“The way the story is told is antithetical to
the way we were accustomed to seeing stories,” Spielberg once said of “2001.”
“Kubrick would tell me, the last couple years of his life when we were talking
about the form, he kept saying, ‘I want to change the form. I want to make a
movie that changes the form.’ And I said, ‘Well, didn’t you with ‘2001?’”
― Steven Spielberg
― Steven Spielberg
“It’s one of those amazing experiences,” Cuarón said at TIFF earlier this year. “It’s unlike anything I had ever seen. I was used to science-fiction more related to fantasy, but this was non-fantasy and non-adventure, and yet just as enthralling. Kubrick was someone who was very concerned with the language of cinema. More than any other film, ‘2001’ is where Kubrick found his real cinematic voice.”
― Alfonso Cuarón
“You look at the cut in ‘2001,’ this vast jump forward — the confidence that takes to do that is actually enormous,” Nolan told IGN. “Would I love to do things like that in my own work? Yes. But I don’t think I have the confidence to do that. Which is why there is only one Stanley Kubrick. I do believe he is inimitable. But you can be inspired. You can be inspired to aspire to be that confident.”
― Christopher Nolan
“It takes extraordinary audacity and power and guts to say, ‘Let’s just screech everything to a halt and take everybody back to prehistoric times,'” Scorsese said of the film’s opening. “Kubrick was saying, ‘I want you to see something. I’m going to take you through something you never thought you’d experience.'”
― Martin Scorsese
“It’s extremely subtle. It’s extremely visual. And the story is razor thin,” Lucas said of the film. “It was the first time people really took science fiction seriously. Stanley Kubrick made the ultimate science fiction movie. It is going to be very hard for someone to come along and make a better movie, as far as I’m concerned.”
― George Lucas
“‘2001’ just shows you the scale of the ideas you can get into in sci-fi if you want to,” Garland told IGN in 2017. “It has two massive things in it: an alien first encounter and probably the best, most involved and intelligent depiction of A.I. that’s ever been in a film or any kind of narrative.”
― Alex Garland
“I remember having my mind fairly blown,” Fincher said of the viewing experience.
“I remember watching that film and thinking I have to be prepared for space travel. When you’re a kid, they’re showing you movies to prepare you for things: How to dissect frogs, here’s what human reproduction is. When it got to the end, it made me start to prepare for the afterlife.”
― David Fincher
“It always stuck with me, the ending from ‘2001,’” Gilliam told Entertainment Weekly in 2013. “I don’t know what it’s really saying. I know it’s beautiful, it’s telling me many things, I don’t quite understand it, but I know it gets me thinking.”
― Terry Gilliam
“This was a film that was imprinted on the conscious of everyone who saw it and forced them to talk about it and, more importantly, to think about it,” Friedkin said of the film’s impact throughout the decades.
― William Friedkin
“He dared to reimagine space and time,” Aronofsky told Wired about Kubrick. “‘2001’ was the first sci-fi movie to deal with real physics. Kubrick introduced his audience to a zero-g world with no up and down or left and right. No matter how good CGI looks at first, it dates quickly. “But ‘2001’ really holds up.”
― Darren Aronofsky
“Even to this day, ‘2001’ remains the all-time great science-fiction film,” Cameron said. “As our films get ever more spectacular, ‘2001’ reminds us that it’s the ideas behind the spectacle that are still the most important special effect of all.”
― James Cameron
“Stanley’s design in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ influenced everybody,” Scott told Deadline in 2015. “I’ve never shaken it off; it influenced me even with ‘Prometheus.’ Stanley really got it right.”
― Ridley Scott