And I think Stan Lee really enjoyed— I didn't— By the way, we never talked about this, Stan Lee and I.

So you think he loved that people thought this, and he's like, "I'm leaning into this." I think he loved that people thought that the moon landing was fake and Stan Lee directed the fake moon landing.

I think not everybody And never having spoken to him about this, knowing Stanley as little as I do, or as much as I do, I think he would love that.

There are sequences in the movie, the moon surface, Clavius landing, where you're like, "Huh, this is a little too close to the imagery that we saw one year later." Like, it definitely feels like it is inspired by— Now, he also, at least what I read, was kind of slavish to accuracy and details of what certain things would have been like too. And then we did obviously have a lot of footage of space at this point. So there, he's working with materials to replicate something that he thinks is real, but it is eerie if you look at the Aldrin and Armstrong photos, especially the high resolution photos that we see now that have been sort of like developed in the aftermath of the landing, how similar they are to a lot of stuff in the movie.

My hottest take is we did land on the moon, but they also had Stanley film or use space stuff Just because they couldn't have actually shown video and they did the hybrid model. Uh, Great Shot Gordo Award for the most cinematic shot, named after the great Gordon Willis. We call it Great Shot Gordo.

Oh, that's a good title for that.

Yeah, I've heard that before. I have the ape in slow motion learning how to use a weapon and how he filmed that would be my favorite. What do you have, Sean?

Um, I think the match cut that Steven described earlier is probably the number one answer. The one I like the most is is the floating pen. And I liked learning about how they did that shot.

He never really cracked it.

Well, I know how they did the shot, but you just took my answer.

Oh, okay.

Well, you're saying how they did it. That was what I was gonna say, with the floating pen, was one of my favorite shots. Uh, they simply put a very large piece of circular glass. And the pen, you can tell when the flight attendant takes the pen off, she doesn't take it out of midair. It pops into her finger because it's been stuck with a very light tape or a little light adhesive onto the glass. But the glass is slowly turning on a motor. It's not hand turning, 'cause that would be uneven. You could tell that it was a human turning it. So there's a little motor turning the glass.

Apparently, double-sided tape had just been invented, and they adhered it with double-sided tape.

But let me tell you my other favorite shot. What's— My other favorite shot is everything at the Donner Man involving, um, the, uh, first time ever front projection screen were used to make you think you were actually outside. You never saw a process shot, a process shot like that before in the history of movies. Stanley got this Scotch 3 sort of 3D a front projection material that when you put a projector right next to your camera lens, it can't be too far away from the center of your camera lens, but when you put another lens next to this lens and you project that image, probably taken with a Hasselblad or some very large negative strip of film, and those were still photographs, those weren't movies, those were still photographs of sunsets of different parts of the world. And when you project that against the screen, its return is so bright, you could almost, with a light meter, read an f/11 or an f/16 just from the return of that light. Wow. It made— and that's why when the tiger or the leopard—

The leopard, yeah.

You can see the front projector reflected in the leopard's eyes, that thing, that chatoyance that's inside the eyes of the leopard. That is actually— the leopard got in the way of the light.

You see that in the foreground.

Forest outside, when you take a light and you see animals running around the forest, well, that's, that's the only giveaway during the dawn of man that there was some technique being used to create those vivid backdrops.

It's such a happy accident because then it makes you wonder why there's something so animated about that leopard, you know. It's like they have something up on these apes, which are humans in ape costumes, right? Exactly.

So when I made— when I made Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I got —front projection. Doug Trumbull brought that front projection material into the studio. Yeah. And there's one— couple scenes when I have my actors against the front projection material, and Doug Trumbull and Richard Juricich and his whole special effects group had to generate the effects first and then project the effects. It was mainly lightning and clouds. And that was done in the cloud tank on Close Encounters. We had a cloud tank and it made very realistic clouds. And we put lights behind, inside the water, behind the actual paint that was being jetted with great force into the water, which creates cumulus clouds. And we had lights behind it. And when he photographed that in 65mm, we had a 65mm, 70mm projection onto our front projection material. And it made it look like we were really outside during a distant electrical storm.

