The voice of HAL 9000 wasn’t always so eerily calm.
“I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Even if you’ve never seen the movie, you know the voice.
HAL 9000, the seemingly omniscient computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” was the film’s most expressive and emotional figure, and made a lasting impression on our collective imagination.
Stanley Kubrick’s epic, a journey from pre-human history to a possible infinity that doesn’t need humans at all, is probably the most respected, if not the most beloved, sciencefiction film of all time.
The story of the creation of HAL’s performance — the result of a last-minute collaboration between the idiosyncratic director and the veteran Canadian actor Douglas Rain — has been somewhat lost in the 50 years since the film’s release in April 1968. As has its impact: Artificial intelligence has borrowed from the HAL persona, and unwittingly, a slight hint of Canadianness resides in our phones and interactive devices.
Rain’s HAL has become the default reference, not just for the voice, but also for the humanesque qualities of what a sentient machine’s personality should be. Just ask Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home — the cadence, the friendly formality, the pleasant intelligence and sense of calm control in their voices evoke Rain’s unforgettable performance. As we warily eye a future utterly transformed by AI incursions into all aspects of our lives, HAL has been lurking.
To Scott Brave, the co-author of “Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship,” HAL 9000 is a mix between a butler and a psychoanalyst. “He has a sense of deference and of detachment,” Brave said, adding that he saw a ripple effect on, for example, the iPhone’s virtual assistant. “When I listen to something like Siri, I feel there is a lot in common.”
In a 1969 interview with the author and critic Joseph Gelmis, Kubrick said that he was trying to convey “the reality of a world populated — as ours soon will be — by machine entities that have as much, or more, intelligence as human beings. We wanted to stimulate people to think what it would be like to share a planet with such creatures.”
The “2001” historian David Larson said that “Kubrick came up with the final HAL voice very late in the process. It was determined during ‘2001’ planning that in the future the large majority of computer command and communication inputs would be via voice, rather than via typewriter.”
But artificial intelligence was decades from a convincing facsimile of a human voice — and who was to say how a computer should sound anyway? To play HAL, Kubrick settled on Martin Balsam, a bestsupporting actor Oscar winner for “A Thousand Clowns.” Perhaps there was a satisfying echo that appealed to Kubrick — both were from the Bronx and sounded like it. In August 1966, Balsam told a journalist: “I’m not actually seen in the picture at any time, but I sure create a lot of excitement projecting my voice through that machine. And I’m getting an Academy Award-winner price for doing it, too.”
Then the director changed his mind. “We had some difficulty deciding exactly what HAL should sound like, and Marty just sounded a little bit too colloquially American,” Kubrick said in the 1969 interview. Rain recalls Kubrick telling him: “I’m having trouble with what I’ve got in the can. Would you play the computer?”
Kubrick had heard Rain’s voice in the 1960 documentary “Universe.” “I think he’s perfect,” Kubrick wrote to a colleague in a letter in the director’s archive. “The voice is neither patronizing, nor is it intimidating, nor is it pompous, overly dramatic or actorish. Despite this, it is interesting.”
In December 1967, Kubrick and Rain met at a recording studio at the MGM lot in Borehamwood, outside London. The actor hadn’t seen a frame of the film, then in postproduction. He met none of his co-stars, not even Keir Dullea, who played the astronaut David Bowman, HAL’s colleague-turned-nemesis. Rain hadn’t even been hired to play HAL, but to provide narration. Kubrick finally decided against using narration, opting for the ambiguity that was enraging to some viewers, transcendent to others.
It’s not a session Rain remembers fondly: “If you could have been a ghost at the recording, you would have thought it was a load of rubbish.”
Rain had to quickly fathom and flesh out HAL, recording all of his lines in 10 hours over two days. Kubrick sat “3 feet away, explaining the scenes to me and reading all the parts.” Kubrick, according to the transcript of the session in his archive at the University of the Arts London, gave Rain only a few notes of direction, including: “Sound a little more like it’s a peculiar request”; “A little more concerned”; and “Just try it closer and more depressed.”
When HAL says, “I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal,” Rain somehow manages to sound both sincere and not reassuring. And his delivery of the line “I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do” has the sarcastic drip of a drawing-room melodrama and also carries the disinterested vibe of a polite sociopath.
Kubrick had Rain sing the 1892 love song “Daisy Bell” (“I’m half crazy, all for the love of you”) almost 50 times, in uneven tempos, in monotone, at different pitches and even just by humming it. In the end, he used the very first take. Sung as HAL’s brain is being disconnected, it’s from his early programming days, his computer childhood. It brings to an end the most affecting scene in the entire film.