‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ With Bill Simmons, Steven Spielberg, and Sean Fennessey

21:50Sean Fennessey:No, I mean, obviously that's the thing I think that continues to attract film fans, especially young film fans, to him is that each movie feels so dramatically different. And so you start trying to comprehend how one person can bounce around between genre, style, time period. The other thing is that all the movies, once you've seen them, I think multiple times, you realize they are all sort of the same in some ways too. Even this movie, which is a little bit quieter than some of his films, they're all about controlled chaos. There's always something very intense and dangerous and manic happening inside the middle of the story, even if this film is a little more leisurely or quiet or there's not as much dialogue, as you said.

22:31Sean Fennessey:But his flexibility and versatility I think maybe accounts for those long stretches of time, too, between projects, where he's trying to figure out what can I do that would interest me maybe for a five-year period if I'm really going to spend this much time developing something. but I don't know. My experience with him is the same as like I think millions of movie freaks which is that you're 13 years old and you find one of these films usually it's either this one Clockwork Orange or The Shining and then you just launch yourself into his entire filmography which feels very conquerable to young people too.

23:03Sean Fennessey:Hopefully it's not

23:04Bill Simmons:as wide shut at 13 years old.

23:06Sean Fennessey:No, well, you never know. You never know. That wasn't around when I was 13 but I anticipated it. I saw The Shining

23:11Bill Simmons:when I was 10. My dad took me Probably a wee bit too early for me, but holy mackerel. And that became, everybody I think has their entry point with his career and that was mine. Yeah, I think everybody does. And I think the thing that Stanley does to all of us is if we're just surfing the channels and we come across Stanley, one of Stanley's movies 30 minutes in, I dare anybody to switch it off. Even if you have a meeting at seven o 'clock the next morning and it's already midnight, I don't know how you get your finger on that off switch. I don't know how you do that. Yeah. I don't care what the movie is.

23:48You know, from, you know, you know, from Killer's Kiss to Eyes Wide Shut, whether you love these films more than others of his or not, you completely become, you know, you become a zombie. Right. You become a family zombie. And you just stare at you. You walk straight ahead and you sit there and you wait till it's over.

24:09Sean Fennessey:Do you remember the first one of his that you saw? I think the first movie I saw was, I know the first movie I saw in a movie theater was Dr. Strangelove. That was the first one. The other films I saw were in art houses later in my life. For instance, you know, Killer's Kiss and those in Paths of Glory I saw on television actually for the first time. but I caught up I caught up with Stanley in terms of going on a regular basis to his films right around I would think Clockwork Orange

24:42Bill Simmons:what do you think the equivalent is in 2026 of this movie coming out like a movie where the people watching it could just walk into the movie I don't even know like some of the effects that he has in here were so far ahead of anything else I don't even know how to wrap my head around it I don't know if it's a movie so much It may be the sphere in Las Vegas. Maybe the equivalent of 2001, a Space Odyssey.

25:06Sean Fennessey:Oh, that's a good call. I like that. Just went for the first time. It was fascinating. We were there together. But I mean, Stanley Kubrick with 2001 created, I think, the first 3D experience. The first, not 3D in terms of interocular, but I'm talking about wraparound, three-dimensional sight and sound. and even though the screen did have its boundaries and you could look off the screen, top, bottom, left, right, it didn't matter because it had enough of a fold around the audience that the audience was really enwrapped by the experience in 2001. One was the perfect film for it. And also, 2001 also does something with suspense.

25:48The middle part of that film is as suspenseful as anything Alfred Hitchcock ever made. I feel that film is the most suspenseful movie Stanley ever made. The whole section with Bowman and Poole going out to replace the AE-35, you know, antenna unit. And what happens to Poole and then what Bowman has to do when Hal decides that the human beings are too flawed to really successfully carry this mission through to completion. and has to take over command of that ship.

26:25Sean Fennessey:When you first saw it, did you feel like you grasped all of these details and the construction that he was building? Or was it repeated viewings and trying to study it to understand what he was doing? Because it's a film that can be confusing on first viewing. It was absolutely repeated viewings. I mean, I've seen 2001 countless times. I can't tell you how many times I've sat there beginning to end. I finally saw it for the first time in 70mm in New York City. in 2001 when it was reissued on that special year. But I can watch it over and over again, and I don't claim to have understood it metaphysically or philosophically or even completely when I first saw it, but it kept bringing me back, and the layers continued to expose themselves to me.

27:20And then when I got to meet Stanley, I got to talk to Stanley about the film. I knew enough about it at that point that I didn't sound like a clown talking to him about his own work. But the thing about the picture is it's an anti-emotional film that's truly a deeply empathic picture. But it's kind of anti-emotional. uh pool and bowman you know gary lockwood and caridulia uh are play it like you know they don't they don't laugh they don't smile there's nothing you know uh you know pool is getting a little getting a little he's he's on on a sun deck you know in an adjustable kind of bed and he's he's getting some rays yeah good vitamin c and a recording comes from his mother and father wishing him happy birthday, and he takes it in his stride.

28:15He doesn't smile. He doesn't blink. He's not warm. He just listens and says, and he asks Hal to adjust the chair. Right. You know, in full recline after his parents sing happy birthday to him badly. And so the most emotional, and we've all heard this spoken, but it's true, the most emotional character is Hal 9000. the computer that was that was built in 1992 in i believe urbane illinois yeah and um and and that that was the most emotional character in the entire piece uh the the movie begins with a pretty good character played by william sylvester you know haywood floyd haywood r floyd and he's warm and he's he's commanding and you listen to him he's got that great scene in the kind of uh Hilton, the space station, next to what the wall says, Hilton 5.

29:16And he's meeting with a Russian delegation that he knows. I think the Russian's name is Shmiernov or Shmiernikov, possibly. I don't really know. Talking about, you know, one of their landers was denied landing rights at Klaviyos Moon Base. And he wants to know why. And there's a rumor the Russians hear that there's some kind of an epidemic. But that, of course, is the cover story, which I immediately stole when I made Close Encounters. And used Fozgene Gas as the cover story to clear the civilians away from Devil's Tower so they could have this first communion between an off-world civilization and the human race.

30:03Bill Simmons:So how many movies did this directly influence, you think? Because obviously Star Wars, your movie. Every film. Every film. It's funny growing up with it because the theme of the movie, if you're a kid, is computers are going to take over. Computers someday, watch out. Watch out the moment they get too much. That's true. And it's like, all right. And then in the 80s, we start getting the home computers. This is nice. This is great. And the internet comes in the 90s. This is fun. I can talk to my family. And now we're in this stage. It's like, uh-oh, did we go too far? No. No, and remember the great movie that Walter Parks made called War Games?

30:43Oh, yeah. 1980. And before that, there was Colossus, the Forbin Project. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Where computers, you know, machines were threatening to take over the world. Now, that's an old sci-fi trope, and it's fine because all science fiction eventually comes true. Yeah. It just does.

31:02Sean Fennessey:Yeah, one thing that struck me thinking very hard about this movie was there are dozens, maybe hundreds of sci-fi movies that come before this, but almost all of them, and especially the American films, are all about what will happen when either an alien species or robots come to Earth. And this is not that. This is a kind of post-Earth exploration of life. It's about something completely different. And just to conceive that very small but critical thing makes the movie feel so different than everything that came before it. 2001 made me feel as big as a grain of sand. You know, I felt no more aware.

31:42When I was done seeing the film for the first time, I was no more important than any of the stars in that sky that were, by the way, hand-painted by Doug Trumbull and his team. It made me feel really small in a good way because, you know, you can look up at the night sky and feel pretty small and diminished if you don't have the contamination of a big city spoiling your view. But if you get out into the desert, into the country where there's no city lights and you really see that awesome vista, you see our entire Milky Way, you can get the same feeling every single time you watch 2001 A Space Odyssey.

32:23Stanley created that. And when you think about some of his concepts, They found a monolith buried on the moon and had been buried there for 4 million years. Right away, that makes us all feel like a greater intelligence before we ever had evolved into, you know, a race of Homo sapiens. had already been here once and possibly had seeded the planet with the life that we claim is generated from whatever your belief system is. And so 2001, even if you've seen it 50 times, the movie can still, I think, shock you. Well, it does seem like... Do I sound like an ad to get people to see 2001? No, I love this.

33:17Sean and I are having the best time ever.

33:18Sean Fennessey:This is, yeah.

33:19Bill Simmons:This is what I wanted. Well, it feels like there's two types of people, right? There's the people who are like, I really want to know what's out there. Like, tell me more. Like, let's talk. And then there's the other people who are like, I'm afraid to know what's out there. And I think I'm in that camp. The latter? Yeah. Really? Yeah. The sci-fi stuff has always kind of freaked me out. Wow. And especially this movie. I think I've only seen it twice before I started preparing it for this one because it brings things into my brain that I don't even know if I'm 100 % ready for. You're talking about Dawn of Man all the way through.

33:52Bill Simmons:Where are we going? What happens to this guy at the end? Does he get sent back as this superhero, or is he just dead and he saw the end of his life? You think of this stuff and you can, I don't know, go crazy. Yeah, I'm not a big fan of the next 2010 movie they made. Because I really wanted to be left in my imagination when the star child turns and looks at the planet Earth. I wanted to leave it at that. I just wanted to be able to have that image exist without any possible film follow-up.

34:32Sean Fennessey:It's so interesting, though, because, you know, obviously Clark wrote a novel while they were making this film. Yes. And in the novel, there's all kinds of explanations about why the monolith exists, who put it there, the meaning of the star child, all of this discussion about sort of exploding the nuclear weapons in orbit and the intentions of the film. And I didn't learn about that until after I'd seen the movie many times. And it is a little bit of a letdown to learn details of intention. I think it's mundane. For me, that's mundane because it's a mundane thing to start to explain and start to throw out other plot lines.

35:19Because in the abstract, when the star child turns and those eyes are moving in the puppet's head and almost looks at the audience, it's just a moment that Stanley is saying, we need to start looking within ourselves. We can always be looking to the stars, and ambition and exploration is great, but aren't we missing us? Shouldn't we start, all of us, looking more inward? And that's what that said to me. Not the first time I saw the film, not the 25th time I saw the film, but eventually it started to make, it started to become very clear to me.

35:57Bill Simmons:Is that something you think about when you talk about intention for movies you've made? Because some directors, like Tarantino will never tell us what's in the briefcase, right? He's probably the only one that knows in Pulp Fiction. And then there's other directors. and writers of stuff. They'll be like, oh, here's what I meant. Here's what I think. Like, I like the mystery, but where do you stand on this? I like the mystery too. I don't think I've made enough movies with enough mystery that anybody said, but what did you really mean? Everybody sees my movies and says, I get it, okay. What are you doing next?

36:27Bill Simmons:That's not true. What is the most, what's the most kind of confused people were after one of your movies where they were like, ah, I wonder. I think they were really confused in a good way and kind of a, I think they were kind of confused

36:43Sean Fennessey:at the end of Munich, you know. Interesting. Because I showed the Twin Towers in the last shot. And I think they made a big link. And it wasn't, they should have been confused. I intended the link to what the never-ending cycle of violence, the seemingly unsolvable cycle of violence did eventually lead to. So there's a lot of people talking about the end of that movie, and a lot of people talk about the end of AI, where David gets his mom back from dawn till nightfall, and that's it. And what happens to David? Is he just going to sit in that bed until his batteries run down with Teddy? And then what happens to him?

37:32Is he going to become a deity for all the machines that found him? The super mecha that people often confusingly think are aliens. They are not. They are the result of many iterations and generations of machine-built entities. Sentient, but completely built by other machines. is David going to become a kind of deity or oracle for them? Because humans actually had their hands on David and created David. So David is the first iteration of who they have now become.

