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

Bill and Sean open up the pod bay doors with director Steven Spielberg to revisit one of the greatest films of all time, Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, and William Sylvester. Producer: Craig Horlbeck, Chia Hao Tat, Eduardo Ocampo, and Matt Pevic The Ringer is committed to responsible trading. Please visit https://fanduel.com/predicts to learn more about the resources and helpline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Bill Simmons?

  Welcome to the Rewatchables. I'm Bill Simmons. This is a special one. It's gonna actually be a special summer for us. We're gonna do a From Hell gimmick. We're gonna rip through a bunch of my favorite dot, dot, dot from hell's. We're talking about The Roommate from Hell. We're talking about The Tenant from Hell. We're talking about The Little Kid from Hell. The Nanny from Hell. These are some of my favorite movies. They're ridiculous.

• 0:32Bill Simmons?

  They're just perfect for the Rewatchables. We can make fun of them. We can admire them. We can talk about how campy they are. We can talk about what they did right and wrong. And we're gonna do a lot of them. And guess what? Almost all of them are gonna be on Netflix. So keep an eye out for it. Next week, we're going to be doing Single Way Female, which is on Netflix. But a bunch of them will be on Netflix. We're gonna be From Hell, at least through June and in part of July as well. So stay tuned for that. Coming up, me and Sean Fantasy got to do an entire Rewatchables episode with the greatest living director we have, Steven Spielberg. Yeah, it's the three of us. It's me, Sean, and Steven Spielberg.

• 1:14Bill Simmons?

  And we're gonna talk about 2001: A Space Odyssey. I can cram it into the From Hell gimmick just by saying this is how the computer from hell. It's a little bit of a reach, but to kick off From Hell, we'll do it that way. Anyway, this is really one of the great podcasts I've ever been a part of. Steven Spielberg was incredible. Can't wait for you to listen to it. Here it is. The Rewatchables 2001: A Space Odyssey.

• 1:39Bill Simmons?

  The Rewatchables brought to you by the Ringer Podcast Network, where you can find the big picture with Sean Fantasy. That's right. Steven Spielberg not on the Ringer Podcast Network. This is like your second podcast ever, right?

• 1:49Speaker 01

  My second podcast where there's a couple of cameras around. Ever.

• 1:54Bill Simmons?

  What do you think of this whole new world?

• 1:55Speaker 01

  Well, it's, guess what? Radio's back.

• 2:00Bill Simmons?

  We're gonna talk about one of your favorite movies ever, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is the oldest movie I think we've ever done in the Rewatchables. By one year. Yeah, and that's next.

• 2:09Speaker 02

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• 3:09Bill Simmons?

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• 3:56Bill Simmons?

  All right, so this movie's released April 2nd, 1968. What are you doing?

• 4:02Speaker 01

  I'm in school. I believe I'm at Long Beach State in April of that year.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Semester's coming to an end. Everybody's talking about this movie that is a drug trip. So, the word around campus, or at least around my circles, and I'm a teetotaler. I don't, never done any of that at all. But I smoked cigarettes for a year. That was the worst thing I did in college. For one year? Yeah, I quit. One year. And I quit. But, but everybody was talking about this, kind of like Roger Corman's The Trip. And, and, and so the scuttlebutt on campus was, this is trippy. This is gonna be like The Trip. This is gonna be like a really trippy film.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  So, everybody was getting ready to get into a car and go down to, I believe it was the Pantages Theatre, to see the film. So, I think I saw the film probably the first week it opened. And I went with three or four of my college friends. We all piled into a car, drove into Hollywood. And, correct me if I'm wrong, it might have been the Pantages. It might have been another, one of those big movie palaces. Yeah. In 1968. But we parked, walked like nine blocks to get to the theatre. Got into a line, because in those days, there was no such thing as buying your tickets ahead of time. And so, we waited in line for a long time, and everybody was being, I looked around, nobody was smoking grass, because there were cops up and down Hollywood Boulevard.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  Dropping acid. But when I walked into that theatre, and people started filling it up, it was filled with, with smoke. It was just filled with smoke. Was that common? Uh, I had never been to a movie where I smelled marijuana as, as thick as a London fog inside that movie palace. But, everybody was in the theatre, a lot of guys, not as many women, more men, everybody with long hair, everybody making a lot of noise. I thought I wouldn't be able to hear the dialogue. First of all, I didn't realize, because the movie hadn't started yet, there was gonna be very little dialogue. But it didn't matter.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  I was worried that there wasn't going to be room to hear the dialogue, because everybody's making so much noise in the theatre. And then when the movie started, and thus spoke the orchestra started, and it hits that tremendous chord.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  It shut everybody the F up. Everyone just got completely quiet. So as the music was decaying after that big explosive chord, I was aware that everyone was still. It was kind of in itself before the film started, mind blowing. And then what began, I think from a lot of people in that theater, was a religious experience. Fueled by whatever they were on. For me, it was not so much a religious experience, but one of the most audacious films I had ever watched in my life.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  The audacity and I, of course, we all knew Kubrick and we all knew he was audacious. But the audacity and the risks he took telling that story, if you could even call it a story, uh, set me back. And I think, you know, just rocked my world for sure. Rocked my cinema world.

