Weston, who went on to perform in numerous James Bond films, says: “One of the great things about Stanley was he had an incredible, tremendous artistic integrity. Tempers were soothed after the stuntman was given a swish dressing room with a fridge full of beer and a large raise in his fee. The director did not return for two or three days, Weston recalls. Having recovered from the oxygen deprivation, Weston was so outraged that he decided to confront Kubrick, only to find that he had fled the scene. So it simply built up inside, incrementally causing a heightened heart rate, rapid breathing, fatigue, clumsiness, and eventually, unconsciousness.” Even when the tank was feeding air into the suit, there was no place for the carbon dioxide Weston exhaled to go. In his book, Benson writes: “Given the complexity of the shots, and the amount of time it took simply to remove the platform used to prepare the stuntman’s wires and suspend him, 10 minutes wasn’t enough. More seriously, a small tank within Weston’s backpack contained only 10 minutes’ worth of compressed air. He insisted that Weston wore a wig that made his hermetically sealed spacesuit become all the more overheated. Photograph: Doug Trumbullīut Kubrick did not make things easy. ![]() Stuntman Bill Weston recovering from oxygen deprivation after the stunt. His stunts involved being suspended horizontally from wires connected to a drill motor against a black abyss of outer space recreated by vast curtains of black velvet. ![]() Yet the most complex shots of his film included Weston playing the dead astronaut Frank Poole, spinning lifelessly. Kubrick, like his lead actors Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, was afraid of flying. Kubrick was a supreme visual stylist with a perfectionist’s attention to detail.Ģ001 was so realistic that the Soviet cosmonaut Alexey Leonov, who became the world’s first spacewalker in 1965, said after seeing the film in 1968: “Now I feel I’ve been in space twice.”īenson says that, decades before digital effects, the 2001 stunts “constitute an extraordinary, largely unsung moment in film history”. It starred Kirk Douglas, who also played the hero in Kubrick’s Roman classic Spartacus. ![]() Kubrick’s masterpieces include Paths of Glory, one of the most powerful anti-war movies. Its author, Michael Benson, included in depth interviews with Weston and the visual effects supervisor Doug Trumbull, who photographed the daredevil stunts, among others. Intellectuals will take the position that you are a mentally challenged clod if you dare disagree with their elevated opinion of the movie-so be aware that this is not conventional story-telling in any sense whatsoever and only for those who admire Stanley Kubrick's way with unlikely cinematic material.Stanley Kubrick on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I had the same letdown feeling when I watched THE CLOCKWORK ORANGE, so your like or dislike of this movie is purely dependent on personal taste. Beyond that, there is nothing the least bit interesting about the human characters (trite dialogue and no personality or warmth to any of the individuals), the pace is unbelievably slow (so the intellectually gifted can philosophize on the mysteries of space), and the payoff at the end leaves you either breathless with enlightenment or convinced that you have watched three hours of nothingness. The musical background is glorious, the colors are dazzling, and there's an interesting use of HAL as a villainous computer. The others, like myself, find it as absorbing as watching paint dry on woodwork. ![]() This is supported by those who claim to understand the complexities involved and leading up the Star Child ending. One, is that it is the greatest science-fiction epic ever made. There are two schools of thought about 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.
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