38:18Sean Fennessey:That's one of the major reasons I ask you about the link between 2001 and AI, because it's such an echo of the apes touching the monolith and the astronauts approaching the monolith. I told you this film had an effect on me in 2001.

38:32Bill Simmons:it worked yeah Close Encounters definitely leaves you with some questions it does especially like is Richard Dreyfuss's character ever gonna be able to have a normal day ever again and it's like Richard Dreyfuss's character went up in the mothership but then he came back down to make Always With Me he made Always With Me with Holly Hunter so with sequels for the most part I Sean and I are both I think pro sequels when it's like we like these characters like Raiders is a great example it's like I get to hang out with Indiana Jones again awesome but then there's other ones like Jaws 2 like you didn't you didn't necessarily want to be in Jaws 2 you wanted the story to end you never saw it?

39:07Bill Simmons:I didn't see it for 20 years we did rewatchables on it like a mother we had a lot of fun with it it's a very silly movie it's silly and funny they tried to get me to make it and I kept saying we blew the shark up guys we blew the shark up it's unmakeable the shark got blown up and they said well there's other sharks there are no other sharks 26 feet long only Jaws you know we've had this podcast since 2017 and we were trying to figure out all these different structures formats with it and Jaws was ironically the one that we were kind of like we'd been doing it for nine months and me and Sean and Chris Ryan did Jaws and it was like the first one we were like this is the pod this is what it is and one of the things that we loved talking about like the Robert Shaw stories and what he was like on the set and him daring Dreyfus to climb up to the top yeah so that is that story true?

39:58yeah he offered him money but Richard didn't do it for the money Richard did it because Robert dared him and Richard is a very courageous person and Richard is going to do I mean he's Richard stood up to Robert right I think there's a lot of exaggeration that's happened over the years over the 50 52 years Richard and Robert admired each other they respected each other as actors and they respected each other as people but they had a routine like Steve Martin and Marty Short where they go on the road. They're always acting like they're rivals and they're teasing each other and making jokes about each other.

40:37And they had a comedy act in a way. I think it kind of pushed Richard, Robert pushed Richard a bit to the brink. And sometimes Richard pushed Robert to the brink. But you don't do that to other people unless underneath it is an enduring admiration. Right. And respect. And I think that's what gets overlooked after all these years. It serves the movie, though. I'm thinking they really didn't like each other. That's not true.

41:03Sean Fennessey:But it really serves the movie. But it serves the movie, and I was happy about it. Yeah. Because when they got in front of the camera, they knew their business. They knew who they were to each other as Hooper and Quint.

41:14Bill Simmons:It probably also almost served a heart attack for you when you found out Dreyfus is going to climb up 50 feet up in the air. Oh, we stopped him. Yeah, we stopped him. No, Richard, get down!

41:24Sean Fennessey:it's funny though when Stephen was talking about catching a Kubrick movie 30 minutes in and not being able to turn it off which is literally the premise of this show that was the thing I think Jaws is definitely one of those movies for us and for Chris for millions of people where it doesn't if you're in the 8th minute or the 90th minute you're like I just I gotta get to the end I gotta get to the Indianapolis I gotta get to you know I gotta see the shark popping out like I just have to get to those moments that's very it's hard though to make something where you can go back not two times or five times, but 50 times.

41:54Like this movie that we're talking about, it kind of demands several viewings.

42:00Sean Fennessey:Like you were saying, you've only seen it a couple of times beforehand, but if you watch it at different stages of your life, it tells you something different. You learn more about yourself when you watch it. You notice different things, different themes. It's true. And you also get kind of seduced by the amazing musical choices. You know, he hired his composer when Stanley directed Spartacus, Alex North, one of the greatest Hollywood film composers ever, composed a brilliant score for Spartacus. It's one of the greatest scores ever written for a film, especially the main title that Alex North did.

42:30And so Stanley employed Alex to write the score, a film score for 2001, The Space Odyssey, and very quickly threw it out because it turned his movie too much into a movie. And so he went and did what he did best, Stanley, which is needle drops. but look who he went to he went to aram kachatorian he went to penderecki he went to corje ligetti or ligetti yeah and and uh and he went to the he went to both strauss composers and so you've got the blue danube playing when you suddenly go from a proto-human taking a bone and throwing it in the air, and the camera follows the bone into the air, and on its descent, the bone transitions into a space shuttle in the year 2001.

43:26It's unbelievably audacious. And then suddenly you hear the Blue Danube Waltz playing, and it completely relaxes you into accepting the possibility of a future like this one.

43:43Bill Simmons:Also, the most New York thing he did was just use the music. and didn't tell some of those people, right? That became, I think, an issue for a couple of them. They were like, wait a second, my music's in this? My music's in this? I'm Stanley Kubrick. I'm going to use your music.

43:56Sean Fennessey:We'll figure it out later. I couldn't think of another example of a movie before this that just transitions so radically, not just to the future, but to a completely seemingly unconnected phase of the movie. It just feels like we've changed the tone, the style, the color, the location. Everything is just different. and you're expected to not only accept it but understand what he's trying to tell you. It's amazing.

44:20Bill Simmons:Well, I wrote down the timing of the movie. So it launches the modern sci-fi boom, right? They're science fiction movies but they're all cheap and they're just they're making them for less than a million bucks. This is the first one where somebody's like I'm spending real money You're putting serious coin in science fiction. Planet of the Apes

44:35Sean Fennessey:released five days before this movie though which is very interesting Oh my God. that they are so twin together and they both prominently feature apes obviously. But didn't Planet of the Apes outgross 2001? It did. Yeah. but maybe not over time, ultimately. Maybe not over time. But those two movies I see as very connected. Yes.

44:51Bill Simmons:It's a year before Apollo 13 and Neil Armstrong, everything. Yep. It's hitting the psychedelic late 60s, like, perfectly. This is like right as this whole generation, this counterculture thing's happening. Whole generation of young filmmakers, including yourself, all waiting to be influenced by movies like this. So you have that. the 70 millimeter and just like the big awesome this is like the perfect thing to go which is now by the way I don't know if you've heard but it's now made a comeback people going to movie theaters and seeing IMAX and awesome different things it's made for I wrote down nerds, philosophers and movie junkies but somehow became massive and then and then what we talked about earlier about life in the next century what's going to happen like that 2001 is 33 years after they make this movie But when you watch it, it feels like it's 130 years after 1968.

45:46And the movies already outlive some of the sponsors. Pan American Airlines. Yeah, long gone. Airways no longer exist. The other thing, Bell Telephone.

45:55Sean Fennessey:Yeah. No longer exists. Howard Johnson's. Howard Johnson's is still around. I think that's still around in Spotty, but it's still around. But you've got a lot of things that don't exist anymore where the film has outlived some of what I think Stanley assumed would be around for millennia. These like bedrock corporations of our life. I think you assume those are bedrock corporations.

46:16Bill Simmons:So when you're watching this and you're thinking someday I'm going to make movies and then you're seeing the special effects in this movie, like what is, what's going through your brain? Well, I didn't, when I first saw the movie, I didn't notice the special effects. I was in that story. I was part of that experience. So I wasn't picking it apart. I went back to see the movie two weeks later and I went back to see the movie a week after that. So I saw the movie about four times in a month. And it was the second and third and fourth time that I started just marveling at how did they get that on the screen?

46:45How did they do that? And who are these people? Who is Wally Beavers? Who is Douglas Trumbull? Who is Colin Cantwell? I mean, who are these people? And because they all got kind of special effect supervisor credits on single cards. And I just wanted to get to know them. And so, of course, I went to Doug Trumbull when I made Close Encounters with the Third Kind.

47:10Bill Simmons:So then 14 years later, you have little kids riding their bike in the air, and it's like the greatest moment of every kid's generation. It's basically the same thing. Like, oh, my God, how did they do that? This movie has a lot of how did they do that. Yeah, how did they do that? I mean, how did they create weightlessness when he had to back the rover backwards with the exploding bolt door against the pod bay. And then he had to get, you know, he had to basically hold his breath, you know, blow up the, first of all, he mechanically manually opened the pod bay doors because Hal wouldn't do it. Yeah.

47:52And then he had to turn the entire pod around. He had to back the pod up to the entryway and he had to wait for the detonation. and when it occurred, he blew toward camera completely weightless. And what I didn't realize until much later was he was on a wire, but the wire was coming from the camera. Right. Because they didn't have wire removal. They didn't have digital wire removal in those days. Before digital wire removal, we just put, the special effects guys would put a little Vaseline blur where the wire was to make it harder for the audience to see the wires. uh films like war of the worlds the george powell film you see the wires on on the on the triangular you know you know you know you know martian ships but in this case because the wire it was was came right from the nodal point of the lens almost this right to the side of the lens it looked like he was completely weightless and bouncing around like on a bungee inside that place and when stanley built an entire set.

48:56The set turned 360, but the actors just walked.

48:59Bill Simmons:Yeah, wasn't that flight attendant to walk upside down? They actually rotated the entire set. I got the idea in Poltergeist when I produced and had co-written Poltergeist. I wrote the story. I wrote the screenplay. I wanted Joe Beth Williams, the character, to kind of weightlessly fly around a room. We built an entire bedroom, put it on the same kind of vertical carousel, and we just started revolving it. And Jo Beth just had to go like Gene Kelly did in Royal Wedding when he danced on the walls and the floor and the ceiling. Jo Beth just had to understand where she, what down was, where up was and where down was, so she could struggle and traverse the entire room from the wall to the ceiling to the wall back to the floor again, which is exactly how Stanley also got the guys jogging in the ship.

49:54Right. With the, with the Catriterian music plane when they were jogging all around for exercise.

50:01Bill Simmons:Even some of the shots I'd feel like, cause have drifted into other movies. Like the, when, when the thing you just mentioned about him flying around, bouncing around, it's a little like Castaway with Hanks when the plane blows up and he gets sent back. Yes. But I thought of that when I was watching it.

50:18Sean Fennessey:Keir DeLay did not enjoy shooting that sequence. I can't imagine. He only did it twice. For the record, he said that. He did not enjoy it.

50:25Bill Simmons:So here's what Kubrick said about the ending in a 1980 phone interview with a journalist. I read this. Yeah, but go ahead. The idea was supposed to be that he is taken by godlike entities, creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form. They put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him. And his whole life passes from that point on in that room, and he has no sense of time. and then maybe he's transformed into some kind of super being and sent back to earth. We'll only have to guess what happens when he comes back. So he makes it seem like he doesn't die.

50:57Sean Fennessey:That's completely logical, but it's not very fun to think about. Like I, it's, this is an interesting thing where I'm also very interested in directorial intent. Like what did the person who made this, think about it? Why did they do it? I've spent the last 10 years asking filmmakers, like why did you do this? However, with certain movies, this being one of them, I do not want an explanation of that room. I wish that I did not read that. I'm actually quite surprised that he shared that. And it seemed like he shared that maybe shortly after the film had come out. And he was not as concerned maybe about being so mysterious at this particular period of time.

51:34Bill Simmons:Maybe it's 12 years after he made the movie. You make a movie you send out in the world after 10 years, you're like, yeah, fuck it, I'll tell you what happened. I'd like to think that Stanley said that because that's exactly what the movie doesn't mean, what Stanley never intended, and he's throwing the world off.

51:51Sean Fennessey:See, I love that. So he can keep the truth a little more contained. I think he's playing a little chess with us. Oh, he was a great chess player. Matter of fact, the best gift I ever gave Stanley for his birthday was the first computer chess game. Ooh. Because Stanley, I played chess, and Stanley played chess. I would never play with Stanley because I could only make four moves, and he'd checkmate me. But when I found out that in the 80s, they had made a little, you know, tabletop electric computer chess game, I said to Stanley, and Stanley called me back a week later, and he said, couldn't you have sent me a smarter one?

52:33Sean Fennessey:That's a real careful what you wish for scenario, though, given what happens in the movie. Couldn't you have sent me a smarter electronic chess game because you kept beating it?

