Some of my favorite bits, for those who are interested:
In pre-production, Clarke and Kubrick consulted with a young Carl Sagan, who really irritated Kubrick.
Clarke and Kubrick saw a UFO over New York City that Clarke, despite calling around to several astronomer friends, could not explain.
Kubrick was very hard-nosed in contract negotiations with Clarke, and several of Clarke’s advisors and friends thought he’d been taken advantage of. He didn’t get an ownership stake in the film, for instance, only a salary. At times, with no other income, Clarke had to borrow money from Kubrick. Later, the director delayed approving the draft of Clarke’s novelization until after the movie’s release. Fortunately, the book was a best-seller and Clarke ended up making out very well from its sales.
Kubrick was good friends with the famous bandleader Artie Shaw and was happy to introduce him to Clarke.
Early drafts of the script had a robot named Socrates and, later, a ship’s computer named Athena.
Clarke, a closeted gay man, came out to Kubrick relatively early on, and Kubrick was totally unconcerned.
Kubrick’s family, traveling to the UK, needed 48 steamer trunks.
Kubrick said he didn’t like the taste of the British water and insisted on bottled water imported from the U.S. After a few days, his British production assistant just refilled the bottles from the tap. Kubrick never noticed the change for the next year and a half of filming.
A plexiglas monolith was built but Kubrick thought it looked fake, hated it and ordered it scrapped. The cost? $400,000, very big money in those days, even for a movie studio.
The actors who played the hominids in the “Dawn of Man” scenes would sometimes watch the dailies in full makeup and costume, happily hooting when they liked a take and screaming in rage when they didn’t.
IBM was consulted closely on computer issues and proved very helpful; both Kubrick and Clarke were later at pains to say that HAL’s name was not a swipe at IBM (one letter “ahead” for each). You can see the IBM logo on Dave Bowman’s spacesuit arm controls. Other product placements, a first for a Hollywood film, included Pan Am (the shuttle from Earth), Hilton Hotels and Bell Telephone (on the space station), and Whirlpool (the food machine aboard the Aries moon shuttle).
Many people developed vertigo and dizziness on the curved floor of the space station set.
William Sylvester (Dr. Floyd) botched his lines so often in the Clavius Base conference-room scene that Kubrick sent a studio aide to say he’d be replaced if he couldn’t get his act together. It worked.
Several takes of the scene where Dr. Floyd and the scientists visit the TMA-1 monolith, the first scene shot for the film, had to be dropped due to flies and a bat, which lived in the large soundstage, flying in-shot, attracted by the lights. Kubrick himself filmed the astronaut’s-POV shot going down the ramp into the pit, using a handheld camera.
Kubrick, Keir Dullea (Bowman) and Gary Lockwood (Poole) all hated flying.
Kubrick was firmly in control of the movie as director, but was open to suggestions from others: Lockwood came up with the idea of the two astronauts climbing into one of the pods to avoid being heard by HAL; associate producer Victor Lyndon, weeks later, suggested having HAL read their lips; Dullea suggested the broken glass in the final alien hotel-room scene.
Kubrick shot 35 (!) takes of the spacepod discussion scene.
The Discovery sets were so brightly-lit that Dullea and Lockwood often wore sunglasses between takes.
The Discovery model was 55 feet long. When it was finally finished, Kubrick was vaguely dissatisfied with it, and told the crew to “do something” with it. The lead modelmaker couldn’t think of what to do, so he did nothing, showed it Kubrick again a few days later, and the director said, “That’s it! Perfect!”
Benson, the author, notes several parallels between Homer’s Odyssey and Kubrick’s: Odysseus overcomes a one-eyed monster, the Cyclops, just as Bowman defeats HAL; Bowman’s name recalls Odysseus’s stringing of a bow to shoot an arrow through twelve axe shafts, a feat of strength that proved his identity; Odysseus is the sole survivor of his ship, just as Bowman is; Bowman has a homecoming, greatly changed as the Star Child, just as Odysseus returns home to Ithaca at the end of his long journey, greatly changed by all he has experienced.
Douglas Rain, a Canadian actor whose voice Kubrick had noticed in an earlier space documentary, Universe, was eventually hired to do HAL’s voice. He recorded his lines in just 8 1/2 hours over two days’ time, including singing or saying the words of “Daisy” 51 times.
The same stuntman played both Bowman and Poole for the EVA scenes. The sound of their breathing was done by Kubrick himself, wearing one of the spacesuit helmets fitted with a microphone.
Kubrick struggled with the music of the movie, even briefly considering asking the Beatles to do the score, but eventually decided to go with classical music he liked. A score written by well-known film composer Frank Cordell was never used; Cordell had a nervous breakdown after the film came out.
Less than one-third of the movie has dialogue.
The film premiered in Washington, D.C. and there were many walkouts. The NYC premiere was just about as bad. Scathing reviews followed. Kubrick decided to cut the film by what turned out to be 12%, including a scene of Bowman exercising that he decided was duplicative of the Poole workout scene. Despite poor early reviews, the recut film became a hit, and was ultimately the highest-grossing film of 1968.
Kubrick put himself in for the Oscar nomination for the film’s sfx, and won, shutting out those who’d done the actual work. Douglas Trumbull, among others on the sfx crew, was pissed.
Clarke was concerned that the movie would be too hard for most people to understand, but Kubrick encouraged the author to be just as clear and specific as he wanted to be in his novel.
Kubrick later said that the film was about “nothing less than the origins and destiny of Man.”