Stanley Kubrick started filming 2001: A Space Odyssey at Shepperton Studios in England in December 1965. He spent three years making the movie. The production team included scientists and engineers from NASA and Boeing to ensure technical accuracy. Every piece of equipment on the space sets had a specific purpose based on real science.
One of the most expensive parts of the set was the centrifuge. It was a rotating circular room built by a company that usually made airplanes. The structure was 38 feet wide and cost 750,000 dollars to build. It moved at a speed of three miles per hour. Actors Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood walked along the inside surface as the room turned. This created the illusion of gravity in space. Cameras were bolted to the floor or moved on specialized tracks to follow the actors. Kubrick communicated with the actors through a headset while they were inside the moving wheel.
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The “Dawn of Man” sequence at the start of the film was shot entirely inside a studio. Kubrick used a massive front projection system to create the landscape. A huge screen, 40 feet tall and 90 feet wide, was placed at the back of the set. High-resolution photos of the African desert were projected onto this screen using a mirrored glass system. The ape costumes were designed by Stuart Freeborn. He used real horsehair and a mechanical jaw that allowed the actors to use their own mouth movements.
Visual effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull used no computers to create the space scenes. Every shot of a spaceship was done using large miniatures. The Discovery spaceship model was 54 feet long. The crew used a process called motion control photography to move the camera very slowly past the models. This kept every part of the ship in sharp focus. They used tiny light bulbs and fiber optics to create the glowing windows on the models.
The Stargate sequence near the end of the film used the slit-scan technique. Trumbull built a machine that moved a camera toward a narrow slit in a black screen. Behind the slit, colorful patterns on glass moved across the frame. The camera shutter remained open during the movement to blur the light into long streaks. This process took months of work for just a few minutes of footage.
For the scenes where astronauts float in zero gravity, the crew used thin wires. The actors were hung from the ceiling and filmed from an angle that hid the wires behind their bodies. The “Star Child” at the end of the movie was a large model with moving eyes. It was two and a half feet tall. Kubrick insisted on filming the space scenes in total silence because there is no sound in a vacuum. He removed the original dialogue from several space sequences during the editing phase.
The Monolith was a solid block of wood. The crew applied a special mixture of graphite and black paint to the surface to make it look smooth and alien. They polished the surface for hours to remove any fingerprints or dust. The control panels for the HAL 9000 computer were built with real electronic components. Every screen displayed 16mm film loops that showed actual mathematical data and navigation charts.