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54:01Bill Simmons:Visit WeatherTech.com today. Let me ask you about the casting quick because this movie does not have anyone who was a star at the time or became a major star, which is literally, I think if they're making this movie now, they're probably like, you got to figure out if Gosselin can do it or whatever. Kubrick didn't want big name stars. He wanted like anonymous faces, anonymous expressions. That's right. And yet, like if Steve McQueen is in this movie, does it feel different or does he take you out of it? It would take me out of it if Steve McQueen were in 2001, a space odyssey. Yeah. Because I would have too much baggage to unpack from all the movies I've seen, you know, from basically from, you know, the blob to bullet, which came out that year.

54:43Bill Simmons:So he's bringing the Steve McQueen IMDB baggage with them. Yeah. I thought it was really smart to hire Gary Lockwood and Keir Julia. Keir, of course, was brilliant. Frank and Eleanor Perry's David and Lisa. And he had a wonderful career. And Gary Lockwood did some great stuff, too. I really admired both of them. But they were more like astronauts who were a little more, there was more anonymity in casting them. And nobody, William Sylvester was an American living in England working on stage and nobody had seen him in American movies. Because you went both ways with this. Because like in Raiders, everyone knew who Harrison Ford was.

55:23Bill Simmons:You could have gone somebody more anonymous. But in E.T., it's basically people I didn't have a history with. So like I'd never seen Henry Thomas. I'd never seen Dee Wallace. I'd seen because she'd been a couple of things, but you know what I mean? Like you could have put big stars in that and you didn't. No, not really. I couldn't have put big stars in E.T. because, uh, there are, there are no, I mean, Drew Barrymore became a big star about two months after E.T. opened. And Henry did, had a great career. Henry Thomas, Dee, Dee's great. She's a wonderful actor. I love her. But, um, I, I wondered the same kind of anonymity, you know, I wanted the movie to, to be known and I wanted them to be the characters that would become known.

56:05Look, I never thought E.T. would work. I thought E.T. was going to be, I couldn't believe that they gave me$10 million to make the movie because I didn't think it would make any money back. Really? I thought it was going to be, the parents were going to have to, you know, drop their kids off and say, you should go see E.T. It's healthy. It's good for you. I didn't know it was going to take off the way it did. I had no idea. We've also done E.T.

56:29Sean Fennessey:on this show. Have you really?

56:30Bill Simmons:Oh, we've done, you're the leader in directors. Really? We've done nine Spielberg movies. Yeah, you're the leader in the clubhouse right now. I love the Close Encounters one. Oh, thank you. That was a great one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You guys got it. Well, we still have Zodan. That's nice. That's nice to hear. Yeah, that is nice to hear. Yeah, we still have some left in your catalog, which is extensive. Well, E.T.

56:51Sean Fennessey:and this film too, like the star of the films, E.T. and HAL 9000. And Jaws is the star of Jaws. And Jaws, yeah. And Roy Schreider was the star. He had done French Connection and stuff, and Richard had done American Graffiti, and Richard had done The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which was a huge critical hit. And Robert Shaw had done Man for All Seasons, and he was well-known. He had done The Sting before a big, big hit movie, won the Oscar for Best Picture. But it was about three anonymous guys that divested themselves of who they were to all of us publicly and became those characters. I mean, that's the whole thing about good actors.

57:25Maybe even Steve McQueen I thought was a really good actor. I knew Steve pretty well. Maybe Steve could have done 2001. I mean, a good actor is supposed to become an anonymous character based on what the writer and the director have offered us. And so I'm going to take that back. I'm going to back. I'm going to kind of back that up a little bit by saying. I talked you into it. You did. You can use movie stars in a film. And if the movie is compelling enough, you forget the filmography of the character in the film.

57:55Bill Simmons:The reason I thought of him was he was, and we've talked about this, this is a big Tarantino point about how we don't have enough McQueens now. People that didn't really need dialogue but just seem like stars. They just, you could read their faces and something about them. You're like, oh, that guy's a movie star.

58:11Sean Fennessey:Well, also for such a film with so little dialogue, you know, that you need somebody. On the other hand, though, like, he obviously is encouraging these actors to kind of drain some of their inherent charisma. And McQueen could so effortlessly communicate charisma. True. so maybe that isn't what he would have wanted out of one of the astronauts yeah okay i'm gonna go back to your point you're right but 2001 the space honestly but maybe hackman could have done it

58:35Bill Simmons:i don't know yeah hackman could have done it yeah so he was a he was a legendary million takes guy who was that kubrick yes um what's where are you in the because we have like you always hear stories about like clint eastwood's like two takes let's move on to the thing where are you in that in that scale i'm six to eight probably six to eight takes what are you trying to accomplish in the six to eight what are you trying to find out from the actors well i'm i'm it it varies because the number of takes i make it depends on whether i feel that it is all the actors are going to be able to contribute or or is it all i want or need the actors to contribute i have to make that determination on every take.

59:18So I've done 30 takes before. I've done 30 takes with certain actors. But I've also done two takes with certain actors. It all depends. Anthony Hopkins on Amistad came over to me before we shot the movie and he said, I'm going to give you a little insight into how I work. Take one, I'm just getting a feeling about how it's sounding and how it's feeling to me. Take two, I'm going to nail it. Take three, you can use parts of it, but after take three, you're not going to want to use any of those takes. And he told me ahead of time that he's good for about three. Take two. Take two, Tony. We did a couple more takes.

1:00:02We did five, six takes, but Tony is one of the most intuitive actors and his choices are almost gifts. I don't know where it comes from but when he makes a choice and he finds a moment the moment is not a moment that he has thought about a lot it's a moment that comes to him it's intuitive it's right it's in the it's it fits the shoes of the character he's walking in and then that's it he's giving you

1:00:32Bill Simmons:his best giving you i love shit like this like our favorite one ever is nicholson and a few good men when they did all the Colonel Jessup courtroom scenes and he was done. And they were like, all right, now you can go. We can use this stand-in. We're going to get the other one. And he's like, no, no, I'm going to stay. I'm going to just keep doing this over and over again. And they're like, really? He's like, yeah. No, I love it. He loves to act. Also, it's fun. You get actors that have done, you know, 300, 400 performances on stage. They want to do a lot of takes. Right. You know, because every night they bring something else to the theater.

1:01:05They bring something else to the character. They find other ways of expressing things that don't throw the other characters off that aren't going to sabotage the company because they suddenly come up with a better idea than the playwright. They're not going to do that. Or some of them, most of them are not going to do that. But I find that if an actor who's had a lot of stage experience, he really desires more takes. And I'm fine. And if an actor comes to me and says, when I work with Leo, Leo likes to watch his own takes when I did Catch Me If You Can with DiCaprio. he likes to go to the monitor after every take and look at the take back and it gives him ideas and he says let me have one more let me have one more so i might i might do nine ten eleven takes because leo feels he hasn't explored it sufficiently so i will wait for leo to tell me when he thinks he's got it i'm not going to be a big overseer you know as a director and say no I think it was great on take four.

1:02:00We're moving on. If I got a schedule problem, if I'm losing the light and we're racing the light, yeah, I'm going to be a little more, come on. I hope you felt that enough because we're not doing it again. We can't do it again. But short of that, I'm going to let an actor tell me when they think they've given me their best take. Leo grinds tape.

1:02:22Bill Simmons:Who knew? Not surprised. Grinding tape like a quarterback. It's like Patrick Mahomes. And other people are just like, whatever, Stephen, let's, I trust you. You're one of the greatest directors ever. Sometimes I have to, especially in this later area of my career, I've got to sometimes go to an actor and say, you know, if you want another take, you can ask me for another take just because I'm expressing joy that I love what you just did. It doesn't mean that there's something I haven't seen yet that you've, that you know you haven't given yet. So if you, so I have to go to the actors and say, don't be intimidated, you know, because I MADT, tell me that you, and your childhood was informed by it, tell me if you think you have more to give.

1:03:04Don't take cut, print as an answer.

1:03:08Bill Simmons:I don't know if our guy Stanley was doing that.

1:03:11Sean Fennessey:Seemed like he had a different manner. Yeah. In terms of approaching actors. Making the movie, we mentioned, he spent five years developing it,

1:03:20Bill Simmons:got involved with Arthur C. Clark, kept doing it. And I'll say, people, there's a lot of great research on this. There's been documentaries, multiple books. Yes. But he, the most interesting thing of all that stuff, the clip notes, Clark had the book ready to go. And he's like, you can't do it until the movie comes out. And he's like paying him on the side because he was banking on the money from the book. He said, no, no, no, you got to wait. You got to wait until the movie comes out. And then movie came out, releases the book. But that's a lot of trust you got to do. So they worked on the script together and seemed a little tumultuous in the research.

1:03:56Bill Simmons:Between them? Yeah, like working on the script and stuff. I don't know if it was perfect, but it got to where it needed to get to. I don't know anything about their working relationship, but they were both—they were not hive minds. They were not hive-minded. They were single-minded visionaries who I'm sure had alternative points of view and common points of view. But whatever the magic was between Clark and Kubrick, man, we're so grateful to both of them. Have you ever had somebody like that, that you were just like partners on this thing where you had to sketch out this whole thing and spending, you know, months and months and years with one person?

1:04:36I have a deep partnership with Tony Kushner. And I have an equally deep partnership with David Koepp. And it has been just, I'm just lucky that they're on this planet to tell stories with me.

1:04:54Sean Fennessey:Can you talk about the relationship that you have with a writer like that who you return to over and over again? And what happens when they have an idea that you don't like? Or how do you come to a common ground? Well, it depends. I mean, both, they're two completely different people, number one. Tony Kushner is a Tony Award-winning, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and multiple Academy Award-nominated screenwriter. And David Koepp is one of the most commercial screenwriters in Hollywood history.

1:05:30Bill Simmons:Yeah. And they both have different ways of working, which I really love. And I've got to be the flexible one here. I have to be the chameleon that doesn't, I'm not asking them to conform to the way I work. I will conform to what makes them great writers. And so I have to listen more than I talk sometimes. But it's just when you, I've always said, look, I've always said that Shakespeare said it first. He said it best. He said the play is the thing. And without a screenplay, I'm nothing. I'll just take my iPhone and take a lot of really nice still photographs but without a screenplay I absolutely am lost and so for me the writer is the most important person in my life interesting

1:06:18Sean Fennessey:this is a funny one too though because you and Kubrick are somewhat alike in this way all of his movies are based on something he was always on the hunt it sounds like for material for something that could make for a good story but then you have to shape the story in this case he approaches Clark and he has the original idea, but the Clark story, The Sentinel, is a huge inspiration for the idea that he has. And so they take parts of a pre-existing story and then they fold it into one section of this smaller movie. It's this really unique version of story synthesis that, again, like I was trying to find some other examples of a movie like this.

1:06:57Sean Fennessey:There's just not any other movies like this. Yeah, there aren't, there aren't. Can you answer me this? did Arthur Clark's book Rendezvous with Rama happen before? I think it follows. 2001 or did it follow? I think it's 73. Okay. Because that had similar themes.

1:07:13Bill Simmons:Yeah. So, when they were working on this, Kubrick wrote to Clark's agent about his workload because they weren't getting along. And he said, I get up at 7 a.m., hit the studio about 8.15, begin a day that generally ends around 8.30 p.m. I go home, say goodnight to the children, have dinner, work on the novel, and go to bed around midnight. I do this seven days a week. Who said that when? Kubrick. He said it to Clark's book engine. That's like me prepping for pods. It's like you watching the entire Kubrick catalog to get ready. Oh, my God. He really sounded demanding and was just, that was it. He's working on something.

1:07:50Bill Simmons:That's what he's doing. Interesting, though. Polanski asked him if he'd ever taken drugs. And Stanley said, I never had. I never will. not because he had a problem getting high but because he didn't know the source of his creative gift and didn't want to fuck with it.

