What is Reddit's opinion of The Making of Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey'?

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Thank you but the book I am looking for has been published in 2014; 2015 and 2020.

This one is beautiful too:

https://www.amazon.de/Piers-Bizony/dp/3836559544/ref=mp_s_a_1_6?dchild=1&keywords=2001+taschen&qid=1599850541&sr=8-6

[Post 1/2] I think that the historical context of imagining the future is a decently important component in the explanation of why the film is great, but by no means the most important or even the most interesting. I also think the tangent into Disney's Epcot could take up ~10s, but the amount of time spent presenting it doesn't really help your argument at all. As presented, literally any movie made with a decently imaginative presentation of the future would be great, and even if 2001 is the best of the bunch, that doesn't explain why it is considered a great piece of cinema both historically and cinematically. No offense intended, but if you want to make an effective video explaining why the film is great you should do your homework.

In my opinion, these points are the best way to explain to a non-cinema oriented person why 2001 is great: *The density and ambiguity of possible interpretations, and the sparsity with which though enormous themes and ideas are presented *The incredible technical and artistic achievements of the film's production *How Kubrick as a director shows through in the film, and how it is an example of truly great directing.

Thematic development: Kubrick argued repeatedly after the film's release that there was not a single explicit meaning to the film, nor any of its components - despite the literal interpretation given in the contemporaneous novel. From the opening scenes with the apes, we are provoked endlessly to ask what each scene means and how each fits into a larger narrative, but are never given a satisfying answer. The movie feels 'weird' and unnerving because nothing is made clear, but that's precisely why a non-cinematic person should be interested in 2001: they are given agency as a viewer to engage and interpret the movie on their own terms, rather than having the plot spelled out for them as is typical of blockbuster movies. The extended, often near-silent shots give the viewer time to think about what is happening and why it is happening (while also being insanely beautiful, more on that below). 2001 is not, however, contentless: the themes are presented as enormous conceptual archetypes in themselves, rather than being presented within the context of the movie and then extrapolating those to the larger concepts. These themes will always resonate with us: a sharp transition in the course of human history brought about by an unexpected discovery or shift in culture, the relationship between humans and what they create, a sort of bottomless searching that impels us to invent and explore space, etc. People should be interested in this movie because they are interested in the ideas that are both a necessary product of human civilization while simultaneously having a profound influence on its progression.

Production: Kubrick is notorious for being extremely demanding and precise with his technical vision of his films, and this is, in my opinion, shown most clearly in 2001. Every single shot is exquisitely designed to the finest detail - the set, the position and movement of the camera, the sound, etc. Giving a potential viewer a sense of the incredible depth of the story of the production would let them appreciate those 'quit, slow, boring' scenes so foreign to them as the examples of technical mastery that they are. There are so many good stories of the people involved in the production that you could have told here: Kubrick's consultation with Carl Sagan on the presentation of the alien lifeforms that made the obelisks, the collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke (one of the most prominent science fiction authors at the time and a far better example of the importance of imagining the future than Disney) on the screenplay, the consultation with IBM about HAL, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the input from NASA and other high-tech companies that made 2001 far more realistic than the other glittery science fiction movies at the time, and the list goes on. There is an entire book on the film's production filled with fascinating photos and stories from behind the scenes that would have worked well here. As a few examples: Kubrick and his collaborator John Alcott studied lighting more deeply than anyone ever had before - studying the way the light worked with the set and the actors such that it looked more convincingly and consistently like natural lighting than most films that had been made to that point. The set of the interior of the Discovery was actually unprecedented: "A 30-ton rotating "ferris wheel" set was built by Vickers-Armstrong Engineering Group, a British aircraft company at a cost of $750,000. The set was 38 feet in diameter and 10 feet wide. It could rotate at a maximum speed of three miles per hour, and was dressed with the necessary chairs, desks, and control panels, all firmly bolted to the inside surface. The actors could stand at the bottom and walk in place, while the set rotated around them. Kubrick used an early video feed to direct the action from a control room, while the camera operator sat in a gimbaled seat." I can't stress enough that that simply wasn't done - Kubrick would invent new ways of directing just so that the shot was closer to his vision. 2001 was one of the first films to effectively use front-projection, or projecting images onto the set from the point of view of the camera, to both animate the set as well as make a more convincing set than the clumsy manual tape-editing techniques that were used to fake a set in a sound stage. The visuals in the final scenes were made with a machine that was invented for the movie - the "Slit Scan" machine being the first adaptation of slit-scan photography to film - allowing the animations in that scene that would otherwise have been impossible. A good demonstration of how that works is here. Kubrick was a genius at solving technical and mechanical problems himself, for example the 'iconic' pen floating scene was done by mounting the pen inside a spinning glass disk rather than suspending it from a thin wire - the dominant technique at the time - and to make the astronauts 'float' he and the crew rigged up an ingenious array of wires and harnesses that allowed the actors to perform naturally while being essentially invisible. Even non-cinematically oriented viewers would be interested by the fact that many of the creative team went on to do the production for later heavily influential and more approachable movies like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner, etc. The scenes are only 'boring,' and you only need to sell them as "it's weird but just watch it because it's historic" if you don't understand the massive amount of creativity and work that went into every shot. If you were to have planted in potential-viewers mind the idea that they should be watching every shot to figure out how it was done, or to wonder at the fact that it was done, rather than telling them to snooze through it, you would have allowed them easier and deeper access to the movie.