I think Sean's gonna explode. I'm in heaven, yeah.

I think Sean just passed out.

But I learned so much from Doug. I mean, Doug Trumbull taught me so much about special effects, which, of course, he and Stanley had devised.

You have a Hall of Fame Great Shot Award winner, Brody. Mm. Got that trombone shot. Yeah, that was—

Which you can recreate at the Academy Museum right now.

You can. You can do that with your own iPhone.

Yeah, yeah.

When did you think of that one?

I, I thought of it— I didn't even realize it had been done before because I don't remember it being done before. But later, Brian De Palma was the one, because he knows Hitchcock better than anybody— Brian said, you stole that from Vertigo. I said, no, I didn't. He said, yeah, Hitchcock did that in Vertigo. That's easy. You start with, you start with 100mm lens, you put it on a dolly, and as you're, as you're dollying in, you're zooming back. Come on, that's been done before. But I didn't know that. I did it first in Sugarland Express. Yeah. Not as effectively. Yeah. When the snipers are getting the bead on the police car with my main principal characters approaching the house where supposedly the foster child is, Lou Jean Poplin's child is in the house. I did it the first time there. It didn't work as well. And then I was able to use it effectively in Jaws.

Mm. Wow. Quick ones. Sarah Connor Award for would modern technology ruin this movie? We've talked about it. I think one of the things that makes this movie great is they had to think outside the box. And they did, you know, so I— it wouldn't ruin it, but I think it would hurt the legacy of the greatness.

Today's technology. Yeah.

Well, you say if we had the same digital tools that we have today, I just feel like part of the legend of this movie is it's like watching somebody make a world-class meal based on like some leftovers and the leftover groceries, you know what I mean? The stuff we had back then. And now if you had all this AI stuff, yeah, it would be cool. But I, I don't know, would you have people dotting out stars? And no, you wouldn't. You wouldn't.

You'd lose that stuff if you, if you did it. If you used AI, you would, you would, uh, unemploy about 400 people, wouldn't have jobs, right?

Yeah. I, I, it's funny, you know, Project Hail Mary's come up a couple times, and they shot that movie as very practically, relatively speaking. They built sets and they shot on sets, which is not common for movies like this nowadays. And, um, I hope that there's like a little bit of a turn back to that because the practical stuff is what's like, the movie doesn't really make sense as an idea if it's just made with digital effects. Like that's part of why I think one of the reasons why it endures and feels so different from other things is that there's so much handmade. Same goes for Star Wars. I mean, when you watch A New Hope, the, everything is tactile. You feel like everything feels worn and lived in and real. And that stuff matters.

It's just— There's a lot of virtue in analog. When you look at TCM, as much as I watch it, you see a lot of virtue in, like, for instance, San Francisco. You see the San Francisco earthquake, the great quake, and you see it being done in analog, meaning they actually had to build big models, probably an inch and a half to the foot, foot and have them collapse. When you see the Clark Gable movie about the Chicago Fire, they had to burn several acres in order to make it appear as if it was all of Chicago burning after Mrs. O'Leary's cow knocked over the lantern. You know, I watch those films in the context of the age and era they were produced, but I appreciate them as much as watching effects in a modern day— in Avatar, let's say, today. I appreciate those handmade effects as much as I appreciate the genius digital motion capture work that Jim Cameron's done consistently with his Avatar films. Yeah.

Uh, Kid Cudi Pursuit of Happiness Award for best needle drop. That has to be the opening credits.

Oh, by far. You named it. That's it.

Unbelievable. Come on. Uh, the Sean Fantasy Award for Stealth Homage That Gives Every Movie Nerd a Criterion Orgasm.

Yes, this award is named after me. Yeah.

And, and what is he— what is the category? It's your category, but what is it again?

It's an homage that's in the film to a previous film or an aspect of film history.

So that only a psycho like Sean or you would, would notice.

There's a great one in this one.