1:08:06Sean Fennessey:Oh.

1:08:07Bill Simmons:I love that. I love that he acknowledges that he had a creative gift. Yeah. I mean, a lot of filmmakers are shy about even confessing that they have any gift at all. Those who have been really successful, I don't know anybody in my circle. I mean, I paint models with directors at Guillermo del Toro's house every weekend and not once during those model painting and making sessions since anybody referred to themselves as gifted. Right. Well, it's interesting that he knew he had something and probably didn't want to veer from it, both in the structure of his day-to-day life. Maybe he drank some wine.

1:08:45Bill Simmons:I don't know. I don't know. It really sounded... We talk about... I mean, we talk about... We certainly talk about stuff we've done and how much fun it is to make movies and cook up stuff that never existed five seconds ago and suddenly you get an idea. where that idea come from what came from being born and living and experiencing everything and that's where your ideas come from but yeah but we never we never look at each other like we're like i think guillermo del toro is a genius but guillermo will never refer to him that way nor will i ever say to guillermo you're a genius because that's that that's it's gonna make all of us blush i mean that's something that we don't talk about we don't think of ourselves any of us that way we think of ourselves as people that love doing what we do but it's the hardest thing we've ever done there is nothing harder i can imagine except raising children than in my profession there's nothing harder than than directing a movie on the opposite i tell sean i'm a genius all the time that's actually true yes i've been working with that for almost 15 years so they do the premiere for this movie and it goes badly and and kubrick's wife said stanley was tearing himself to shreds.

1:09:52Bill Simmons:He's saying, oh my God, they really hated it. He was heartbroken. He couldn't sleep, couldn't speak, couldn't do anything, was shattered, felt terrible. And then what we talked about, the young people started to come out. Did you ever have an experience like that when you released a movie and you were like, oh my God, they hated it and just went into a spiral? No, I've never gone into a spiral. Usually when I have a movie that opens, I go away somewhere where nobody can find me and where I can't read anything. I try to go away. I go because I, it's my excuse for taking a vacation. The film gets released and then I go somewhere and it's been really therapeutic and it's, it's, it's good.

1:10:31And I know if something's not going well, of course, I know when something is, I didn't before the internet, it was harder to find out before the internet, you had to have somebody call you and, and you know, the person that calls you and says your film's a bomb, it's not a person you're going to want to have dinner with the next week. but now if your film is a huge success or is a middling success or isn't a success at all it gets you, it just osmosis through the current you know, the current social state of the art that we're all enveloped in and but I still can get away and so I don't have to stress out

1:11:08Sean Fennessey:this is a little bit of a confusing one with 2001 because critically it's very split and there are some extremely sharp-elbowed, kind of nasty reviews about the film. Yeah. Holly and Cale, not a fan. Very tough piece. And then there's some that are very laudatory right out of the gate. Yes. And then the movie, it seems like in the first week, it does okay business. Yes. It's not a bomb, but it just does okay. And then it seems like you said, like it seemed like people caught on one week in. Something else really helped that movie catch on. The marketing department at MGM. and I want to give Stanley credit for this but Stanley, I don't think Stanley actually came up with this slogan but the marketing department at MGM put on all the posters and all the billboards 2001 A Space Odyssey the ultimate trip and appealed to the psychedelic generation.

1:12:04Sean Fennessey:Did he anticipate though that this was going to be a drug trip movie when he was making it? I asked him that question and he actually said he doesn't think the movie is a drug trip movie and he sort of is, I'm not saying he's in denial of that because I don't really know if that's the reason that it eventually did so well and people saw it. I think drugs notwithstanding, the film itself is a drug. You don't need to smoke marijuana to get off on 2001 The Space Odyssey. And like me, who's never taken drugs, I went to that movie and that was a drug and to this day it continues to be something that every year I need a little bit of a 2001 fix in me

1:12:49Bill Simmons:well he wins his only Oscar that he won for a movie which was visual effects nominated for director screenplay art direction yes do you remember who wins that year for best picture in 68 yeah no Oliver with an exclamation point oh Oliver Oliver. Yes, Oliver. You mean? We did it in the 60s. We put exclamation points in our titles. Oh, my goodness. Oliver. Of course, that was Carol Reed's first Oscar. Yeah.

1:13:17Sean Fennessey:Yeah. Painful one for me. One of my favorite directors ever. It's one of my favorite musicals ever, though. Is it? It's one of my favorite musicals. I love that musical. Not a fan of Oliver. Don't earn that one out of 4K? No, I don't. I can tell you. Another podcast will tell you why I love that movie. Why I love the choreography, especially by Ona White in that movie. I can talk to you about that later. 10 million dollar budget for for uh 2001 yeah double what they gave him i think he he jacked

1:13:44Bill Simmons:it up they gave him like 4.5 it's like i have about 10 did you ever jack it up higher than that on a movie well jaws was budgeted for 3.5 million and it cost 10 because it went over schedule 100 days they were okay with that trade well no they weren't okay with that eventually they were okay with that the second day of release. But not until. They got you back by making seven sequels. Are we done with Jaws sequels? How many have we had? Four? I think we've had three, right? Three sequels. Was it four or three? Three sequels. The last one was a 3D movie. Jaws 2 was solid. It wasn't bad. Second biggest movie in 1968.

1:14:28Bill Simmons:Was what, 2001? Yeah, that was great. we mentioned Pauline Kael said it was the biggest amateur movie of them all and there's only one hour's worth of a good movie here LA Times guy loved it Roger Ebert four stars we always do a Roger Ebert review when we do the rewatch the film creates its effects essentially out of visuals and music it's meditative does not cater us wants to inspire us enlarge us goes on he loved it we're gonna do some categories okay hold on buckle up you can see but he has photographic recall

1:15:04Sean Fennessey:of the sequences he's gonna do fine in this this is not gonna be a problem so I'm gonna give you some choices for most rewatchable alright

1:15:11Bill Simmons:most rewatchable scene this is the premise of the podcast you're hopping into a movie and it's like oh shit this scene's coming I gotta this is 2001 yeah the most rewatchable scene in 2001 I'm gonna give you some choices Dawn of Man the beginning with the apes leading onto the leopard which holy shit the leopard scene and we didn't even talk about that yet. These are people in monkey costumes, and they're just planting a play-acting leopard jumping out, and this is something that happened? Yeah. Was that... I just couldn't believe it. I thought... I don't know how I thought they did this, but they did it the way...

1:15:47Sean Fennessey:What did they do with a real leopard?

1:15:48Bill Simmons:And a guy in a gorilla suit. Yeah. Well... And Kubrick was like, I hope this works. I hope the guy in the gorilla suit got a stunt adjustment. Unbelievable. So we got that.

1:16:00Sean Fennessey:Such a great choice because it just jolts you awake in the movie.

1:16:03Bill Simmons:We get the ape figuring out that bones can be a weapon leading into the big fight with the two gangs. We get Floyd and the astronauts checking out the buried artifact. Big sit down with the Russians, which is our second summit of two rebel gangs. Jogging scene into the eating scene into the Hal interview. Hal does the lip reading thing. Yeah, that's my favorite scene in the movie. Okay, explain. My favorite scene in the movie is where they, for one thing, these guys should have known that Hal 9000 could read lips. I mean, they should have known that. After all, you know, he holds up a sketch he made and he says, that's a very good rendering, Dave.

1:16:52So he's already comments about Dave Bowman's artwork. Dave's got to realize that he's got tremendous visual acuity. So when they rotated the pod, you know, rotate pod, rotate pod, please, Hal. Rotates around. The best moment in that movie, though, is cutting to Hal's eye. The eye that Peter Jackson, I understand, has in his archive. Oh. What? Yeah, I hear that Peter Jackson has the prop eye.

1:17:25Sean Fennessey:That foretells a response to one of the categories. Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's my favorite scene of the movie because I didn't see it coming. I must say, like Bowman and Poole, I did not see that coming.

1:17:38Bill Simmons:It's funny that they didn't use the NFL coaches calling in the play. Covering the mouth. Yeah, yeah. Holding the clipboard. Again. Their mouth, right? Yeah, yeah.

1:17:46Sean Fennessey:That was their big mistake. That's Bowman's play sheet. What was he? He forgot what they were supposed to be running there. What the formation were they supposed to be using. That's such a great moment of trusting the audience to understand what is happening. Yes. It's not over-explained what's transpiring, but because of the way he shoots the astronauts and then does that cut that you're describing, we get it. We get it in a very clear way. But here's what also happens. He strategically places that scene just before the intermission. So you go black,

1:18:15Bill Simmons:and it says intermission on the screen. For maximum impact. Hal attacks Paul as he's trying to fix the pod. Dave tries to disconnect Hal. Just what do you think you're doing, Dave? That's my other favorite. stop Dave I'm afraid oh I love that Daisy Daisy we get the Stargate approach which is I think in the running for the let's get stoned and watch this later greatest scenes of all time I'm sure that's been yeah that's the reason I go for the I love because I love Cal so much as a character my favorite moment in the movie is a character moment but my favorite visual effect in the film is the slit scanner they use that Doug Trumbull created with Stanley Kubrick who conceived this amazing idea to do this Stargate effect.

1:19:04It's out of control.

1:19:05Bill Simmons:And then the ending would be the last one. It's out of control even now. Yeah. Then the ending, boom, it goes through the stages of life, the music, all that stuff. What do you have, Sean? For most rewatchable.

1:19:14Sean Fennessey:I think one that we didn't mention is when they land on Clavius and are witnessing the monolith and that selfie moment that they're taking. and right before that sonic note hits. You know, that's such a bracing. The film is so quiet at so many times and it jostles you so abruptly. And I always like to watch that scene because he, at a certain point, he puts the camera on the astronaut's shoulders and it turns into a horror movie. It's before Halley even shows up in the movie. It's true. But the movie gets very scary and tense and you described it as like a Hitchcockian thriller. Like it is so, you are waiting to find out what's going to happen.

1:19:52Sean Fennessey:And then we get this sonic hit And then it just cuts into the future and we don't know what's happened. No. That's the other, that's his conceptual audacity, Stanley Kubrick's. You go from the high-pitched emission of a sound that makes everyone hold their space helmets because it's going right through their suits into their ears. And you go right from that, which is hurting the audience's ears, at least in the panthagous theater it was, with the monaural or the stereo sound system they had in those days. It hurt the ears. And then it goes into complete silence. and then suddenly it's quiet, and you see Jupiter mission 18 months later, and then this huge ship comes in, which I think inspired George to do the first shot of Star Wars with that huge Imperial destroyer coming over the top of the screen.

1:20:45Bill Simmons:I think I like when he disconnects, tries to disconnect Hal. I think it's my favorite part, but I will say in the 4K era, I haven't seen this movie in a theater because it was Kim. But in the 4K, just when they're landing on the space station, the detail of everything is amazing. It's amazing. You can see everything they crevice. I just don't understand how they did it. I don't either. Do you remember the scene where the shuttle that takes Haywood Floyd to Clavius, the shuttle, when it lands, it's on some kind of a huge, almost like a mono, it's like an elevator. It's like an elevator. And it starts coming down.

1:21:33Now you see what it looks like. And if you look very carefully, for me, it looks like an Egyptian sculpture of an Egyptian head with the two eyes, which are the windows, the red window lights. But the windows are spaced equally apart. And there's a flat nose in the center, and it looks like an Egyptian head. And there's just something about the way you could anthropomorphize on what all of these designs remind us of, of the ships and the shuttles they were using.

1:22:10Sean Fennessey:And all the opening Dawn of Man sequence and all the space stuff, they're meant to be these kind of reflections of each other, like ancient history and evolution of man. And the original monolith was a tetrahedron. It was more of a pyramid. It was not this kind of large rectangular shape. It was originally that way. And so this idea of the development in Egyptian societies and then what that meant to technology and evolution as people, like all of this stuff kind of mixing together in the story and that whether that's intentional or not, you feel that because you're thinking about all this stuff as you're watching the movie.