• 7:43Bill Simmons?

  Your career started next year.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got my contract to be a TV director at Universal the next year. Correct.

• 7:52Bill Simmons?

  Pretty good start. And it really is like a before and after with movies, the sixty eight, right? Like it, it feels like, I remember you said in, in a, some interviews, Stephen, that you thought this was like the Big Bang Theory for a whole generation of filmmakers.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:05Bill Simmons?

  What was the before and after?

• 8:06Sean Fennessey?

  Well, it's like that year is, uh, Planet of the Apes, Rosemary's Baby, um, Bullet, um, a handful of other like all time classics.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  I've seen them all.

• 8:16Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, a couple.

• 8:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  I've seen them all.

• 8:18Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. What, did you feel it in the moment? Did you feel like something is changing about this thing that I love?

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did. I, I didn't feel that way until after Stargate. And which we'll get to. But I, but, but after Stargate, I felt that nothing would ever be the same.

• 8:35Bill Simmons?

  Especially as you're watching people run out of the theater.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  But I'm watching, I'm watching the movie completely in a state of, of, you know, intoxication because Stanley intoxicated me. Well, perhaps I was getting a contact high with all the smoke in the room. But I was completely intoxicated by what I experienced. And it wasn't a film, it was an experience. It was the most experiential thing I had ever seen since I was a little kid and got scared to death by The Greatest Show on Earth. And then later by Bambi and then again by Snow White in reissues.

• 9:13Bill Simmons?

  Well, what's crazy, it's 58 years old now. Still kind of banging. Like when you think of like some of the other movies from back then feel like they happened in the 60s.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:24Bill Simmons?

  This is like, you know, it's obviously it's slow by today's standards and things like that, but for the most part, the special effects, the feeling of like being in space. Just like, is this what it's actually like to be in space? Like that couldn't have existed in a movie before.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Also, you have to remember how big the screen was. The screen was so big. During Stargate, I just have to say that a person in the theater, several people in the theater got up and started walking into the screen. And that was, by the way, you can probably look it up in the LA Times. It was reported that people were walking into the screen. In those days, at least in that theater, the screens were like louvers. They were vertical strips of reflected, you know, reflective material. And, um, and a couple of the people in the film during Stargate were reported to have walked actually into the screen and disappeared backstage.

• 10:19Sean Fennessey?

  Did you find anybody was not feeling it or walking out? Cause there was reports of it being divisive when it was released.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  No, because no, everybody, everybody I saw the movie with that day were all probably under 35 years old. So I don't know anyone that, I wasn't, I was unaware of it. Look, half the audience could have walked out and I would not have noticed.

• 10:41Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  I, I, I looked, I looked dead center, dead left to center, dead right of center, because that was my field of vision. And I was completely, um, you know. I guess completely magnetized by what was happening.

• 10:56Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, because there was a story when they when it had its big premiere. They were counting how many people walked out and it was like 241 people and the writer Arthur Clark was there who worked on it with them and he was like. This is a disaster. This is devastating, but young people were what saved this movie.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, listen, a lot of people walked out of the sneak preview of Goodfellas. One of the greatest films I've ever seen and one of the greatest films Marty's ever made and yet I didn't go to the preview, but Brian De Palma was there. And he just said there were a lot of walkouts and that because of the violence, but the movie went on to to become a piece of our collective history.

• 11:31Bill Simmons?

  So you said. Nobody could shoot a picture better in history than Kubrick.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  Well, what context did I say that?

• 11:40Bill Simmons?

  I don't know.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Okay, I don't want to reference something. I want I if I said it, I'm sure there was a context for saying it. I'm not sure it was a declarative statement.

• 11:50Bill Simmons?

  Well, explain the shooting part, like what made him so special, like as you as you saw his different catalog.