Okay, let's hear it.

I, I will say that this movie might be number one for the inverse of of this award, which is people who have borrowed from this movie and that there are several— there are inspirations. There are— you've talked about some of them, some of them in your films. There are parodies up the wazoo of this movie. It's appeared on The Simpsons several times. Airplane! Magazine, Airplane! 2. But there's one in the film that has Kubrick winking at himself, which is that in Dr. Strangelove, Major Kong says, fire the explosive bolts. And in 2001, the entry "Hatch Sign" reads, "Caution: Explosive bolts." Oh!

Which is his own little— I never saw that. You know something?

Look at Sean teaching you about movies.

Hey, guys, I'm just saying that I'm having such a good time talking to both of you about this movie, but that one insight just makes this day for me.

That's great. That's great. Wow!

It really does. Best moment in the history of the category.

A Criterion orgasm right there. We just saw it.

I only have a couple. What's aged the worst? We mentioned the intermission, which nobody would do anymore, especially— it just would never happen. So this is a good one. They mentioned BBC 12, and there were only 2 BBC channels at the time.

He— little Kubrick joke. Kubrick joke, basically saying that England would surpass America with the number of channels in the future.

So I researched how many BBC channels there are now. How many are there now? We have BBC One, Two, Three, and Four. We have BBC News, BBC Parliament, CBBC, which is children's content, CBeebies, preschool programming, BBC Scotland, and BBC Alba, which is Scottish Gaelic language service. So only 11. So he was wrong. Sorry, Stanley. Missed it. There's still time. By one. One short. Sorry, buddy. You mentioned the sequel as a Wood Sage Award winner. First, couldn't agree more. I don't really have any other ones.

Well, just the idea that we could shut down AI, I think maybe under some— yeah, it's true, right now, you know.

Yeah, the whole thing about shutting things down, you know, when I made Ready Player One, I had a great time making— it was a hard movie to make, but I had a great time with the outcome of the movie in terms of what it said at the very end, you know. After all this stuff and they— and, and the kids win the Oasis, they, they, you know, they, they, they, they get the Easter egg and And they're happily escons, kissing in a chair. And the narrator comes over and he says, "And furthermore, they're going to close the Oasis 2 days a week so people can really connect with each other and get on with normal lives." That was the whole reason I think I made that movie, to basically say that sometimes we have weekends, weekends where we're supposed to to take our weekends off, but there are no weekends in terms of the amount of demand on our time and our lives. Right. And demanding that we make our identities known and shared with strangers. Why can't there be 1 or 2 days that we take off from that and get back down to having picnics outside somewhere?

That's a great idea. I wish I could just put my phone in the ocean, but I can't.

My kids are going to hate me for that so much when they hear this, when they listen to this podcast. Come on, can they hear that? Say, Dad, you are a square.

The Steven Seagal Award for most unbelievable anecdote from the actual film shoot. So they had a dead horse painted like a zebra for the shot of the leopard next to the zebra, and apparently the horse had been dead for a few days and was really starting to smell. That was the thing that happened. Okay, uh, casting Kubrick wanted Sterling Hayden for Floyd, and MGM vetoed it.

Yes, I know. I know.

Yeah. They wanted Henry Fonda, George C. Scott. Landed where it landed.

He— I read Holden as well.

Yeah, I read Holden also. Yeah, I read that too.

Which is— Holden would have been good for Floyd.

For Floyd. That's what I was thinking too.

But Holden would have been like Janet Leigh in Psycho. You know what I'm saying? He never reappears in the movie again, you know? And it would be sort of front-loading— A red herring. Doing a movie that really needs to, you know, start with a clean slate.

He looked at a bunch of actors, famous ones, for the Moonwatcher, the lead ape, including your guy Robert Shaw.

That would have been interesting. Now, where are these facts from?

This is why they're half-assed internet research. They're just on Wikipedia and random articles about the movie. So, okay, as the years go along, we never totally know what to believe, but we talk about them anyway.

