OF

292 The Making of Kubrick's 200
authorized the money. Although he was bothered constantly
by the problem of maintaining control of the company, warding
off various attempts at usurpation of his authority, and having
to win the affection of the stockholders, he never burdened
me with any of these problems; he was very strong in not passing
on his problems to me. He realized that it was necessary for
us, somehow, to overcome the previously unsolved problem
of making special effects in the film look completely real-
istic, and he understood that new techniques were being devised,
engineered, and so forth, and that somebody had to get
these right, otherwise the film would be expensive at any price.
O'Brien had seen a lot of the film in sort of isolated form, but
once the film was being cut— well, first of all, the film never
was cut much before I left for California, and because of the
slowness in getting the special effects completed there were
huge sections of the film missing, and I didn't want to show it to
anyone in that form. O'Brien had enough confidence that he
would get what he was hoping for that he never insisted on seeing
anything except whatever I wanted to show him. Nobody
saw the cut film until it was finished, because there really
wasn't any time for anyone to see it."
Were the stockholders growing restive and applying pressure
to Mr. O'Brien because of the time it took you to complete
2001?
Kubrick: "Well, I don't know of any specific cases, and he
never said there were, but I wouldn't be surprised if the film
was an embarrassment to him during the making of it. It certainly
hasn't been an embarrassment since then, but before anybody
saw it I'm sure that they wondered what was going on."
Nearly thirty minutes pass before the first words are spoken in
2001. Kubrick: "I tried to work things out so that nothing im-
portant was said in the dialogue, and that anything important in
the film be translated in terms of action/'
The first speech:
Orion hostess (to Dr. Floyd): Here you are, sir. Main level, please.
Floyd: See you on the way back.
Space station hostess: Did you have a pleasant flight?
Floyd: Yes, very nice, thanks.
Miller (of space-station security): Sorry I'm late [as though he had
had far to go].
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