2001: A Space Odyssey
IF YOU’D VENTURED onto the Borehamwood Studios set of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1967 hoping to find Stanley Kubrick playing with rocket ships and astronauts, you’d have been justifiably surprised by what you found. A soundstage dressed like a parched stretch of African veldt, with rocks, spiny kokerboom trees and animal skeletons. Huge backdrops flickering with images of prehistoric-looking vistas, the travel-phobic Kubrick having pioneered cutting-edge techniques to effectively front-project photography of modern Namibia. And a troupe of mime artists, each swathed in black fur, their faces hidden by detailed prosthetic ape masks designed by make-up genius Stuart Freeborn.
With all his impeccably researched, groundbreakingly captured future visions now in the can, Kubrick had, by this late point in the shoot, turned his attention to the film’s extended prologue, boldly set three million years in the past. Despite its title, this was a film about far more than space. “The basic theme of the movie was evolution,” said Arthur C. Clarke, 2001’s co-writer with Kubrick, “from ape to man and what lies beyond man.”
So here at ‘The Dawn Of Man’, a visiting alien “teaching machine” — Clarke’s phrase — has appeared in the form of a jet-black monolith. Via some mysterious means, it inspires a hairy australopithecus named Moonwatcher (played by mime troupe leader Daniel Richter) to take his species’ first step towards planetary supremacy. Crouched amid an animal skeleton, Strauss’ majestic ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ escalating on the soundtrack, Moonwatcher picks up a single thigh-bone and considers it, before bringing it down, again and again, smashing the skeleton to pieces.
The American Richter, an American working in England at the time, had spent many days at London Zoo observing its gorilla, Guy, absorbing every little gesture. But, he says, “the movement wasn’t the solution. The solution was to motivate the movement. [We] needed to understand who these man-apes were. It’s like the seven dwarfs. They have to be very specific characters.”
If Moonwatcher had been one of the seven dwarfs, he might have been named ‘Thoughtful’ (or perhaps ‘Homicidal’). “Suddenly an idea comes to me to pick up a bone,” Richter relates. “I decided I was gonna play it slow. The only decision I made is that I would cock my head slightly.”
To actor Gary Lockwood, who plays Discovery 1’s ill-fated Frank Poole, that little head-cock is “one of the most incredible movie moments in history”. It represents, he thinks, “man’s first progressive thought: something’s going on inside there that wasn’t there before.”
With that subtle Eureka moment, humanity masters its first-ever tool of war, soon to be used to brain Moonwatcher’s rival, One-ear, then memorably tossed into the air, audaciously match-cut by Kubrick to an orbiting, thousand-megaton nuclear bomb. “In an infinite and eternal universe,” Kubrick himself summed up, “the point is, anything is possible.” It is amazing what you can achieve with an old bone and a bit of thought.
Initially the man-apes were to be hairless, but this presented Kubrick with the thorny problem of full-frontal nudity. So he asked makeup artist Stuart Freeborn to cover them with fur.
Arthur C. Clarke originally imagined the monolith as a transparent cube displaying educational images. “But that was too naive an idea,” he realised, and he and Kubrick opted for an eerie dark slab which “affected [the man-apes’] minds directly.”
Strauss’ ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ was meant to be a temp track, but Kubrick felt it worked so well, he kept it in. Composer Alex North didn’t realise his score had been dumped until he went to the premiere in 1968.