• 11:57Speaker 01

  Well, I think because Stanley in all the films, for one thing, he started out as a as a still photographer for Look magazine. So he had he had an audacious, rambunctious, ambitious eye. And his compositions and his choices of what to show, what pictures to take already set him apart. I mean, if he wanted to become a war correspondent. Like Bob Cab, Robert Cappa, he could have become that too. Um, but he turned that still eye into 24 frames of stills a second and became. One of the greatest, I think, professors we've ever had. Uh, all my generation that always looked up to him as one of our greatest teachers.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  And what made him that way was he knew how to tell a story. He knew how to tell a story unconventionally. He knew how to shock the audience. And he knew how to make them laugh. He made he Dr. Strangelove is one of the greatest black comedies ever ever created for the screen. And and with 2001 Space Odyssey, he was also. He was also a wizard technologically. He was almost an engineer. His mind had a kind of OCD quality where when he focused in on something, um, um, he was doing it for himself and we were the beneficiaries of whatever reason he was creating

• 13:23Speaker 01

  these incredibly advanced spacecraft that no one had ever seen before in anybody else's films. Those spacecraft alone were kind of works of art, I always felt. And those spacecraft, um, um, especially the Jupiter mission craft, uh, is is what inspired Ralph McQuarrie and myself, uh, to create the mothership in Close Encounters, inspired George Lucas with the Imperial Star, you know, Starship Destroyer.

• 13:59Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  And included and certainly, certainly, um, inspired Ridley Scott in creating the space freighter Nostrum. These, these wouldn't have existed unless Stanley came had come first.

• 14:13Bill Simmons?

  It seems like the lesson is if you're gonna do this, we're going all out. Like even in the research where they told him it would take him like 13 years to, to basically create this universe and have people do the painting. It's like, well, I'll get 13 people and I'll take one year each. It'll be done in a year. And it was just, I don't know who else was even like that in the 60s.

• 14:34Sean Fennessey?

  It seemed like he had incredible patience and spent four years developing, writing, and then making the movie. Long period of editing, which there's not a lot of information about the period of time when he was editing the film together and what it ultimately became. If you read about him first reaching out to Arthur C. Clarke and the idea that he has for the movie, it changes a lot.

• 14:54Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 14:54Sean Fennessey?

  In the progression.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  It does. And, and I've, I knew Arthur. I, I, I had the honor of meeting and having lunch with Arthur C. Clarke. Um, when I was shooting Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, we, we, we stopped, we were shooting in Candy, Sri Lanka. And and we stopped in Colombo before changing airplanes to fly back to the UK to continue shooting the film.

• 15:17Sean Fennessey?

  And he lived there for decades, right?

• 15:19Speaker 01

  And he lived in the Montanical Gardens where David Leena shot Bridge and the River Kwai. And he invited us all to lunch at his house. And I had a great conversation with him about 2001: A Space Odyssey.

• 15:31Bill Simmons?

  Wow. So he had the kind of filmmaking where he might take five years before he made his next movie.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 15:39Bill Simmons?

  You're more prolific than that. Is that there's two types of directors.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  I wouldn't call it prolific, I'm more impatient. Stanley was prolific, I was impatient. I just I just love telling stories and I'd love, I just if I get a story and it gets into my into my bananas, I just have to make, I just have to tell the story. I gotta get it out. I gotta I gotta exercise it.

• 16:00Bill Simmons?

  So you never could have had the type of career where you would have spent four years between projects? You would have gone nuts?

• 16:05Speaker 01

  No, I've got, I've spent three years between two projects and I went a little nuts, but the great thing about that, I went a little bit nuts not directing, but I was raising a family and that was keeping me completely preoccupied, so it was okay.

• 16:18Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. So you you didn't actually talk to him until 1980?

• 16:22Speaker 01

  I met him on the set of, on the set of The Shining in 1980, when they had just finished dressing the big Overlook Hotel, grand, grand, the grand room with the double staircase and the fireplace and the table with the typewriter on it. That's where I first met him.

• 16:40Sean Fennessey?

  Did he invite you to the set? What led you to going there?

• 16:42Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, who reached out to who?

• 16:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 16:44Speaker 01

  No, what happened was I was about to make Raiders of the Lost Ark and I was gonna build the Well of the Souls on the same set that he had had already built, the Overlook Hotel.