1:22:44When I asked Stanley about what I thought was the Egyptian sculpture coming down, Stanley looked at me. He didn't look at me. We were on the phone. And he said, is that what you think it looks like to you? Wow. Stanley sometimes answered questions with questions. He was really interesting about that. We had a kind of real interesting rapport. Yeah, this is how you guys are together. Oh, is that so, Bill? Yeah, yeah.

1:23:10Bill Simmons:What do you mean, Bill? What's the most 1968 thing about this movie? You mentioned Pan Am and the grip shoes and Howard Johnson's, which you say is still around. I'm not positive. I know it might be in middle America, maybe. Maybe somewhere on the East Coast. Yeah. Or in Ohio or Indiana, possibly. What was the other one that doesn't exist anymore? There's... Well, Pan American... Bell Telephone. Bell Telephone doesn't exist anymore. My two would be The Intermission, which just doesn't happen anymore. And then just starting a movie with three minutes of a black screen and weird music. Yeah. Nobody would do that.

1:23:48Sean Fennessey:And it doesn't say overture. It doesn't... No. It doesn't present that we're all going to sit here quietly. It just starts.

1:23:53Bill Simmons:Right. Right. It's such like a 1960s, 70s choice. I just don't ever think that would happen. Because there were these big roadshow epics that made, arguably one of the greatest movies ever made, Lawrence of Arabia, Ben-Hur, followed all that roadshow. You started out with an overture, and then the titles come on. Dr. Zhivago starts out with an overture in a dark theater. The titles go out. West Side Story starts with an overture. And then the titles come on. and one film after the other, you know, that said, this is worth, we're going to give you more bang for your buck. You're paying more money to see these movies than you do in a double bill movie house.

1:24:37Bill Simmons:Yeah. This is a single bill experience. It's one night, like going to a play, you're going to see a movie. It's going to be longer than two hours and there's going to be a prologue of music. There's going to be a long main title sequence. there's going to be an intermission and we're going to pipe you out with a medley of themes as you get up and the lights come up and you leave the theater. Simpler times. It's wonderful. But that's called exhibition. Yeah. That's called presentational style. Right. That's stylish. I miss that. What was your 1968, most 1968 thing about the movie? I have a couple.

1:25:14Sean Fennessey:I mean, Stephen, just the story that he told at the very beginning, the idea of a movie becoming a phenomenon because people are smoking marijuana in a movie theater. Like, that just could not. That's so perfectly 1968. Yeah, true. I mean, the idea that 2001 is a long ways away is very 1968. You know, we are approaching almost double the time. That's the other thing is telling it wrong. Right. We're not even close to that technology. We're not even close. In some cases. The one thing that really strikes me is, so it's a movie made entirely without digital effects in which handmade tools are used to explore a film about man discovering the utility and danger of those tools.

1:25:50Sean Fennessey:There's something fascinating because we just literally don't make movies this way anymore. There are no films of this scale and size that would be made entirely by hand. And the fact that this film, not every film from 1968 still looks this good. If you look at the ape costumes in this movie versus the ape costumes in Planet of the Apes, they're not close. One looks like it's aged badly. The other looks really good. But the space effects and the ship effects and the models in this movie and those hand-painted stars that you talked about, they look as good as any movie that is out right now. It's amazing.

1:26:20And, you know, they had a whole department that did nothing but put black paint on white stars. Because when the Jupiter mission ship passes and starts blocking out stars, it's done in two different passes. They shoot the stars first with a camera moving basically to allow the mothership, let's say, to come into the frame. Kubrick had an entire department of young people that did nothing but blot out the stars with black paint to make it look like it was being occluded by the ship that's entering frame.

1:27:02Bill Simmons:Crazy. I mean, it's a handmade movie, guys. It's a handmade film. And the last handmade film I saw was Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio.

1:27:11Sean Fennessey:yes that's stop motion animation is that's the last vestige of the handmade movie even when we working with aardman at dreamworks uh releasing aardman's movies the last couple movies they made were they looked like they were you know done with uh with you know armatures and and stop motion but the last couple were done on the computer did you have a most 1968 thing about this movie uh the only no the only 1968 thing about this movie was the was the uh how can i say this the trying to find the right word um 2001 had nothing to do with 1968 there was no 1968 when you're watching 2001 the whole year went away whatever the year stood for whatever was relevant about that year for two and a half hours is irrelevant while you're watching or 139 minutes i think i saw the 161 minute version i'm not sure i did but i think i saw in the first week the longer version because he ended up before he cut it to 139 right um but 1968 was completely um obliterated by 2001 we haven't mentioned that either though that this is a very tumultuous time in America, at least.

1:28:29Sean Fennessey:Number one tumultuous. Yeah. A very violent year and very complicated.

1:28:33Bill Simmons:Vietnam is raging. Yeah. RFK, Martin Luther King. And this is like a, it's

1:28:38Sean Fennessey:kind of a retreat from that, but also kind of that call to the self and to think about who you are in the world. It's true. And I think Stanley, look, Stanley knew history, and he watched the news. He knew he was really up on every current event, which is also undermines the fact that people think he was a recluse.

1:28:58Bill Simmons:You know why Sean hates the year 2001? Why? So it was the year Tom Brady got the Patriots starting job and ended up winning six Super Bowls for the Patriots. I do hate that. Sean's a Jets fan. Yeah, I do hate that. Oh, so you're not a Patriots fan. You're not a Patriots fan. I know.

1:29:13Sean Fennessey:I'm a New Yorker. I'm sadly a Jets fan.

1:29:16Bill Simmons:Our next category, don't judge us, but we love the movie Boogie Nights. So do I. It's the Floyd Gondoli Butter in My Ass and Lollipops in My Mouth Award for something I just enjoy. something about this movie we didn't give this one to you Sean and I are going to do ours here's mine according to his brother-in-law Kubrick was adamant that the trims that he made the 19 minutes would never be seen and he burned all the negatives afterwards and this is like a famous thing which I guess I didn't fully know about that he would just get rid of everything because he was so so horrified that anybody would take anything from a movie and put it in another movie he burned all the models

1:29:56Sean Fennessey:He burned all the models in the movie.

1:29:58Bill Simmons:He makes the movie and then destroys all the other pieces of it so it can never come back in any way. This is like me deleting sports tweets. This is crazy. Well, what he's doing is he's striking the sets. Right. Yeah. Do you care about what happens to stuff from your movie after the movie? I save everything. I mean, I have a huge, huge collection of props from all of my films. That's really smart. I save everything. I don't know if you've noticed what's happened in that world. There's the whole prop auction world. But I save everything not to give it to Heritage Foundation to sell. I save everything in an archive.

1:30:30Bill Simmons:So could you have like a little mini Hall of Fame at this point? No, but if the Academy Museum needs anything that I've got, anything in my collection. Jaws is on display right now, right? Jaws is on display right now at the Academy Museum. What's the single greatest thing you have from one of your movies? The single greatest thing. I think, well, it's not one of my movies. The single greatest thing I possess in terms of Hollywood icons is I've got Rosebud, the sled from Wells' movie. I saw it. You saw it? You did see it? I saw it. Oh, in the office?

1:30:59Sean Fennessey:I had a heart palpitation. Well, I moved to New York. As of January 1st, we became residents of New York State, and I moved everything to New York City, so that lives with me in New York. Oh, I saw it at just the last minute then, I guess. Yeah, you did, last minute. What did you have for Floyd? I just love when a movie refuses to explain itself. that we're in a time of ultimate lore where we have to... It's not just that there are wider worlds that are explained and there's rationale for character choices, but a character's specific trauma tends to explore and explain the reason for the movie's existence.

1:31:38Sean Fennessey:This movie is completely disinterested in that. And I wish that we had more... The fact that this movie endures and lets us spend two hours sitting in a room trying to figure out what we think it's about, how it makes us feel. That's one of my favorite things about movies. And is this maybe the single, like the signature example of, well, what do you think at the end of the movie?

1:32:04Bill Simmons:It's the opposite of sports, right? Sports, we have wins and losses. And we could argue about stuff like who is the MVP of stuff like that. This movie, you could come away, like my son's getting into movies and he's watched this four times. He loves this movie. and we've had like real talks about what do you think of the end and just these variables to it that i don't feel like happens as much with movies anymore you almost have to go backwards this this movie has so much room for every single person who sees this movie to personally put their imprimatur on to it it allows stanley loves so much room just like interpretive impressionistic art, even expressionist art, he left so much room for us to draw our own conclusions and make ourselves a part of his vision.

1:32:56Bill Simmons:But then he said, oh, you think I'm done doing this? Here's The Shining. That's right. And it all started over again, didn't it? I mean, Room 237, an entire documentary about how to interpret The Shining. That's absolutely right. I'm not even sure. What's your interpretation of The Shining? Do you have one? Of The Shining? Well, I recreated some of The Shining in Ready Player One. I love that movie. It took me a while to love it. I didn't love it when I first saw it. Do you believe in the... I'll tell you a story about Stanley. I haven't told the story very often publicly. I'll tell you a story about Stanley.

1:33:32When I saw the movie, it came out. I had finished Raiders. I was in England, and I went out to eat with Stanley, and he wanted to know what I thought of The Shining. And because Stanley is, he's not brutally honest. He's really careful about his honesty, but he's honest. He'll tell you if he doesn't like something, and he'll tell you why it didn't work for him. And I said to Stanley, he said, did you like The Shining? I said, yeah, I really liked it a lot. And he stopped me right there. He says, no, you didn't. I said, why? He says, because I can tell you didn't like it a lot. You might have liked it, but you didn't like it a lot.

1:34:14what did you really think of The Shining? And I told him that there were certain things that confused me because I was in love with the book. I loved when the heaters, the generators blew up. I mean, I loved the topiary animals coming to life. There's a lot of things in the book I loved. But I just said, and he said, is there anything that you... Tell me other things that you didn't like. you didn't like it because I didn't include those things that I cut out of the book. And I said, Stanley, I liked the movie. I'm not saying I didn't like it. But would I have liked it more? Had Jack Torrance had an encounter with those topiary animals that were reanimated?

1:35:01Yeah, that would have been a fun set piece. That would have been fun. And Stanley said, what did you think of Jack? And of course, I love Jack Nicholson. He's one of my favorite actors of all time always will be but i said but i thought jack was kind of big he was big the character was big you know he was doing big big things and stanley said okay so you didn't love jack i said no i'm not saying i didn't love jack i'm just saying that jack was was i thought he i thought you let him have his head so to speak you know and he went running not for the barn he went running for the hills. He really expressed himself.

1:35:38It was very kabuki. And Stanley laughed. And he said, okay, I want you to, without thinking, name your top 10 favorite actors of all time. Go. And I reeled off 10 names. And the second I got to the last name, he said, where's Cagney? I said, what, Stanley? He says, where's Cagney on your list? if James Cagney isn't at the top of your list, you're not going to understand what Jack and I did with his character. You're not going to get it. If you did not put Cagney at the top of your top 10 list. End of conversation. That was it. Jesus. James Cagney.

1:36:19Sean Fennessey:That's great. But do you see the wisdom of that? Yeah, of course. I mean, that's brilliant. But were you listing more naturalistic leading men? I don't even remember the names. that I said because he had me on the spot. I mean, he was, look, Stanley is witty and he's funny. The other thing that people don't give him credit for is he's got a devilish sense of humor and he's a really funny guy. He's a great laugher. So, but he kind of pushes you in that kind of a way. So when Stanley asked me a question, when he says jump, I don't say how high.