Okay, so you, you'll, you, will you wink at me if it's, if, if it's urban legend? Just give me a little— we don't know.

You never know. What's the most— what's the biggest urban legend about, uh, Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T.? What's the one that's taken hold that you're like, how did— why is that a—

with the biggest, the biggest urban legends that, that is, that is occurring right now involves my movie coming out, uh, Disclosure Yeah. That somehow— June 12th. I have made this movie in concert with deep state factions that are hoping this movie is going to be— I remember there's a moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey where he talks about the grave dangers of social dislocation and that my movie is going to somehow make it easier for people to accept except the fact that we have been actively interacting in secret with extraterrestrials for 8 to 9 decades. Am I starting to believe that? Yes, I am. However, I am not— I made this movie independent of any influence except, you know, what I know and what I've been following for the last 7 decades.

So you're saying you didn't do it with them, but maybe they have a plan. Point.

Perhaps they do. So not working with deep state, but you see it. Okay. Uh, Kubrick rejected Martin Balsam for Hal. Thought he was a little too—

yeah, but he's a little New Yorkish. Yeah.

Um, I can see that. And then Pink Floyd was approached to perform music, and they turned it down due to other commitments. Yeah, that— wow, I found that hard to believe. Missed out on that one. Yeah, that, that's why— that's on the fringe of I'm not sure how true is, uh, Dianne Waiters Award, which— so that's like somebody who's not the star of the movie but comes in hot for like 10, 15 minutes. I think it's Hal. I think Hal's the— who do you have?

I have Daniel Richter as Moonwatcher, the chief ape, because that's an amazing performance.

Yeah, that's— he gives that suit—

you're right. I don't know, I think it's Vivienne Kubrick, who wants a bush baby and whose father calls her Squirt.

She is my number 2 on my list.

Recasting couch, director, or city. So we wouldn't put any name actors in this?

No, we wouldn't.

Okay. No. Half-assed research. I'll blow through some of these really fast.

It's interesting that one of the astronauts that Hal kills is named after my cameraman, Janusz Kaminski. Kaminski is one of the astronauts in—

I didn't tell you this. I was a soccer dad with him for years. Were you really? Yeah, we thought it was so funny with Bruce. Yeah, well, no, it was his daughter with Helena. Yeah, my daughter Zoe's teammate for years. And we always thought it was so funny. He would take, like, photos at the games of these 7-year-old girls. They were like the most beautiful great shot, gorgeous soccer you've ever seen of these photos that he would take.

I think when I first met Janusz, I don't know what I said to him. I said, hey, do you know you're in 2001: A Space Odyssey? Right.

Well, he would disappear because he was going to make movies with you.

That's right.

Exactly. Yeah, he's not here. Well, he should make movies with me. So Kubrick was so dissatisfied with the script that he approached some other writers, all of whom turned him down.

On 2001? Yeah. Wow.

Because he was disloyal. There's a lot of stuff about this, about him.

He's a great writer himself, as you know. Stanley writes a lot of his own movies.

205 special effects shots in this movie. Now, you know how—

you know what a paltry amount of shots that is compared to a streaming movie on Netflix?

Yeah, today, 205, a lot back then, not a lot now.

Not a lot now.

Talking thousands, not a lot now. I mean, one of the reasons for that is because so many of the shots are so long. There's just not a lot of cutting in the movie. So if he is getting a special effect shot Yes. If they put a tremendous amount of time into what you're looking at and holding on it.

But remember what Stanley was trying to create. He was trying to lure us into a— I guess not a heightened state. He was trying to lure us into a kind of state of mind where we're going to be relaxed and we'll start to accept anything. I mean, you know how long— I mean, I know he cut about 2 minutes from the jogging. When Poole is jogging in his daily workout, he cut about 2 minutes out of that jog. What makes the jog work, though, is the Khachaturian score. Yeah. You know? And it just lulls you. You don't lean forward at that moment watching 2001. You sit back, and you— I was thinking, "How long is this shot gonna go on?" And what's the point of it? And will there be a point of it? And when there wasn't a point of it, the joke was really on me because the point is he's creating a state of mind for the audience to start to accept things that are going to be a little more conventional— Yeah. —in terms of suspense and betrayal and all of the other great, neat things that happen in the movie.

