Awesome Kubrick interview

[Guest the anonymous forumite]

in which he explains the plot of 2001 and give advice on how to become a director.

 

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0069.html

 

The God concept is at the heart of this film. It's unavoidable that it would be, once you believe that the universe is seething with advanced forms of intelligent life. Just think about it for a moment. There are a hundred billion stars in the galaxy and a hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe. Each star is a sun, like our own, probably with planets around them. The evolution of life, it is widely believed, comes as an inevitable consequence of a certain amount of time on a planet in a stable orbit which is not too hot or too cold. First comes chemical evolution -- chance rearrangements of basic matter, then biological evolution.

 

Think of the kind of life that may have evolved on those planets over the millennia, and think, too, what relatively giant technological strides man has made on earth in the six thousand years of his recorded civilization -- a period that is less than a single grain of sand in the cosmic hourglass. At a time when man's distant evolutionary ancestors were just crawling out of the primordial ooze, there must have been civilizations in the universe sending out their starships to explore the farthest reaches of the cosmos and conquering all the secrets of nature. Such cosmic intelligences, growing in knowledge over the aeons, would be as far removed from man as we are from the ants. They could be in instantaneous telepathic communication throughout the universe; they might have achieved total mastery over matter so that they can telekinetically transport themselves instantly across billions of light years of space; in their ultimate form they might shed the corporeal shell entirely and exist as a disembodied immortal consciousness throughout the universe.

 

Once you begin discussing such possibilities, you realize that the religious implications are inevitable, because all the essential attributes of such extraterrestrial intelligences are the attributes we give to God. What we're really dealing with here is, in fact, a scientific definition of God. And if these beings of pure intelligence ever did intervene in the affairs of man, so far removed would their powers be from our own understanding. How would a sentient ant view the foot that crushes his anthill -- as the action of another being on a higher evolutionary scale than itself? Or as the divinely terrible intercession of God?

Edited November 18, 2010 by the anonymous forumite

[Guest Great Maker ShaiHulud]

:blink:

 

Where would the exteriors be shot? Actual sites?

 

I still haven't made a final decision, although there are several promising possibilities. Unfortunately, there are very, very few actual Napoleonic battlefields where we could still shoot; the land itself has either been taken over by industrial and urban development, preempted by historical trusts, or is so ringed by modern buildings that all kinds of anachronisms would present themselves -- like a Hussars' charge with a Fiat plant in the background. We're now in the process of deciding the best places to shoot, and where it would be most feasible to obtain the troops we need for battle scenes. We intend to use a maximum of forty thousand infantry and ten thousand cavalry for the big battles, which means that we have to find a country which will hire out its own armed forces to us -- you can just imagine the cost of fifty thousand extras over an extended period of time. Once we find a receptive environment, there are still great logistic problems -- for example, a battle site would have to be contiguous to a city or town or barracks area where the troops we'd use are already bivouacked. Let's say we're working with forty thousand infantry -- if we could get forty men into a truck, it would still require a thousand trucks to move them around. So in addition to finding the proper terrain, it has to be within marching distance of military barracks.

 

Aside from the Russian War and Peace, where they reportedly used sixty thousand of their own troops, has there ever been a film that used forty thousand men from somebody else's army?

 

I would doubt it.

 

Then how do you expect to persuade another government to give you as many as forty thousand soldiers?

 

One has to be an optimist about these things. If it turned out to be impossible I'd obviously have no other choice than to make do with a lesser number of men, but this would only be as a last resort. I wouldn't want to fake it with fewer troops because Napoleonic battles were out in the open, a vast tableau where the formations moved in an almost choreographic fashion. I want to capture this reality on film, and to do so it's necessary to re-create all the conditions of the battle with painstaking accuracy.

[Guest the anonymous forumite]

more awesomeness:

 

Stanley Kubrick Interview

This is why the internet is awesome, I was able to dig up a real gem for you today – Stanley Kubrick interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein in 1966! It’s a whopping 90 minutes! You might have to be fairly interested in his work to care about this, but I am always interested to hear creative people talk about their work.

http://www.zshare.net/download/51482706e3624e5a/

[Guest rufus]

I can't get this to download which is quite heartbreaking.

Has anyone else managed to grab this?

Is it just me having a funny Zshare error or has it disappeared?

[Guest Blanket Fort Collapse]

Oh yeah I kept this interview in my browser and finally read it 3 days later. Very very good interview thanks a lot for posting.

[Guest mafted]

very interesting read.. i love how he goes in to detail about everything. he had such a photographer's mind.

 

has anyone caught 2001 in blu-ray? it is unbelievably clear.. my cousin, who actually saw it in the theaters back then, said he could read signs and things he had never seen before. it was one of the rare instances where the original 70mm tape was used with no converting.. . but yea, it's an awesome release.

Edited November 23, 2010 by mafted