1:36:53Bill Simmons:You know, right. This episode is brought to you by Spectrum Business. Fast, reliable internet. means everything for your business. And even this podcast. That's why I trust Spectrum Business to keep companies of all sizes connected with internet, advanced Wi-Fi, phone, TV, mobile services, plus 24-7 US-based support. Millions of business owners already trust Spectrum Business. So visit spectrum.com slash business to learn more. Restrictions apply. Services not available in all areas. This episode is brought to you by Hulu. Praised as Hulu's fresh spin on crime comedy, Deli Boys returns with an all-new season.

1:37:30Bill Simmons:Philly's favorite corner store criminal family, the DARS, are back with more money, more problems, and more stars, including Fred Armisen, Andrew Reynolds, and Kamail Nanjiani, former BS podcast guest. The Hulu original series, Deli Boys, is now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus for bundle subscribers. Terms apply. What's age the best is the next category. What is it? What's age the best? So we've talked about some of the stuff, but what do you think is the single thing that's aged the best from this movie? What is aged the best? Aging like a fine wine, like all these years later, wow.

1:38:08Bill Simmons:How 9 ,000 is aged the best? I think that's the correct answer. I agree. That's number one. This is probably the easiest what's aged the best we have.

1:38:15Sean Fennessey:There are hundreds of things in this movie, though. Oh, yeah. I have a bunch. Ripped through a couple. I mean, one, it established the sci-fi blockbuster as a Hollywood staple. Yep. Video phones, voice print identification, artificial intelligence, video tablets, zero gravity toilet, the growing concern or belief that alien life exists, relevant to your film, the presence of brands everywhere. Also, I've thought of Minority Report when I was watching this as well, something you did in that movie. The Kubrick, one thing that really sticks out to me is that foreboding and mysterious style that a movie without a narrative engine can still draw you in has aged very, very well.

1:38:55Sean Fennessey:And also, famous people watching videos of themselves when the astronauts are watching the news segment about them and the interview with them, which is such a social media thing right now. I thought that that was so clever. And him kind of seeing the future on that one in particular made me laugh.

1:39:13Bill Simmons:You had a lot of what I had. I also would add a mysterious government cover-up of something unsettling. Sagewell. A movie that pulled off no dialogue in the first 25 minutes or the last 23 minutes just as an achievement seems I can't imagine anyone even trying to pull that off now. Not just for Fifi. Right. Space Oddity from David Bowie came from this movie. That's right. The solo astronaut space traveler movie gimmick which then eventually became The Martian Project Hail Mary like just sending people out by themselves. Yes. I feel like this probably invented this. This story has aged the best.

1:39:53Bill Simmons:Kier DeLay said that during the New York premiere all these people walked out, including Rock Hudson, who left early and was heard to mutter, what is this bullshit? Will someone tell me what the hell this is all about? Rock Hudson just furious. The Who contacted Kubrick about directing Tommy after this movie, and he said no because he was doing a Clockwork Orange. Brilliant of the Who to tap into Stanley for that. Well, they were upset, so the next album they did, who's next was them urinating on a monolith. That's right. That's the best. Using classical music over a real score. And then we got to talk about the moon stuff that ends up circling back in The Shining, but the way he films outer space and then we go to the moon the next year and then the conspiracy starts that he might have filmed the moon landing and it didn't happen.

1:40:49Bill Simmons:And then he has fun of it in The Shining and Danny's wearing an Apollo 13 shirt. Right, right. And all these people think he filmed the moon landing. What are your thoughts on this? Well, because Stanley was always, he was great inside of a joke. He was terrific in creating, putting himself inside of any kind of what you could call a, you know, a conspiracy theory. And I think Stanley really enjoyed, I didn't, we never talked about this, Stanley and I. So you think he loved that people thought this and he's like, I'm leaning into this to fuck with them. I think he loved the people thought that the moon landing was fake and Stanley directed the fake moon landing.

1:41:27I think not ever, having spoken to him about this, knowing Stanley as little as I do, or as much as I do, I think he would love that.

1:41:36Sean Fennessey:There are sequences in the movie. The moon surface, Clavius landing, where you're like, this is a little too close to the imagery that we saw one year later. It definitely feels like it is inspired by him. Now, he also, at least what I read, was kind of slavish to accuracy and details of what certain things would have been like, too. And we did obviously have a lot of footage of space at this point. So, he's working with materials to replicate something that he thinks is real. But it is eerie if you look at the Aldrin and Armstrong photos, especially the high-resolution photos that we see now that have been sort of, like, developed in the aftermath of the landing.

1:42:14Sean Fennessey:How similar they are to a lot of stuff in the movie.

1:42:15Bill Simmons:my hottest take is we did land on the moon but they also had Stanley filmed or used spaced up just because they couldn't have actually shown video and they did the hybrid model great shot Gordo award for the most cinematic shot named after the great Gordon Willis we call it great shot Gordo oh that's a good title for that yeah I've heard that before I have the ape in slow motion learning how to use a weapon and how he filmed that would be my favorite what do you have Sean?

1:42:44Sean Fennessey:I think the match cut that Stephen described earlier is probably the number one answer. The one I like the most is the floating pen and I liked learning about how they did that shot. You never really cracked it. I know how they did the shot, but you just took my answer. Oh, okay. That was what I was going to say. The floating pen was one of my favorite shots. They simply put a very large piece of circular glass and the pen, you can tell when the flight attendant takes the pen off, she doesn't take it out of midair. It pops into her finger because it's been stuck with a very light tape or a little light adhesive onto the glass.

1:43:25But the glass is slowly turning on a motor. It's not hand turning because that would be uneven. You could tell that it was a human turning it. So there's a little motor turning the glass.

1:43:35Sean Fennessey:Apparently, double-sided tape had just been invented. They adhered it with double-sided tape. But let me tell you my other favorite shots. My other favorite shots is everything at the Donner Man involving the first time ever front projection screen were used to make you think you were actually outside. You never saw a process shot like that before in the history of movies. stanley got this scotch three sort of 3d um a front projection material that when you put a projector right next to your camera lens it can't be too far away from the center of your camera lens but when you put another lens next to this lens and you project that image probably taken with a hazelblath or some very large negative strip of film and those were still photographs those weren't movies it was just still photographs of sunsets of different parts of the world and when you project that against the screen its return is so bright you can almost with a light meter uh read an f11 or an f16 just from the return of that light it made and that's why when the when the um when the tiger or the the leopard the leopard yeah you can see the you can see the front projector reflected in the leopard's eyes that thing that should toyance that's inside the eyes of the leopard that is actually the leopard got in the way of the light you see that in the forest outside when you take a light and you see animals running around the forest well that's that's the only giveaway during the dawn of man that there was some technique being used to create those vivid backdrops it's such a happy accident because then it makes you wonder why there's something so animated about that leopard you know it's like they have something up on these apes, which are humans in ape costumes.

1:45:31Sean Fennessey:Right. Exactly. So when I made Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I got the same front projection. Doug Trumbull brought that front projection material into the studio.

1:45:42Bill Simmons:Yeah. And there's a couple scenes when I have my actors against the front projection material, and Doug Trumbull and Richard Yuricich and his whole special effects group had to generate the effects first and then project the effects it was mainly lightning in clouds and that was done in the cloud tank in close encounters we had a cloud tank and it made very realistic clouds and we put lights behind inside the water behind the actual paint that was being jetted with great force into the water which creates cumulus clouds and we had lights behind it and when he photographed that and 65 millimeter we had a 65 millimeter 70 millimeter projection onto our front projection material and it made it look like it was we're really outside during a distant uh electrical

1:46:33Sean Fennessey:storm i think sean's gonna explode i'm in heaven yeah i think sean just passed out but i learned so much from doug i mean doug trumbull taught me so much about special effects which of course he

1:46:42Bill Simmons:and stanley had devised you have a hall of fame great chuck order award winner um brody the got the beach trombone shot yeah that was which you can recreate at the academy museum right now you can't you could do that with an iphone your own iphone yeah yeah when did you think of that one i i thought of it i didn't even realize it had been done before because i don't remember it being done before but later brian de palma was the one because he knows hitchcock better than anybody brian said you stole that from vertigo i said no i didn't he said yeah Hitchcock did that in Vertigo. That's easy. You start with a hundred millimeter lens, you put it on a dolly, and as you're dollying in, you're zooming back.

1:47:24Come on, that's been done before. But I didn't know that. I did it first in Sugar Land Express, not as effectively, when the snipers are getting the bead on the police car with my main principal characters approaching the house where supposedly the foster child is, Lou Jean Poplin's child is in the house. I did it the first time there. It didn't work as well. And then I was able to use it effectively in Jaws.

1:47:49Bill Simmons:Wow. Quick ones. Sarah Connor Award for Wood Modern Technology ruined this movie. We've talked about it. I think one of the things that makes this movie great is they had to think outside the box. They did. You know, so it wouldn't ruin it, but I think it would hurt the legacy and the greatness. Today's technology? Yeah. You say if we had the same digital tools that we have today? I just feel like part of the legend of this movie is it's like watching somebody make a world-class meal based on like some leftovers and the leftover groceries. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like the stuff we had back then.

1:48:24Bill Simmons:And now if he had all this AI stuff, yeah, it would be cool. But I don't know. Would you have people dotting out stars? No, you wouldn't. You'd lose that stuff. If you used AI, you would unemploy about 400 people. Wouldn't have jobs. Right.

1:48:41Sean Fennessey:Yeah. Yeah, I, it's funny, you know, Project Hail Mary's come up a couple of times and they shot that movie as very practically, relatively speaking, they built sets and they shot on sets, which is not common for movies like this nowadays. And I hope that there's like a little bit of a turn back to that because the practical stuff is what's like, the movie doesn't really make sense as an idea if it's just made with digital effects. Like that's part of what I think one of the reasons why it endures and feels so different from other things is that there's so much handmade. Same goes for Star Wars.

1:49:11Sean Fennessey:I mean, when you watch A New Hope, everything is tactile. You feel like everything feels worn and lived in and real. And that stuff matters. It's just there's a lot of virtue in analog. When you look at TCM as much as I watch it, you see a lot of virtue in, like in, for instance, San Francisco. You see the San Francisco earthquake, the great quake. And you see it being done in analog. meaning they actually had to build big models, probably an inch and a half to the foot, and have them collapse. When you see the Clark Day movie about the Chicago fire, they had to burn several acres in order to make it appear as if it was all the Chicago burning after Mrs.

1:49:57O 'Leary's cow knocked over the lantern. You know, I watched those films in the context of the age and era they were produced, but I appreciate them as much as watching effects in a modern-day Inovatar, let's say today. I appreciate those handmade effects as much as I appreciate the genius digital motion capture work that Jim Cameron's done consistently with his Avatar films.

1:50:24Bill Simmons:Yeah. Kid Cudi Pursuit of Happiness Award for Best Needle Drop. That has to be the opening credits. Oh, by far. You named it. That's it. Unbelievable. Come on. Dun, dun. The Sean Fentasy Award for Stealth Homage that gives every movie nerd a criteria orgasm. Yes, this award is named after me.

1:50:44Sean Fennessey:It's a joking award for us.

1:50:44Bill Simmons:Yeah. And what is the category? It's your category, but what is it again?

1:50:48Sean Fennessey:It's an homage that's in the film to a previous film or an aspect of film history.

1:50:53Bill Simmons:That only a psycho like Sean or you would notice. There's a great one in this one. Okay, let's hear it.

1:50:58Sean Fennessey:I will say that this movie might be number one for the inverse of this award, which is people who have borrowed from this movie. And that there are several, there are inspirations, there are, you've talked about some of them, some of them in your films. There are parodies up the wazoo of this movie. It's appeared on The Simpsons several times. Mad Magazine, Airplane 2. But there's one in the film that has Kubrick winking at himself, which is that in Dr. Strangelove, Major Kong says, fire the explosive bolts. And in 2001, the entry hatch sign reads, caution colon explosive bolts. Oh. Which is his own little.