Patience.

Mm. Yes. Patience. So Samsung battered with Apple about, about the origin of the computer tablet, and one of their cases was this movie. They were like, look at this. This was 1968.

You didn't invent anything. Look at that.

Goes way back there. So that happened. Only a cut there. There was a stuntman that they forgot to put air holes in his suit, and he almost got asphyxiated. That happened. The Ferris wheel cost $750,000 that you mentioned.

That's a big line item on a movie that cost only $10 million. Yeah, well, a lot, lot in its era tends a lot in '67.

Ligeti's permission was not granted for this movie, and he didn't know his music was in there, and they had to settle it after the fact. There's a lot more. I mean, there's been books written about this movie, documentaries. There's been multiple Kubrick books, so you can dive into if you want. Apex Mountain. So this is something we do where we try to figure out shots are in Latin, but the actual apex of somebody's career was where they had like the most juice possible, where it was like not only were they at the peak of their powers, right, but they're at the point of their career where they could have done anything, right? Right. That's like the ideal.

I have lived to see you explain this to Steven Spielberg.

This is incredible. I would say so for you, I— you had multiple apexes, but in '82 when you have E.T. and Poltergeist, at that point you could have probably gone into any studio on the planet, been like, "I'd like to do this," and they would've been like, "Here's a check, Steven." That's an example, right? So for Kubrick—

Okay. I'm with you. I'm trailing behind you, but I am behind you still.

So for Kubrick, what was the moment where he had the most of everything going at the same time as a director? Was it this movie?

Yeah, I would say this is the movie where he had it together. This is the movie that made Stanley famous, not just among critics and journalists and people that write about film, but this is the movie where the public discovered him.

Would you put space movies for the apex of space movies?

Well, this is certainly the— This was certainly the Big Bang for every single movie about serious science fiction where science is being emphasized. Even Jurassic Park, where science creates the credibility for an audience to believe that, yes, dinosaurs can come back.

We have a category called Cruise or Hanks. You've worked with both. You know both of these guys.

Yeah, I love them both.

What's the question? Cruise or— If Cruise— You have to have Cruise or Hanks in this movie. To be, who would you pick?

Hanks. It has to be Hanks. Because he made Apollo 13. Right. He did—

He's the astronaut guy. Sean, can't believe I asked you this. It's wonderful.

If he could be an astronaut, Tom, he would give it all up to be an astronaut.

I think the answer is both. I think Bowman is Cruise. You could have had each of them. And I think Floyd is Hanks.

Can I give you Cruise as the lead ape? How amazing that would have been? Cruise just, like, throwing himself into it.

A very physical role.

Cool performer teaching himself how apes walk for like 9 months to prepare for 10 minutes.

I think it would have been cool for any of, of, of the movie stars to look— Daniel Craig was a stormtrooper in Force Awakens, right?

We have another category called Spielberg or Scorsese. Oh, that we have to do since you're here. Okay. I mean, I think, I think I gotta clear my palate for this. No, I think you won this one. I made Hold on, what was the most— what was the biggest battle we had of that category? Usually it's pretty apparent. Yeah. Oh, of all time?

I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, this one is a no-brainer.

This one's an easy one. Yeah. Uh, picking nits. So this is where we pick little nits in the movie. Okay. The ape costumes in 4K, sure, it feels a little 1968-ish. Like, you could really— a couple times it feels like, yeah, that's probably a guy there. But I mean, for 1968, amazing.

We accept that it's not—

they're not really But also there were apes in Planet of the Apes just a year before, coming out the same year as 2001: A Space Odyssey. So it was the year of the ape. And by the way, they're not apes, they're proto-humans.

Proto-humans. Yeah. Yeah. Would HAL actually be able to read their lips? Are we, like, even now in AI, would we actually get there? Absolutely. You think so?

