Seeing the shots, Kubrick grew excited, and asked Birkin to cut down and transport the highly protected trees far to the north of their natural environment. Sent to South West Africa-today’s Namibia-to scout locations and supervise large-format photography of desert landscapes for the “Dawn of Man” sequence, Kubrick’s assistant Andrew Birkin sent Polaroid shots back to London of a fascinatingly primitive-looking giant spiny aloe tree, or kokerboom in Afrikaans. After being inaccurately accused of pushing drugs by a disgruntled former collaborator, Richter confessed to his legal addict status to an intrigued Kubrick-who immediately asked him to describe what it was like and how he did it. When that blend didn’t do the trick and he needed additional stimulation, he always kept some state-supplied methamphetamine (crystal meth) on hand. Richter, who had beat out numerous professional actors for the role, had managed to achieve the status of a “legal” addict in England, where the film was shot, and injected a doctor-prescribed speedball combination of pharmaceutical-grade heroin and cocaine up to seven times each day. Before the days of digital effects, he had 90 tons of sand dyed dark gray to simulate the surface of the moon.Īmerican mime Dan Richter, who both brought to life the lead man-ape “Moonwatcher” and choreographed the whole “Dawn of Man” prehistoric prelude, was a hard-core heroin addict throughout production-a fact he initially hid from Kubrick. When Clarke Came Out, Kubrick Shruggedĭirector Stanley Kubrick on set. Kubrick later came up with the aphorism, “Never let your ego get in the way of a good idea.” 5. And the decision for HAL to kill off most of the crew came from visual-effects supervisor Doug Trumbull, who suggested that this would resolve some loose plot points-an idea the director at first angrily rejected. In another example, the idea that the HAL-9000 supercomputer would discover the astronauts’ plot against him by reading their lips originated as an offhand suggestion by the film’s associate producer, Victor Lyndon. But after paying massively for the big clear Plexi slab, Kubrick decided it didn’t look right-so production designer Tony Masters suggested the featureless black one, which Kubrick approved. The mysterious black monolith began as a translucent Plexiglas tetrahedron, which ultimately assumed a monolith shape because Plexiglas cools better that way. Some of the film’s most iconic features were decided during production for purely practical reasons. But Kubrick had fled the scene, causing production to grind to a halt for several days. When he actually did pass out, Weston, who’d been a mercenary in South Africa, took a minute to recover and then set off to find the director and teach him a lesson-a story originating from Weston himself. In another incident, Kubrick refused to let Weston punch holes in the back of his space helmet, which meant the stuntman was perpetually on the verge of blacking out from carbon-dioxide poisoning as he engaged in complicated maneuvers while hanging high above the camera. This almost resulted in a serious accident when individual strands of Weston’s sole cable broke under his weight.

Actor Keir Dullea reflected in the lens of the HAL-9000 supercomputer.ĭuring production, Kubrick at first refused to let spacewalking stuntman Bill Weston wear a second cable for safety, although he was 30 feet above a hard concrete studio floor.

Hal 9000 sound effects