Nearly six decades after its wide release on April 3, 1968, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is hailed as a classic and a watershed moment for science fiction cinema: “one of the most influential films ever made,” film scholar Howard Suber called it in his essay for the film’s Criterion Collection release. But great things sometimes come from remarkably rough beginnings. A 1978 interview with Douglas Trumbull, the film’s visual effects supervisor, available on The Internet Archive, has some remarkable behind-the-scenes stories about the original draft and the shooting process, including how Kubrick rigged one of the movie’s most infamous shots.
For context, it’s helpful to know that Trumbull was a groundbreaking effects artist whose striking short film, To the Moon and Beyond, shown at the 1964 World’s Fair, caught Kubrick’s attention and led to Trumbull spearheading the effects sequences for 2001. He went on to handle effects for Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, in addition to directing his own science fiction movies, Silent Running and Brainstorm.
But Trumbull had a public falling-out with Kubrick when 2001: A Space Odyssey won an Academy Award for Best Special Visual Effects, and Kubrick claimed sole credit — and the award — for himself. (It was the only Oscar he ever won, though he didn’t attend the ceremony.) “Kubrick did not create the visual effects. He directed them,” Trumbull told The Hollywood Reporter during a 2014 career retrospective. “There was a certain level of inappropriateness to taking that Oscar.”
So take Trumbull’s reminiscences with a small grain of salt — they’re coming from a pretty salty place, particularly when it comes to Kubrick properly attributing ideas.
2001: A Space Odyssey’s first draft was ‘a piece of crap’
“I wish I had a copy of the original screenplay that I saw when I started working on the picture, so you could see what a piece of crap it was,” Trumbull told journalist James Delson at Fantastic Films magazine. “It was a funny screenplay, because it had lots of blank pages in it, and at the top of each of those pages it would just say, ‘Special effects sequence starts here. Work is now under way with our crew of artists and technicians to produce the most fantastic visual effects ever made.’ Just that above a big blank page. The whole thing was a big snow job that Kubrick did on MGM to get the production under way.”
Trumbull said the first script for 2001 was “just dumb, really bad in a lot of ways.” At the time, he explained, Kubrick and famed science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke were having “a falling out” over the direction the story would take. Clarke is co-credited on the 2001 screenplay, but went on to write his own version of the story as a book series.
Most of the elements 2001 is remembered for, like the coldly logical computer HAL 9000, weren’t in the original script, Trumbull said. “The original story was just the basic sentinel thing. The Dawn of Man in Africa. A lot of ape-type vegetarian characters are dying off in a big drought. There’s nothing but a few weeds and stuff left, but there are still a few animals. The only way they’re going to survive is to learn to kill the animals.”
He said 2001’s famed, mysterious black monolith, which silently inspires these apes to evolve into tool-users, was originally “a transparent cube right by the watering hole where they go every morning.” The cube was meant to project “a big holographic teaching film” illustrating “how to pick up a bone and how to clonk an animal until he’s dead, and then how to eat him.”
“It was a training film,” Trumbull said, “but it was too literal and cinematically problematical. The script kept going off into more and more nebulous implications, rather than the strict concrete ones. That was changed to the more simplistic version used in the film.”
The time Stanley Kubrick chained a jaguar to a rotting horse
Delson and Trumbull spent some time discussing a shot from the Dawn of Man sequence, involving a leopard and a dead zebra. In the opening act of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a tribe of chimpanzee-like hominids, played by actors in chimp suits, lives on the African veldt. At one point, a leopard takes one of them down. Later, the leopard is seen lying next to a zebra it killed. But when the monolith appears and the apes touch it, they learn to use weapons. The film cuts directly from one ape smashing an old cow skull with a bone club to another ape eating raw meat with a distinctly spotted pattern on the skin, implying that tool use has let the apes rise above the local predators.
“It wasn’t in the script, but Stanley wanted this scene with some kind of predatory animal eating a dead zebra at night,” Trumbull told Delson. “He might have been able to get a zebra [in England, where the Dawn of Man sequence was shot], but not a dead one. Nobody was going to kill one just for the film. I said, ‘How about a dead horse? We’ll paint it to look like a zebra.’ He said, ‘Fine, but I don’t want anybody to go kill a horse for me, either.’”
Trumbull said they went and “found a horse that was going to die any minute,” and they postponed shooting the scene until it “finally croaked,” whereupon they “dragged it off to the studio” and painted it with zebra stripes. “Unfortunately, the shooting schedule got all fouled up, and they couldn’t shoot it right away,” he said. “So there was this dead horse which got really foul, ’cause it laid around about a week before they shot the scene. That was really something.”
Delson noted that Kubrick had to drug the jaguar and chain it to the zebra to get the shot, because it didn’t want to be anywhere near the carrion. “With all the animals they had there, the place smelled like hell,” Trumbull said.
In the theatrical cut of 2001: A Space Odyssey, once humanity achieves space flight, they find another black monolith on the moon, which sends a signal to somewhere around Jupiter. (Trumbull says in the original script draft, it was a pyramid.) Five astronauts, including Dr. David Bowman (Keir Dullea), embark on a mission to follow the signal. When their onboard computer, HAL 9000, malfunctions, they discuss shutting it down. To defend itself, HAL kills four of the astronauts, and nearly kills Bowman before he successfully deactivates it.
Trumbull says that in the original script, there was no HAL, and the five astronauts all make it to Jupiter, where they find “this big slot, a big rectangular hole in one of Jupiter’s moons.” When they look through it, they see another star system.
“They say, ‘Oh groovy, time warp,’ or something like that. They drop a lot of little probes down it and send rockets down it which disappear, accelerate off, and read out a bunch of weird things. Finally, one guy goes down in there to see what’s up. He lands on a weird planet and starts wandering around. His buddy comes down and lands with him. They start moving around and… I can’t remember the thing, it was so bizarre. They fall through holes in the ground and end up in a cavern, and then in the strange room. They’re both in the strange room and then a door opens and then this giant 20-foot-tall green man comes out.”
Trumbull says Kubrick was preoccupied with making the 20-foot aliens work on screen, and not on improving the script.
“They sort of went off in all directions, from rubber monsters to all kinds of other things, trying to do extra-terrestrials. I went into Stanley’s office one day and said, ‘Listen, if this movie is going to end with one or two guys in this room, you’ve left too many loose ends. You’ve still got the other guys out there in the spaceship. What are they doing? […] What’s going on outside of this room? You’ve gotta clean it up. Wouldn’t it be better if you just had one man, and wouldn’t it be better if something went wrong back at the ship. Why not kill all those guys?’ He looked at me and said, ‘Trumbull, don’t come in here with any asinine ideas like that.’ It turned up in the script a month later. Fine. Maybe he thought of it himself or something.”
Overall, Trumbull sounds frustrated about the rigors of working on the film. Kubrick was a notoriously detail-oriented director who wanted full control of every aspect of his projects, “from the air-conditioning to the nature of lunch,” according to Garrett Brown, a camera operator on The Shining. But he also constantly changed his story, dialogue, camera work, and production design during his lengthy shoots.
“It was a constant juggle, the film,” Trumbull said. “He wrote dialogue every day before they would shoot. Well, in a sense, it was always a giggle, ’cause we had unlimited time and unlimited money to fool around and have a good time, but there was lots of behind-the-scenes grumbling. In many ways, Kubrick’s really hard to work for.”