Yeah, I think that's a walk in the park for AI. They're reading our lips right now.

Hopefully not.

The film never actually tells us what year it's set. So is 2001 when they go and they get the crate, when they're taking the selfie and they get the crazy noise? Or was it 18 months later? Which year was 2001?

Well, I, I've given that a little bit of thought. I think 2001 is the, um, it's not a year. I don't think it's year specific to anything. I don't think it takes place in a year. 2001 is about the Millennium so it is— it doesn't matter. Okay.

Um, I had one more, but did you have an answer?

That's a great answer.

You just solved it. Did you have a nitpick before we go?

Yeah, if HAL's so advanced, why can't he anticipate Dave's move to remove his central function? You know, HAL's flaws I think are often overlooked. And like, the question of did he react this way and turn against the astronauts because of some emotional crisis that he has because he feels fallibility around this plan. Like, what is actually the reasoning for that? And then how does he not anticipate after that, that obviously Bowman is gonna try to take him offline? There's some questions around that.

Hal, I can join you in that nitpick a little bit. When Hal knows that Bowman is inexorably approaching his last mile, the Green Mile. Yeah. He's gonna get— He's gonna be executed. Why doesn't Hal turn off all the lights? Mm-hmm. Why doesn't Hal— Not everything has manual override.

That's true. Why didn't he turn off the lights?

Why doesn't he close certain ports where there's no manual override controls? And I have an answer for that. I think that Hal somehow knew, being so sentient, that he was a bad boy and needed to be severely punished.

Hal wanted to be shut down.

It's like Grady saying to Jack Nicholson what he should do to his children. Right. Because Grady did it to his. That's right. He needs to correct them. Hal knew he needed to be corrected. And in that moment, Bowman was Jack Torrance. Wow. Love it.

That was amazing. Did you have another nitpick from this?

No, it's almost a perfect film.

Okay, I had one more. This movie was rated G. What were we doing in 1968?

Well, what's really in it though? I mean, what's a— what we were talking before we started recording, could you bring a kid to see this movie?

Would you bring— how old's your daughter now?

She's gonna be 5. No, I wouldn't bring a kid 2001: A Space Odyssey, even today. PG for this one. But, but, um, I'm not sure what that was about. I, I think the film— I would have gone PG for it.

Yeah, the most violent thing in the movie is probably the tapir being beaten in that, like, little quick cut with the bones, right?

I mean, obviously we see Poole floating and being killed, but yeah, you know, don't forget Jaws was PG, so maybe 2001 should have stayed a G.

By comparison, if you're grading on the curve of that era between 65 and 72, I said I'm gonna do my imitation of Quint getting chewed to death. I'm ready for it. I'm ready to just do it. I can't just— just— if he ever comes back, I'll do it the second time.

I will come back. You do certain—

if you come back and do Jaws with us, I will do—

I'd love to do Jaws with you. That'd be fun.

All right, he just promised. Just one Oscar. Who gets it? Kubrick. Best Director. For Director. Best Director. Would you go Best Film or Best Director?

I would go Best Film and Best Director.

Just 2 Oscars. Probably an answerable question.

I would also have given Doug Trumbull an Oscar along with Stanley for special effects. Okay.

Probably an answerable question. You mentioned this. Why did Hal break down? This is a big part of the dialog about this movie. Was it legitimate? Was he faking it? Kubrick, we know not to trust him whenever he talks about this movie, but he said Hal had an acute— emotional crisis because he could not accept evidence of his own fallibility. So my take is that he had these two things, right? He's supposed to be all-knowing everything, but he's also smart enough to know when he's being lied to and told that he's basically lying to them about the mission. And these two things kind of short-circuited him.

No, the reason I think Hal did what he did was Hal was a narcissist. He was a complete narcissist. Listen to how he brags about, you know, his product, his design. He brags about where he was born. He brags about how smart he is. He brags about the fact that no 9000 computer has ever made a mistake. Mm-hmm. He's a narcissist.

