MUSIC: Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss
It's tough to tell anyone how to approach 2001.
It's, I think...
Of any of the great films, to me, it's one of the most personal,
the one that you bring the most to as a viewer.
The point of 2001 is the thing itself, is the experience itself.
It needs to just wash over you
and inform you through the immersion into this extraordinary world.
Well, I first saw 2001 as a child. I was about seven years old.
And they re-released 2001 in the wake of the tremendous success
of Star Wars, so the appetite for anything to do
with science fiction then was massive.
And my father took me to the Leicester Square Theatre.
And it became this sort of seminal introduction
to the power of cinema, what cinema can be.
I remember the size of the screen, I remember the sense of awe.
And over the years...
..my relationship with the film's evolved,
but I think that that first response...
..is, in many ways, I think the truest response to 2001.
I think it is primarily an emotional experience.
It's something you feel.
Excuse me, Frank.
What is it, Hal?
We've got the transmission from your parents coming in.
Well, fine.
Would you put it on here, please? Take me in a bit. Certainly.
Like all great works of science fiction -
and I think 2001 is perhaps the greatest...
..it's in dialogue with our ideas of the future.
It's in dialogue with a continually evolving present
about what the future represents, what that might be.
And the film has never failed to be massively relevant
in a cinematic sense and in a storytelling sense,
but its technological relevance has sort of ebbed and flowed
over the years depending on what's going on in our world.
The 9000 series is the most reliable computer ever made.
No 9000 computer has ever made a mistake or distorted information.
We are all, by any practical definition of the words,
foolproof and incapable of error.
When I first showed it to my kids, sort of ten years ago,
the ideas of artificial intelligence seemed a bit quaint.
They seemed a bit passe.
One of my children immediately sort of said to me,
"Why does the computer talk?"
Cos the idea of a talking computer seemed a little quaint to kids,
for whom the computer's just this tool that they use.
It's just their way of interfacing with the outside world.
But then, over the previous ten years,
things have sailed back in technology very much towards AI -
the idea of talking assistants, you know, with Alexa and Siri
and all these...
..you know, electronic assistants that you talk to,
and the idea of AI - it's all kind of come back massively.
Are you coming to my party tomorrow?
I'm sorry, sweetheart...
Then FaceTime came along, and it seems clearly relevant.
Daddy's travelling.
And I'm sure that the entire...
You watch these guys with these screens, and they're iPads -
to all intents and purposes.
So, how much the people making the technology of today
have been influenced by the film,
and how much the film is just predicting where things
would naturally go, it's impossible to disentangle,
because 2001 has had a massive influence on the way in which
we've imagined the future to be.
AMPLIFIED BREATHING
Kubrick, more than any other film-maker,
understands the potential of movies to be anything.
He understands that that screen,
that form in which you're watching, sitting with an audience,
looking up at that screen,
that screen can take you anywhere and do anything.
There are no rules as far as he's concerned.
The idea of what can cinema do that other art forms can't.
How can that create a purely cinematic experience for you?
AMPLIFIED BREATHING