• 16:55Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 16:56Speaker 01

  And I was scheduled to move, when he struck his set, when he was done shooting with it, we were gonna build our set. And and so I was gonna scout the set anyway, but Stanley happened to be there doing doing his still photographs. And he had he had a camera with a periscope lens and he had a tabletop model of the set that he was actually standing in when I first met him. And Douglas Twitty, our production manager, brought me over at Stanley's, at Stanley's, I asked to meet Stanley. And Stanley said, yeah, he'd meet me. And when I met Stanley, I was surprised he knew anything I had done and he just wanted to talk about duel. The movie I made, the TV movie I made with Dennis Weaver.

• 17:40Bill Simmons?

  That was awesome.

• 17:41Speaker 01

  Truck chasing the car. Thank you. And that's what he wanted to talk about. And then we didn't talk for long because he was busy, but he said, why didn't we talk more? Come over to the house for dinner tonight. And so I got a chance to meet Christian and Jan Harland and Vivian and his daughters and

• 17:56Bill Simmons?

  That was it.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  And that was the beginning, beginning of our relationship.

• 17:59Bill Simmons?

  Sean, you never claim him as a New Yorker. I think most people mistakenly think he's from England.

• 18:03Sean Fennessey?

  All he does do is hear his speaking voice.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Totally bronched through and through.

• 18:08Sean Fennessey?

  He sounds like a WFAN caller. I mean, he really is a, it's an unusual thing because he's obviously is looms over film history as this great intellectual and, and dynamic powerhouse, but he really just is a, a, a fast talking New Yorker.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:24Bill Simmons?

  What was the biggest thing you learned during all your conversations with him, just about him as a, as a talent?

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Um, well, what I'd learned was he was a human being and I also learned he was not a recluse as he's so often been recu- accused of. And, and I think it's the most unfair thing about Stanley's reputation is that people think he's like Howard Hughes. He never, you know, he never left his house, didn't speak to people, didn't go out any, anywhere. Uh, Stanley used the telephone and Stanley used all kinds of means of communication. If Stanley had been born now, he would have reinvented the iPad and the iPhone to his, to, to his needs. He would have bent it toward his visionary needs.

• 19:05Bill Simmons?

  I mean, you could argue he invented it in the movie.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  He puts one in the movie. He kinda did. He sorta did. You know, but Stanley, Stanley really, really was social in, in the sense that if he liked somebody's movie, he would surprise a director and call him and just say, hi, it's, it's Dennis Cooper here. I just saw your picture. I loved it. Uh, where'd you get the idea and start a conversation?

• 19:26Bill Simmons?

  Was he the number one, holy shit, this guy likes my movie director? Cause like you're that now.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  He was the number one, holy shit, that guy loves my movie director. And I'll tell you the story. It is quickly, as Albert Brooks was a friend of mine, uh, called me up and he said, did you give Stanley my phone number? And I said, yep, yeah, because he asked for it. Why? I said, because he called me at three o'clock in the morning to tell me how much he loved, uh, Lost in America. And then Stanley and Albert began to relate, began a friendship at, at, from that moment.

• 19:54Bill Simmons?

  Do you imagine getting a call from him at three in the morning?

• 19:56Sean Fennessey?

  Was it three in the morning though, because he was in England and he was calling LA?

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Stanley was never aware of times. He called me at the strangest hours. He was, he just didn't have that kind of, I mean, I'll never understand Stanley. I don't have to. I was not in his family circle. But I feel that Stanley allowed me to be a colleague. And the greatest honor he afforded me was he let me into his professional circle. And he treated me like a colleague. And he was very generous with his compliments when he saw a movie I made and liked it. And we had a real rapport and talked often on the phone.

• 20:35Bill Simmons?

  I mean, he basically handed AI over to you.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Well, he asked me to direct it.

• 20:40Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  For him to produce. And then after that didn't work out, only because Stanley really wound up directing it, directing it with a lot of memos. He was sending me, he was sending me many faxes about, you know, hey, it'd be great if you put the camera here. Here's a couple of storyboards. And I finally, after six months with Stanley, let's reverse roles. I'll co-produce it with you.

• 21:01Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  And you directed, because this is your baby. This is, this is your vision. And, and he agreed. And then he got distracted by Eyes Wide Shut. And then sadly, tragically, in 1999, he passed.

• 21:15Sean Fennessey?

  Well, when you were talking to him about that movie, did he see a very clear link between 2001 and AI?

• 21:20Speaker 01

  We never, he never made the link there. He did, he, we did a couple, a couple of times. The only link he made was, was the clear and present danger. He thought it was a cautionary tape, a tale about unrestricted machine sentience. He was really, really concerned about machine learning and machines teaching machines to teach machines. And that was, that was, I think, the main link between 2001 and his version of AI.