1:51:36I never saw that. You know something? look at Sean

1:51:40Bill Simmons:teaching you about movies hey guys I'm just saying that I'm having such a good time talking to both of you about this movie but that one insight just makes this day for me that's great it really does best moment in the history of the category

1:51:55Sean Fennessey:a criteria orgasm right there we just saw it

1:52:00Bill Simmons:I only have a couple what's age the worst we mentioned the intermission which nobody would do anymore especially it just would never happen So this is a good one. They mentioned BBC 12. There were only two BBC channels at the time. A little Kubrick joke. Kubrick joke basically saying that England would surpass America with the number of channels in the future. So I researched how many BBC channels there are now in 2026. How many are there now? We have BBC 1, 2, 3, and 4. We have BBC News, BBC Parliament, CBBC, which is children's content. CBB's preschool programming, BBC Scotland, and BBC Alba, which is Scottish Gaelic language service.

1:52:45Bill Simmons:So only 11. So he was wrong. Sorry, Stanley. Missed it. There's still time. By one. One short. Sorry, buddy. You mentioned the sequel as a What's Age the Worst. Couldn't agree more. I don't really have any other ones.

1:52:58Sean Fennessey:Well, just the idea that we could shut down AI, I think maybe, under some debate right now. You know, the whole thing about shutting things down, You know, when I made Ready Player One, I had a great time making, it was a hard movie to make, but I had a great time with the outcome of the movie in terms of what it said at the very end. You know, after all this stuff and the kids win the Oasis, they, you know, they get the Easter egg and they're happily ascones, kissing in a chair. And the narrator comes over and he says, and furthermore, they're going to close the Oasis two days a week. so people can really connect with each other and get on with normal lives.

1:53:38That was the whole reason I think I made that movie, to basically say that sometimes we have weekends, weekends where we're supposed to take our weekends off, but there are no weekends in terms of the amount of demand on our time and our lives. Right. And demanding that we make our identities known and shared with strangers. Why can't there be one or two days that we take off from that and get back down to having picnics outside somewhere?

1:54:10Sean Fennessey:That's a great idea. I wish I could just put my phone in the ocean, but I can't. My kids are going to hate me for that so much. When they hear this, when they listen to this podcast, and they hear that, say, Dad, you are a square.

1:54:24Bill Simmons:The Steven Seagal Award for Most Unbelievable Anecdote from the actual film shoot. So they had a dead horse painted like a zebra for the shot of the leopard next to the zebra. And apparently the horse had been dead for a few days and was really starting to smell. That was the thing that happened during this movie. Casting what ifs. Kubrick wanted Sterling Hayden for Floyd and MGM vetoed it. Yes, I know. I know. They wanted Henry Fonder, George C. Scott, landed where it landed.

1:54:53Sean Fennessey:I read Holden as well.

1:54:56Bill Simmons:Yeah, I read Holden also. Yeah, I read that too.

1:54:58Sean Fennessey:Which is... Holden would have been good for Floyd. Floyd, that's what I was thinking too. But Holden would have been like Janet Leigh in Psycho. You know what I'm saying? He never reappears in the movie again. And it would be sort of front-loading a movie that really needs to start with a clean slate.

1:55:17Bill Simmons:He looked at a bunch of actors, famous ones for The Moonwatcher, The Lead Ape, including your guy Robert Shaw. That would have been interesting. Now, where are these facts from? This is why they're half-assed internet research. They're just on Wikipedia and random articles about the movie. So we've learned as the years go along, we never totally know what to believe, but we talk about them anyway. Okay, so will you wink at me if it's urban legend? Just give me a little. We don't know. That's the thing on the internet. You never know. What's the biggest urban legend about Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T.?

1:55:53Bill Simmons:What's the one that's taken hold that you're like, Like, why is that a thing people think? The biggest urban legend that is occurring right now involves my movie coming out, Disclosure Day. Yeah, June 12th. I have made this movie in concert with, you know, deep state, you know, factions that are hoping this movie is going to be... I remember there's a moment in 2001 A Space Odyssey where he talks about the grave dangers of social dislocation and that my movie is going to somehow, you know, make it easier for people to accept the fact that we have been actively interacting in secret with extraterrestrials for eight to nine decades.

1:56:44Am I starting to believe that? Yes, I am. However, I am not. I made this movie independent of any influence except what I know and what I've been following for the last seven decades.

1:56:57Sean Fennessey:So you're saying you didn't do it with them, but maybe they have a point. Perhaps they do. So not working with Deep State, but you see it.

1:57:05Bill Simmons:Kubrick rejected Martin Balsam for Hal. Oh, Martin Balsam. Yeah, but he's a little New Yorkish. Yeah, I can see that. And then Pink Floyd was approached to perform music and they turned it down due to other commitments. Yeah. Wow. I find that hard to believe. Missed out on that one. Yeah, that's on the fringe of I'm not sure how true that is. Dion Waiter's award, so that's like somebody who's not the star of the movie but comes in hot for like 10, 15 minutes. I think it's Hal. I think Hal's the... Who do you have?

1:57:38Sean Fennessey:I have Daniel Richter as Moonwatcher, the chief ape. Because that's an amazing performance that he gives in that suit. I don't know. I think it's Vivian Kubrick who wants a bush baby and whose father calls her squirt.

1:57:52Bill Simmons:She is my number two on my list. Recasting couch, director, or city. So we wouldn't put any name actors in this. No, we wouldn't. Okay, no. Half-assern at research. I'll blow through some of these really fast. It's interesting that one of the astronauts that Hal kills is named after my cameraman, Janusz Kaminski. Kaminsky is one of the astronauts I was a soccer dad with him for years were you really? we thought it was so funny with Bruce well no it was his daughter Helena my daughter's always teammate for years and we always thought it was so funny he would take like photos at the games of these 7 year old girls they were like the most beautiful new soccers you've ever seen of these photos that he would take when I first met Janusz I don't know what I said to him.

1:58:47I said, hey, do you know you're in 2001, A Space Odyssey?

1:58:50Bill Simmons:Right. Well, he would disappear because he was going to make movies with you. That's right. Exactly. Yeah, he's not here. He should make movies with me.

1:59:01Bill Simmons:So Kubrick was so dissatisfied with the script that he approached some other writers, all of whom turned him down. On 2001? Yeah. Wow. Because he was disloyal. There's a lot of stuff about this, about him and Clark. He's a great writer himself, as you know. Stanley writes a lot of his own movies. 205 special effects shots in this movie. Now, you know what a paltry amount of shots that is? Compared to a streaming movie on Netflix? Yeah. Today? 205, a lot back then. Not a lot now. Not a lot now. Now we're talking thousands. Not a lot now.

1:59:33Sean Fennessey:I mean, one of the reasons for that is because so many of the shots are so long. There's just not a lot of cutting in the movie. A lot of sustained shots. So if he is getting a special effect shot, if they put a tremendous amount of time into what you're looking at and holding on it. But remember what Stanley was trying to create. He was trying to lure us into a, I guess, not a heightened state. He was trying to lure us into a kind of state of mind where we're going to be relaxed and we'll start to accept anything. I mean, you know how long, I mean, I know he cut about two minutes from the jogging when Poole was jogging in his daily workout.

2:00:18He cut about two minutes out of that jog. What makes the jog work, though, is the Cacheturian score. Yeah. You know, and it just lulls you. You don't lean forward at that moment watching 2001. and when you sit back and you, I was thinking, how long is this shot going to go on? And what's the point of it? And will there be a point of it? And when there wasn't a point of it, the joke was really on me because the point is he's creating a state of mind for the audience to start to accept things that are going to be a little more conventional in terms of suspense and betrayal and all of the other great neat things that happened in the movie.

2:00:56Patience.

2:00:58Bill Simmons:Yes, patience. So Samsung battled with Apple about the origin of the computer tablet. And one of their cases was this movie. They were like, look at this. This was 1968. You didn't invent anything. Look at that. Wow. It goes way back there. So that happened. Only a cut. There was a stuntman that they forgot to put air holes in his suit and he almost got asphyxiated. That happened. The Ferris wheel cost$750 ,000 that you mentioned. That's a big line item on a movie that costs only$10 ,000. Yeah. Well, a lot in its era tends a lot in 167. Then Ligeti's permission was not granted for this movie, and he didn't know his music was in there, and they had to settle it after that.

2:01:37Bill Simmons:Oh, wow. There's a lot more. I mean, there's been books written about this movie, documentaries. There's been multiple Kubrick books, so you can dive into it if you want. Apex Mountains. So this is something we do where we try to figure out what the actual apex of somebody's career was where they had like the most juice possible. Where it was like, not only were they at the peak of their powers, but they're at the point of their career where they could have done anything. That's like the ideal.

2:02:06Sean Fennessey:I have lived to see you explain this to Steven Spielberg. This is incredible.

2:02:10Bill Simmons:I would say, so for you, you had multiple apexes, but in 82, when you have E.T. and Poltergeist, at that point, you could have probably gone into any studio on the planet and been like, I'd like to do this. and been like, here's a check, Stephen. That's an example, right? So for Kubrick, okay, I'm with you. I'm trailing behind you, but I am behind you still. So for Kubrick, what was the moment where he had the most of everything going at the same time as the director? Was it this movie? Yeah, I would say this is the movie where he had it together. This is the movie that made Stanley famous, not just among critics and journalists and people that write about film, but this is the movie where the public discovered him.

2:03:03Would you put space movies for the apex of space movies? Well, this was certainly the big bang for every single movie about serious science fiction, where science is being emphasized. Even Jurassic Park, where science creates the credibility for an audience to believe that, yes, dinosaurs can come back.

2:03:25Bill Simmons:We have a category called Cruise or Hanks. You've worked with both. That's a great category. You know both of these guys. Yeah, I love them both. What's the question? If Cruz, you had to have Cruz or Hanks in this movie, who would you pick? Hanks. It has to be Hanks. Because he made Apollo 13. Right. He did, he's the astronaut guy. Sean can't believe I asked you this. It's wonderful. If he could be an astronaut, Tom, he would give it all up to be an astronaut.

2:03:53Sean Fennessey:I think the answer is both. I think Bowman is Cruz. You could have had each of them. And I think Floyd is Hanks.

2:04:00Bill Simmons:Can I give you Cruz as the lead ape? How amazing that would have been? Cruz just like throwing himself into it. A very physical performer. Teaching himself how apes walk for like nine months to prepare for ten minutes. The thing is, I think it would have been cool for any of the movie stars to look, Daniel Craig was a storm trooper in Force Awakens. Right, right, right. We have another category. It's called Spielberg or Scorsese that we have to do since you're here. Okay. I mean, I think it's you for this one. Wait, I got to clear my palette for this one. No, I think you won this one. Wait a minute.

2:04:34Bill Simmons:Hold on. What was the biggest battle we had with that category? Usually, it's pretty apparent.

2:04:39Sean Fennessey:Oh, of all time? I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, this one is a no-brainer. This one's an awesome one.

2:04:45Bill Simmons:Pickin' Nits. So, this is where we pick little nits in the movie. Okay. The ape costumes in 4K. Sure. It feels a little 1968-ish. Like, you could really... A couple times, it feels like, yeah, that's probably a guy there. But, I mean, for 1968, amazing.

2:05:01Sean Fennessey:We accept that they're not real apes. But also, there were apes in Planet of the Apes just a year before, coming out the same year as 2001 Space Odyssey. So, it was the year of the ape. And by the way, they're not apes. They're proto-humans. Yeah.

2:05:17Bill Simmons:Would Hal actually be able to read their lips? Are we... Like even now in AI, would we actually get there? Absolutely. You think so? Yeah, I think that's a walk in the park for AI.

2:05:27Sean Fennessey:They're reading our lips right now. Hopefully not.

