2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

"2001 is a nonverbal experience; out of two hours and nineteen minutes of film, there are only a little less than forty minutes of dialog. I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content. To convolute McLuhan, in 2001 the message is the medium. I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does; to "explain" a Beethoven symphony would be to emasculate it by erecting an artificial barrier between conception and appreciation. You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film - and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping an audience at a deep level - but I don't want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to purchase or else fear he's missed the point. I think that if 2001 succeeds at all, it is in reaching a wide spectrum of people who would not often give a thought to man's destiny, his role in the cosmos and his relationship to higher forms of life. But even in the case of someone who is highly intelligent, certain ideas found in 2001, if presented as abstractions, would fall rather lifelessly and be automatically assigned to pat intellectual categories; as experiences in a moving visual and emotional context, however, they can resonate within the deepest fibers of one's being."

"If anyone understands it on the first viewing, we've failed in our intention."

"I've tried to avoid doing this ever since the picture came out. When you just say the ideas they sound foolish, whereas if they’re dramatized one feels it, but I'll try. The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by god-like 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. It just seems to happen as it does in the film. They choose this room, which is a very inaccurate replica of French architecture (deliberately so, inaccurate) because one was suggesting that they had some idea of something that he might think was pretty, but wasn't quite sure. Just as we're not quite sure what to do in zoos with animals to try to give them what we think is their natural environment. Anyway, when they get finished with him, as happens in so many myths of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some kind of super being and sent back to Earth, transformed and made into some sort of superman. We have to only guess what happens when he goes back. It is the pattern of a great deal of mythology, and that is what we were trying to suggest."

"An epic drama of adventure and exploration."

"Man's colony on the Moon … a whole new generation has been born and is living there … a quarter-million miles from Earth."

"The Ultimate Trip."

"An astounding entertainment experience."

"My God, it's full of stars."

":Not present in film, but present in book as David Bowman enters the monolith, in form:"

"::"The thing's hollow — it goes on forever — and — oh my God! — it's full of stars!" (p. 254 of paperback edition)"

":Also referenced in sequel 2010: The Year We Make Contact, whose opening sequence contains:"

"::LAST TRANSMISSION FROM COMMANDER BOWMAN: "MY GOD, IT'S FULL OF STARS.""

"Keir Dullea – Dr. Dave Bowman"

"Gary Lockwood – Dr. Frank Poole"

"William Sylvester – Dr. Heywood R. Floyd"

"Daniel Richter – Moon-Watcher"

"Leonard Rossiter – Dr. Andrei Smyslov"

"Margaret Tyzack – Elena"

"Robert Beatty – Dr. Ralph Halvorsen"

"Sean Sullivan – Dr. Bill Michaels"

"Douglas Rain – HAL 9000 (voice)"