• 21:54Bill Simmons?

  I mean, you could argue 2026 is the most relevant year we've had for this movie since 1968. But these are all the conversations everyone's having right now. What happens if the machines learn too much? And these are things that have been in movies now for six decades. Sean, can you think of anybody who could have gone Strange Love, 2001, Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, all in a row in 10 years?

• 22:19Sean 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 like 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.

• 23:00Sean Fennessey?

  But I'm, you know, 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. I'm not, 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. You 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.

• 23:32Bill Simmons?

  Hopefully, it's not as wide shut at 13 years old.

• 23:34Sean Fennessey?

  No, well, you never know. You never know. That wasn't around when I was 13, but I anticipated.

• 23:39Bill Simmons?

  The Shining when I was 10, my dad took me, probably, 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.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I I think I think I think everybody does. And I think the thing 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, Thirty 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 off switch. I don't know how you do that.

• 24:14Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  I don't care what the movie is, you know, from, you know, you know, you know, from Killer's Kiss to Eyes Wide Shut, whether you love love these films more than others of his or not, you completely become, you know, in it, you become a zombie.

• 24:32Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Become a Stanley zombie. And I'm, and you stare, you you walk straight ahead and you sit there and you wait till it's over.

• 24:38Sean Fennessey?

  Do you remember the first one of his that you saw?

• 24:40Speaker 01

  I think the first movie I saw was, I know the first movie I saw in a movie theater was Doctor 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 and those and 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.

• 25:11Bill Simmons?

  What do you think the equivalent is in two thousand twenty six 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, like, some of the effects that he has in here were so far ahead of anything else. And I don't even know how to wrap my head around it.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's a movie so much. It may be The Sphere in Las Vegas. Maybe the equivalent of two thousand one of Space Odyssey.

• 25:34Bill Simmons?

  Oh, that's a good call.

• 25:35Sean Fennessey?

  I just just went for the first time. It was fascinating. We were there, we were there together.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  But I mean, I mean, I mean, Stanley Kubrick with two thousand one created, I think, the first three D experience. The first, not a three D in terms of, you know, of 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 and by the experience in two thousand one was the perfect film for it. And also, two thousand one also does something with suspense. The middle part of that film is as suspenseful as anything Alfred Hitchcock ever made.

• 26:22Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  I feel that film is the most suspenseful movie Stanley ever made. The whole section with Bowman and Poole going out to replace the AE35, you know, antenna unit. And, uh, and, and what happens to Poole? And then what Bowman has to do when Hal decides that the, uh, human beings are, are too flawed to really successfully carry this mission through to completion and has to take over command of that ship.

• 26:54Sean Fennessey?

  When you first saw it, did you feel like you grasped all of these details and the construction that he was building? Or did you, was it repeated viewings and trying to study it to understand what he was doing? Cause it's a film that can be confusing on first viewing.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  It was, it was. To say the least. I've absolutely repeated viewings. I mean, I've seen 2001 countless times. I can't tell you how many times I sat there beginning to end when I, I, I finally saw it for the first time in 70 millimeter in New York City, uh, in, in 2001, um, uh, when it was reissued, uh, on that special year.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  But I can watch it over and over again, and I, I don't claim to have understood it metaphysically or, 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. And 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, his own, you know, work.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  But the, the thing about the picture is it, it, it, the movie, it's an anti-emotional film that's truly a deeply, um, um, empathic picture, but it's kind of anti-emotional.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  Uh, Poole and Bowman, you know, Gary Lockwood and Cara Doolia, uh, are play it like, you know, they don't, they, they don't laugh, they don't smile, there's nothing, you know. You know, Poole is getting a little, getting a little, he's, he's on, on a sun deck, you know, and a, and 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. He 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, you know, you know, full, in full recline after his, his parents sing

• 28:58Speaker 01

  happy birthday to him badly. And, and, and so the most emotional, and we all, we've all heard this spoken, but it's true. The most emotional character is Hal 9000. And a great villain too. 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 Hilton, the space station. Mm-hmm.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Next to what the, on the wall it says Hilton 5. And, uh, he's, he's meeting with a Russian delegation. Yeah. That he knows, I think is, I think the, the Russians name is, uh, uh, Shmirnov or Shmirnikov, possibly. I don't, don't really know. Talking about some, you know, the, the, one of their, one of their landers was denied landing rights at Klavius Moon Base. And he wants to know why. And there's a rumor the Russians here that there's some kind of an epidemic. Epidemic, yeah. But that, of course, is the cover story. Yeah. Which I immediately stole when I made Close Encounters. And use Fosgene gas as the cover story to clear the civilians away from Devil's Tower.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  So they could have this first communion between an off world civilization and the human race.