2:05:30Bill Simmons:The film never actually tells us what year it's set. So is 2001 when they go and they get the crate, when they're taking the selfie and they get the crazy noise? Or was it 18 months later? Which year was 2001? Well, I've given that a little bit of thought. I think 2001 is the, it's not a year. I don't think it's year specific to anything. I don't think it takes place in a year. 2001 is about the millennium. So it is. So it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Okay. I had one more, but did you have. I love that answer. That's a great way to think about it. You just solved it. Did you have a nitpick before we go?

2:06:10Sean Fennessey:Yeah. If Hal's so advanced, why can't he anticipate Dave's move to remove his central function? Yeah. You know, Hal's flaws, I think, are often overlooked. And like the question of, did he react this way and turn against the astronauts because of some sort of emotional crisis that he has because he feels fallibility around this plan? Like, what is actually the reasoning for that? And then how does he not anticipate after that, that obviously Bowman is going to try to take him offline? There's some questions around that. A little overrated. I can join you in that nitpick a little bit. When Hal knows that Bowman is inexorably approaching his last mile, the green mile, he's going to be executed.

2:07:05Why doesn't Hal turn off all the lights? Why doesn't Hal—not everything has manual override. That's true. Why didn't he turn off the lights? Why doesn't he close certain ports where there's no manual override controls? And I have an answer for that. I think that Hal somehow knew, being so sentient, that he was a bad boy and needed to be severely punished.

2:07:29Bill Simmons:Hal wanted to be shut down. It's like Grady saying to Jack Nicholson what he should do to his children. Right. Because Grady did it to his. That's right. He needs to correct them.

2:07:44Hal knew he needed to be corrected. And at that moment, Bowman was Jack Torrance. Wow.

2:07:53Bill Simmons:Love it. That was amazing. Did you have another nitpick from this? No, it's almost a perfect film. Okay. I had one more. This movie was rated G? What were we doing in 1968?

2:08:06Sean Fennessey:What's really in it, though? I mean, what's... We were talking before we started recording. It's scary. Could you bring a kid to see this movie, I guess? Would you bring, I don't know, five? She's going to be five. No, I wouldn't bring a kid to see 2001 A Space Odyssey, even today. I'm going to go PG for this one. But I'm not sure what that was about. I think the film, I would have gone PG for it. Yeah, it's a PG. The most violent thing in the movie is probably the tapir being beaten in that little quick cut with the bones, right? I mean, obviously we see Poole floating and being killed, but, you know.

2:08:37Don't forget, Jaws was PG. So maybe 2001 should have stayed a G. by comparison if you're grading on the curve of that era between 65 and 75 Sean's been nervous for two hours

2:08:47Bill Simmons:and I'm gonna do my imitation of Quint getting chewed to death I'm ready for it I'm not doing it I'm ready just do it I can't just do it if he ever comes back I'll do it the second time I will come back for certain if you come back and do Jaws with us I will do Quint I'd love to do Jaws with you that'd be fun alright he just promised just one Oscar who gets it Kubrick best director for director best director would you go best film or best director I would go Best Film and Best Director. Just two Oscars. Probably an answerable question. I would also have given Doug Trumbull an Oscar along with Stanley for special effects.

2:09:21Bill Simmons:Okay. Probably an answerable question. You mentioned this. Why did Hal break down? This is a big part of the dialogue about this movie. Was it legitimate? Was he faking it? Kubrick, we know not to trust him whenever he talks about this movie, but he said Hal had an acute emotional crisis because he could not accept evidence of his own fallibility. So my take is that he had these two things, right? He's supposed to be all knowing everything, but he's also smart enough to know when he's being lied to and he's basically lying to them about the mission and these two things kind of short-circuited him.

2:10:00No, the reason I think that Hal did what he did was Hal was a narcissist. He was a complete narcissist. Listen to how he brags about his product, his design. He brags about where he was born. He brags about how smart he is. He brags about the fact that no 9 ,000 computer has ever made a mistake. He's a narcissist.

2:10:28Sean Fennessey:He's so smug when he wins that chess match. Good game, Dave. You know? I think that the intention, I think that's right. I agree with you. and also that he is obviously inspired by his creator. I mean, the narcissism of the human race and these machines could only come from us who built them. That's right. Because you are a mirror of who created you. The creature, certainly in Guillermo's movie, which I think is the best Frankenstein movie ever made, the creature was a reflection of Victor. Was Victor.

2:11:04Bill Simmons:Unanswerable. The first shot of the three astronauts we see, sure looks a lot like the moon landing, as Sean mentioned. It's still a tiny bit unanswerable. Do you have any? I have one good one. Do you have any other ones?

2:11:15Sean Fennessey:I mean, I think who delivered the monoliths is like the ultimate question of the movie. Yes, it is. That's the most unanswerable thing. That's a definitely unanswerable question.

2:11:24Bill Simmons:Right. All right, here's my good one. Did this movie ruin the name Hal? I don't know. Because we had Hal Holbrook, Hal Ashby, and Hal Linden. We have no... When was the last time you met anyone under 40 named Hal? Do you know any Hal's? I don't know any Hal's. Could this have been the end of the Hal's? I think Hal was such a villain and so scary in this movie, that was it. Hal was out. You know, I love a Hal, though.

2:11:50Sean Fennessey:I love when Falstaff is calling him Hal. You know, I love Henry or a Harold can be a Hal. That's a great name. It's a great nickname. No Hal's. I don't, I never even thought to name one of my boys Hal. Just gone. Not because of It was too It was too tied to the

2:12:08Bill Simmons:Computer and the whole thing Alright The one piece of memorability We'd want from this movie Um Quick story on this Gene Siskel Loved this movie And he really wanted the monolith And he asked Kubrick About getting it And Kubrick said It didn't exist And that They threw it away Oh And it's gone Wow Um But what would be your answer for this? Well I I actually I actually bought the one piece of memorabilia I wanted from this movie.

2:12:37Sean Fennessey:That's never been uttered on this show before. Yeah, you just trumped us. I have I have David Bowman's spacesuit. Which I've donated to the Academy Museum. I don't possess it. Sean just passed that again. I bought it and I donated it to the museum. Wow. That's good. Well, you said Peter Jackson owns Hal's Eye. I understand Peter Jackson owns Hal's Eye. That would have been my answer. But see, there's all these stories of him burning all of these things after they finished the shoot. And you said that's him striking the set. But they make it seem as though he was burning costumes and all the models and everything.

2:13:16Sean Fennessey:So how did some of these things survive? To me, what I know of Stanley is he doesn't remind me of somebody that would do all that, that would burn all these props and costumes. He also wasn't sentimental at all. So he was not himself, unlike myself. I'm a collector of a lot of memorabilia. Also, a lot of my own memorabilia I collected. Stanley is not sentimental. He's not going to be collecting his own memorabilia.

2:13:44Bill Simmons:My only other answer is just because he was from New York. Jets fan? Kubrick? Could have explained a lot with some of the darkness in the movies. Although they did win in 1969.

2:13:55Sean Fennessey:The 1968 season is the year that they won the Super Bowl. Maybe that was it. That's why I decided to move to England.

2:14:01Bill Simmons:Coach Finstock, Mr. Miyagi Award for Best Worst Life Lesson from this movie. I guess it's keep questioning what's out there. Oh, yeah. The best life lesson in this movie is, you know, never, ever close your mind off to an impossible possibility. That's better than mine.

2:14:26Sean Fennessey:I don't have a follow-up. I can't do better than that

2:14:29Bill Simmons:we only have two more categories left I love these categories we had more, I cut them down because I didn't know how long we had I would have thrown more at you best double feature choice and you could put either this is first or second with the other one you want to go first?

2:14:47Sean Fennessey:well my pick would be AI for all the reasons that I talked about and the lineage and the relationship that you both have and the movies I feel like are talking to each other

2:14:56Bill Simmons:Wow. It's a pretty good run. Good choice. Mine would be George Powell's Destination Moon, made, I think, in 52 or 50, 51, 52, because it was the most scientifically realistic film about man's first trip to the moon, not taking into account, you know, George Melier's film, the first film, which was more of a pageant, less of a science project. But Destination Moon, which also is a tremendous exercise in suspense, echoes a lot of what then became, in Stanley's vision, 2001 A Space Odyssey. But to me, that was the first breakthrough movie that makes an audience actually believe that someday we will be able to land on the moon.

2:15:47Sean Fennessey:Can I tell you something? Destination Moon finally being issued on Blu-ray in June it is wow great see full circle

2:15:55Bill Simmons:my double feature choice is Disclosure Day opening on June 12th there we go by Steven Spielberg and I've seen it backup choice would be The Shining I don't know why but I think it would be really and you'd watch 2001 first then The Shining but I'd be really interested to just watch both and see what is there any stuff that he took or things you know what I mean just watching it fresh for five hours but I think the connection between that movie The Shining in 2001 is a connection Stanley has made with all of his films is what I said when we first sat down to talk about Stanley audacity audacious choices who won the movie Stanley Kubrick Craig you're up what did you think of this movie it came out where were you born 1994 alright so you're 26 years late don't screw this up Craig no no no

2:16:46Sean Fennessey:This is the third time I've seen it. I saw it first in film school when I was 19, and then I saw it again in my mid-20s, and now the third time in my mid-30s, or early 30s. And I have to say, my maturity has affected how much I appreciate this movie. I have to admit, when I saw it when I was 19, I think I was a little bit underwhelmed, and I think I didn't like the lack of clarity at the ending. I didn't enjoy that it was just ambiguous and essentially was left up for interpretation, and I have completely pivoted. and now that is why I appreciate the movie leaving you know that ambiguity letting yourself use your life experience to kind of inform what you think about the movie is why I think it's so good and just the attention to detail and the craft and the more movies I've watched over my life you just appreciate it so much more and how mesmerizing the visuals are it almost feels like I mean these big synchronized spacecraft sequences you almost feel like you're watching like with these big musical numbers behind it when the scenes end and they kind of go to black for a second, these vignettes, you almost want to applaud.

2:17:46Sean Fennessey:It's like you're at a magic show and you turn to the person next to you and you go, wow, how did they do that?

2:17:51Bill Simmons:Yeah.

2:17:52Sean Fennessey:I love it.

2:17:53Bill Simmons:The one thing that you guys didn't mention that I think is the reason why the movie is so successful and so perfect, Hal's voice, the choice of Hal's soft but chilling tone,

2:18:04Sean Fennessey:I think makes the entire film.

2:18:07Bill Simmons:I have to concur. That's a good point, Craig.

2:18:09Sean Fennessey:I thought you would open the pod by saying open the pod bay doors. Steven. I thought you could have we're literally in the pod bay right now.

2:18:17Bill Simmons:It's so comforting but also ominous and you know there's something beneath it that is chilling. I'm just going to walk up the wall later. Just do a 360 around there. Well that's it. You just completed your first rewatchables. A long one. You did it. You gave us two hours too. That was amazing. I would have thrown in more categories. This was so much fun. Sean passed out twice. You have disclosure date coming. I'm elated. We're running this on June 1st, so you have Disclosure Day coming... June 12th. Yes. 12 days later. Yes. And then are you thinking about the next movie already or not? No, I'm just thinking about Disclosure Day.

2:18:51That's all I got on my mind right now.

2:18:53Bill Simmons:And you promised you'd come back... Except today, and now all I'm thinking about is 2001 A Space Odyssey. But you promised you'd come back for Jaws at some point. Let's do Jaws. I would love to do it. That was on tape. We videotaped it. It doesn't have to be the 50-year anniversary. That's behind us. Let's do it. And I'll do my Quint getting eaten impersonation at some point. I want to see that. I definitely want to see that. I'm going to save that for you. Steven Spielberg, an absolute honor. Thank you, Bill. Thanks for being here. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Sean. Thank you, Bill. Thank you.

2:19:19Bill Simmons:And that's it for the Rewatchables. What an honor to be here with you guys. Thank you. Thank you so much.