He's so smug when he wins that chess match. Good game, Dave. You know, um, I think that the intention— I think that's right. I agree with you. And also that he is obviously inspired by his creator. I mean, he— the, the narcissism of the human race and could only cut— these machines could only come from—

you're absolutely right. That's right. Because you are a mirror of who, who created you. You know, uh, the creature certainly— and Guillermo del Toro's movie, which I think is the best Frankenstein movie ever made, the creature was a reflection of Victor?

Was Victor unanswerable? The first shot of the 3 astronauts we see sure looks a lot like the moon landing, as Sean mentioned. It's still a tiny bit unanswerable. Do you have it? I have one good one. Do you have any other ones?

Um, I mean, I think who delivered the monoliths is like the ultimate question of the movie. Yes, that's the most unanswerable.

That's definitely an answerable question, right?

All right, here's my—

here's my good Did this movie ruin the name Hal? I don't know. 'Cause we had Hal Holbrook, Hal Ashby, and Hal Linden. We have no— When was the last time you met anyone under 40 named Hal? Do you know any Hals?

I don't know any Hals.

Could this have been the end of the Hals?

I think Hal was such a villain and so scary in this movie, that was it. Hal was out.

You know, I love a Hal, though. I love when Falstaff is calling him Hal. You know, I love— Henry or a Harold can be a Hal. That's a great name. It's a great nickname. Nickname?

No, Hal's. I, I don't— I, I never even thought to name one of my boys Hal. Just gone. Not because of—

it was too tied to the computer and the whole thing. All right, the one piece of memorabilia you'd want from this movie. Um, quick story on this. Gene Siskel loved this movie, and he really wanted the monolith, and he asked Kubrick about getting it, and Kubrick said it didn't exist and that they threw it away. Oh, and it's gone. Wow. But what would be your answer for this?

Well, I actually bought the one piece of memorabilia I wanted from this movie.

It's never been uttered on this show before.

Yeah, you just trumped us. I have David Bowman's spacesuit. Which I donated to the Academy Museum. I don't possess it.

Sean just passed away.

I bought it and I donated it to the museum.

Yeah. Wow. That's good. Well, you said Peter Jackson owns Hal's eye.

I understand Peter Jackson owns Hal's eye. That would have been my answer.

Yeah. But see, there's all these stories of him burning all of these things after they finished the shoot. And you said that's him striking the set, but they make it seem as though he was burning costumes and all these are all the models and everything. Like, so how did some of these things survive?

You know, to me, Stanley isn't— What I know of Stanley is he doesn't remind me of somebody that would do all that, that would burn all these props and costumes. He also wasn't sentimental at all. So, he was not himself, unlike myself. I'm a collector of a lot of memorabilia, also a lot of my own memorabilia. I collect it. Stanley is not sentimental. He's not gonna be collecting his own memorabilia.

Yeah, my only other unanswerable is just because he was from New York, Jets fan. Kubrick could have explained a lot with some of the darkness in the movies.

I mean, although they did win 1969 season is the year that they won the Super Bowl. Maybe that was it. That's why he decided to move to England.

Okay, uh, Coach Finstock, Mr. Miyagi Award for best worst life lesson from this movie. I guess it's keep questioning what's out there.

Oh yeah. The best life lesson in this movie is, you know, never, ever close your mind off to an impossible possibility.

It's better than mine.

I don't have a follow-up. I can't do better than that.

All right.

I can't. We only have 2 more categories left. I love these categories.

These are great. We had more.

I cut them down because I didn't know how long we had you. I would have thrown more at you. Are you? Um, best double feature choice. Oh, I know. And you could put either this is first or second with the other one.

You want to go first?

Well, my pick would be AI for all the reasons that I talked about. Interesting. And the lineage and the relationship that you both have, and the way that the movies, I feel like, are talking to each other.

Wow, it's a pretty good run.

Good choice.