• 30:32Bill Simmons?

  So how many movies did this directly influence, you think? Cause you obviously Star Wars, your movie.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Every film, every film.

• 30:40Bill Simmons?

  It's funny like growing up with it because you know, the, the theme of the movie, if you're a kid is computers are gonna take over. Computers someday, watch out, watch out the moment they get too much.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 30:54Bill Simmons?

  You know, and it's like, all right. And then in the eighties, then we start getting the home computers like this is nice. This is great. And the internet comes in the nineties. This is fun. I can talk to my family and now we're in this stage.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:05Bill Simmons?

  It's like, uh oh, did we go too far?

• 31:07Speaker 01

  No, and I remember the great movie that Walter Parks made called War Games.

• 31:12Bill Simmons?

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  You know, and before that there was Colossus, the Forbin project.

• 31:16Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  Where, uh, where computers, uh, 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.

• 31:30Sean 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, you know? 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.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Two thousand and one made me feel as big as a grain of sand. You know, I felt, I felt no more aware, when that, when that, when I was done seeing the film for the first time, I, 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 and to the desert, into the country where there's no city lights and you really see that awesome vista, you see the entire, our entire Milky Way.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  You can get the same feeling every single time you watch 2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley created that. And, um, and when you, when you think about some of his concepts, they found a monolith buried on the moon and had been buried there for four million years. Right away, that makes us all feel

• 33:09Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  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, is, is, is, is generated from whatever your belief system is. And, and, and, and so 2001, even if you've seen it 50 times, the movie can still, I think, shock, shock you.

• 33:41Bill Simmons?

  Well, it does seem like

• 33:42Speaker 01

  Do I sound like an ad to get people to see 2001?

• 33:45Bill Simmons?

  No, I love this. I'm gonna have it the best time ever.

• 33:47Sean Fennessey?

  This is, yeah, this is what I wanted.

• 33:49Bill Simmons?

  Well, it feels like there's two types of people, right? There's the people who are like, I really want to know what, what's out there.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:56Bill Simmons?

  What, 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.

• 34:03Sean Fennessey?

  The latter.

• 34:03Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 34:04Sean Fennessey?

  Really?

• 34:04Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, the sci-fi stuff has always kind of freaked me out.

• 34:07Sean Fennessey?

  Wow.

• 34:08Bill Simmons?

  And especially this movie, I think I've only seen it twice before I started preparing it for this one because it, it brings things into my brain that I don't even know if I'm a hundred percent ready for. Like, you're talking about Donovan all the way through, where are we going? What happens to this guy at the end?

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:26Bill Simmons?

  Does he get sent back as like 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.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not a big fan of

• 34:37Speaker 01

  The next 2010 movie they made.

• 34:40Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Because I was, 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.

• 35:01Sean Fennessey?

  It's so interesting, though, because, you know, obviously Clark wrote a novel while they were making this film.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:08Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 35:17Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  I take 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. Because in the abstract, when the star child turns and those eyes are moving in the models, in the puppet's head, and almost looks at the audience. You know, it's just a moment that let, sort of Stanley is saying, we need to start looking within ourselves. You know, 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?

• 36:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 36:26Bill 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 a plot fiction. And then there's other, 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?

• 36:45Speaker 01

  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?

• 36:56Sean Fennessey?

  That's not true.

• 36:58Bill Simmons?

  What is, 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.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  I think they were really confused in a good way and kind of a, I think they were kind of confused at the end of Munich.

• 37:12Bill Simmons?

  Hmm.

• 37:13Speaker 01

  You know.

• 37:14Bill Simmons?

  Interesting.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  Um, because I showed the Twin Towers at the, in the last shot. And I think they, they made a big link and it wasn't, it wasn't, shouldn't, they could have been confused. I intended the link to what the never ending cycle of violence, uh, the seemingly unsolvable cycle of violence is going, did eventually lead to. Um, so there's a lot of people talking about the end of that movie. A lot of people talk about the end of AI, um, where David gets his mom back for like, from, 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, what happens to him?

• 38:00Speaker 01

  Is he going to be, is he going to become, um, a deity for all the machines that found him? The super mecca that people often confusingly think are aliens. They are not. They are the result of, 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, or oracle for them? Because humans actually had their hands on David and created David.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  So David is the first iteration of who they have now become.

• 38:47Sean Fennessey?

  That's one of the major reasons I ask you about the link between 2001 and AI because it's so, it's such an echo of the apes touching the monolith and the astronauts approaching the monolith, you know?

• 38:57Speaker 01

  I told you this film had an effect on me in 2001.

• 39:01Sean Fennessey?

  It worked.

• 39:02Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Close Encounters definitely leaves you with some questions at the end. Especially like is Richard Dreyfuss's character ever gonna be able to have a normal day ever again in his life?

• 39:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:18Bill Simmons?

  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 want the story to end. You never saw it?

• 39:36Speaker 01

  I didn't see it for 20 years.

• 39:37Bill Simmons?

  We did rewatchables on it. We had a lot of fun with it. It's a very silly movie.

• 39:41Speaker 01

  I didn't see it. 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. Shark got blown up. This was, there's other sharks. There are no other sharks 26 feet long. Only Jaws.

• 39:58Bill Simmons?

  You know, we've, we've had this podcast since 2017 and we were trying to figure out these different structures, formats with it. And Jaws was ironically the one that we were kind of like, we'd, we'd been doing it for nine months. 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. This is what, and one of the things that we loved talking about, like the, the Robert Shaw stories and what he was like on the set and him daring Dreyfus to climb up to the top. And so that, is that story true?

• 40:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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.

• 40:41Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  I think there's a lot of exaggeration that's happened over the years, over the 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, 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. And 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 put, pushed Robert to the brink. But you don't do that. To other people unless underneath it is an enduring admiration.

• 41:24Sean Fennessey?

  Right.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  And respect. And I think that's what gets overlooked after all these years.

• 41:28Sean Fennessey?

  It serves the movie though.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  They really didn't like each other. That's not true.

• 41:31Sean Fennessey?

  But it really serves the movie.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  But it serves the movie and I was happy about it.

• 41:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:42Bill Simmons?

  It probably also almost served a heart attack for you when you found out Dreyfus was gonna climb up 50 feet up in the air.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Oh, we stopped him.

• 41:49Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  He's like, no, no, Richard, get down.

• 41:53Sean Fennessey?

  It's funny though, when Steven 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.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:59Sean Fennessey?

  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 eighth minute or the 90th minute, you're like, I just, I gotta, I gotta get to the end. I gotta get to the Indianapolis. I gotta get to, you know, I gotta see that the shark popping out. Like, I just have to get to those moments. That's very, it's hard, though, to, to make something where you can go back, not two times or five times, but 50 times. Like this movie that we're talking about, it kind of demands several viewings. Like you were saying, you've only seen it a couple of times beforehand, but if you like, watch it at different stages of your life, it tells you something different. You learn more about yourself when you watch it. It's really interesting.

• 42:35Bill Simmons?

  You notice different things, different themes.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  It, 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. And so Stanley employed Alex to write the score, a film score for 2001: The Space Odyssey, and, 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.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  He went to Aram Katchatorian. He went to Penderecki. He went to Corje Leggeti or Leggeti.

• 43:31Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  And, and, and he went to, he went to both Strauss composers. And so you've got the Blue Danube playing.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  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 be transitions into a space shuttle in the year 2001.

• 43:55Bill Simmons?

  It's unbelievable.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  It'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.

• 44:11Bill Simmons?

  Also, the most New York thing he did was just use the music and didn't tell some of those people, right? And that became, I think, an issue for a couple of them. They were like, wait a second, my music's in this.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  My music's in this?

• 44:22Bill Simmons?

  I'm Stanley Kubrick, I'm gonna use your music. We'll figure it out later.

• 44:26Sean Fennessey?

  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 it's a, you know, 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.

• 44:50Bill Simmons?

  Well, I wrote down the timing of the movie. So it launches the modern sci-fi boom, right? There's 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.

• 45:02Speaker 01

  They're putting serious coin in science fiction.

• 45:03Sean Fennessey?

  Planet of the Apes released five days before this movie, though, which is very interesting.

• 45:07Bill Simmons?

  Oh, my God.

• 45:08Sean Fennessey?

  That they are so twin together and they both prominently feature Apes, obviously.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  But didn't Planet of the Apes outgrow 2001?

• 45:13Sean Fennessey?

  It did, but maybe not over time ultimately.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  Maybe not over time.