Mine would be George Pal's Destination Moon, made I think in '52 or '50, '51, '52. Because it was the most scientifically realistic film about man's first trip to the moon. Not taking into account, you know, George Méliès' film. Yeah. The first film, which was more of a pageant, less of a science project. But Destination Moon, which also is a tremendous exercise in suspense. Echoes a lot of what then became, in Stanley's vision, 2001: A Space Odyssey. But to me, that was the first breakthrough movie that makes an audience actually believe that someday we will be able to land on the moon.

Can I tell you something? Destination Moon finally being issued on Blu-ray in June. It is! Wow. Great. See? Full circle.

My double feature choice is Disclosure Day, opening on June 12th. There we go! Directed by Steven Spielberg.

And I've seen it.

Backup choice would be The Shining. I don't know why, but I think it would be really— I mean, you'd watch 2001 first, then The Shining, but I'd be really interested to just watch both and see what— Is there any stuff that he took or things or— You know what I mean? Just watching it fresh for 5 hours.

But I think the connection between that movie, The Shining, and 2001 is a connection Stanley has made with all of his films, is what I said when we first sat down to talk about Stanley. Audacity. Audacious choices. Who won the movie?

Uh, Stanley Kubrick. Craig, you're up. What'd you think of this movie? It came out, uh, where you were born? 1994. All right, so you're 26 years late.

Don't screw this up, Craig.

No, no, no, this is the third time I've seen it. I saw it first in film school when I was 19, and then I saw it again in my mid-20s, and now the third time in my mid-30s or early 30s. And I have to say, my maturity has affected how much I appreciate this movie. I have to admit, when I saw it when I was 19, I think I was a little bit underwhelmed. And I think I didn't— I didn't like the lack of clarity at the ending. I didn't enjoy that it was just, like, ambiguous and essentially, you know, was left up for interpretation. And I have completely pivoted. And now that is why I appreciate the movie. Leaving, you know, that ambiguity, letting yourself use your life experience to kind of inform what you think about the movie is why I think it's so good. And just the attention to detail and the craft. And the more movies I've watched over my life, you just appreciate it so much more and how mesmerizing the visuals are. It almost feels like— I mean, these big synchronized spacecraft sequences, you almost feel like you're watching, like, with these big musical numbers behind it.

When the scenes end and they kind of go to black for a second, these vignettes, you almost want to applaud. It's like you're at a magic show and you turn to the person next to you and you go, wow, how did they do that?

Yeah. Um, I love it.

The one thing that you guys didn't mention that I think is what the reason why the movie is so successful and so perfect— Hal's voice. The choice of Hal's soft but chilling tone, I think, makes the entire film.

I have to—

that's a good point, Craig.

I thought you would open the pod by saying, open the pod bay doors, Steven. You know, like, I thought you could have— we're literally— we're in the pod bay right now.

It's so comforting but also ominous, and you know there's something beneath that is, that is chilling.

I'm just going to walk up the wall later, just do a 360 around there. Well, that's it. You just completed your first Rewatchables.

A long one. You did it.

You did two. You gave us 2 hours too. That was amazing. Wow. I would have thrown in more categories.

This was so much fun.

Sean passed out twice. You have disclosure day coming. I'm elated. We're running this on June 1st, so you have disclosure day coming June 12th. Yes. 12 days later. Yes. Yes. And then are you, are you thinking about the next movie already, or no?

I'm just thinking about Disclosure Day. That's all I got on my mind right now.

And you promised you'd come back.

Except today, and now I'm all, all I'm thinking about is 2001: A Space Odyssey.

But you promised you'd come back for Jaws at some point.

Let's do Jaws. I would love that.

That was on tape. We videotaped it.

It doesn't have to be the 50-year anniversary. That's behind us. Let's do it.

And I'll do my Quint getting eaten impersonation at some point.

I want to see this. I definitely want to see this.

Steven Spielberg, an absolute honor. Thank you, Bill. Thanks for being here. Thank you, Sean. Thank you, Sean. Thank you. And that's it for the Rewatchables.

What an honor to be here with you guys. Thank you so much.