• 45:17Sean Fennessey?

  But those two movies I see as very connected.

• 45:19Bill Simmons?

  It's a year before Apollo 13 and Neil Armstrong, everything.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 45:26Bill Simmons?

  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. You have that. You have the 70 millimeter, 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 go into 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, uh... And then what we talked about earlier about life in the next century, what's gonna happen? Like that 2001 is 33 years after they make this movie.

• 46:11Bill Simmons?

  But when you watch it, it feels like it's 130 years after 1968.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  And the movies already outlive some of the sponsors. Pan American Airlines Airways no longer exists. Um, um, the other thing, Bell Telephone.

• 46:24Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Does no longer exist.

• 46:25Bill Simmons?

  Howard Johnson's?

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Howard Johnson's is still around. I think that's still around in Spotty, but it's still around. But um, you've got a lot of things that don't exist anymore where the film has out, out, outlived the uh, uh, some of what I think Stanley assumed would be uh, around for millennia.

• 46:40Bill Simmons?

  These like bedrock corporations of our life.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  I think he assumed those were bedrock corporations.

• 46:44Bill Simmons?

  So when you're watching this and you're thinking someday I'm gonna make movies. And then you're seeing the special effects in this movie, like what is, what's going through your brain?

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Well, I didn't, when I first saw the movie, I didn't notice the special effects. I was in that story. I was.

• 46:59Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 46:59Speaker 01

  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? How did they do that? And who are these people? Who is Wally Veevers? Who is, who is Douglas Trumbull? Who is Colin Cantwell? I mean, who are these people? And because they all got kind of special effects supervisor credits on single cards. And uh, I, I, I just wanted to get to know them. So of course I went to Doug Trumbull. When I went to, when I, when I made Close Encounters with a Third Kind.

• 47:39Bill 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 has, this movie has a lot of how did they do that?

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. How do they do that? I, I mean, how did they, how do they create weightlessness? When he had to back. 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, he had to basically hold his breath. You know, blow up the, uh, first of all, he mechanically manually opened the pod bay doors because Hal wouldn't do it.

• 48:20Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  And then he had to turn the entire pot around. He had to back the pot 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, a wire. But the wire was coming from the camera.

• 48:43Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Cause they didn't have wire removal. They didn't have digital wire removal in those days. Before digital wire removal, we just put, uh, 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, uh, films like War of the Worlds, the George Powell film, you see the wires on, on the, on the triangular, uh, you know, you know, you know, you know, Martian ships. But in this case, because the wire was, was, came right from the little 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, the set turned three sixty, but the actors just walked.

• 49:28Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. What's in that flight attendant to walk upside down?

• 49:31Speaker 01

  They, they actually rotated the entire set. I got the idea in Poltergeist when I produced and had, had co-written Poltergeist, um.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  I wrote the story. I, I wrote, I wrote the screenplay, um. I wanted Joe Beth Williams, the character to kind of weightlessly fly around a room. So we built an entire bedroom, put it on the same kind of, uh, vertical carousel. And we, we just started revolving it and Joe Beth just had to go like Gene Kelly did in Royal Wedding when he danced on the walls and the floor and the ceiling. Joe 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.

• 50:23Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  With the, uh, with the Cacheturian, uh, music plane when they were jogging, uh, all around for exercise.

• 50:30Bill Simmons?

  Even some of the shots I'd feel like has 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.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 50:45Bill Simmons?

  But I, I thought of that when I was watching it, um.

• 50:47Sean Fennessey?

  Kierdelid did not enjoy shooting that sequence for the record.

• 50:50Bill Simmons?

  I can't imagine.

• 50:50Sean Fennessey?

  They only did, they only did it twice and he said.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  For the record, he said that.

• 50:52Sean Fennessey?

  He did not enjoy it.

• 50:53Bill Simmons?

  So here's what Kubrick said about the ending in a 1980 phone interview with a journalist.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  I read this, yeah, but go ahead and.

• 51:00Bill Simmons?

  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.

• 51:26Sean 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 wish that I, I'm, 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.

• 52:03Bill Simmons?

  Maybe it's, maybe it's what 13th, it's 12 years after he made the movie. Do you get like, you make a movie, you send out in the world after 10 years, like, ah, fuck it, I'll tell you what happened.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  I'd, 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 drawing the world off.

• 52:20Sean Fennessey?

  See, I love that.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  So he can keep, he can keep the truth. A little more contained.

• 52:25Bill Simmons?

  He's playing a little chess with them.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Maybe. Oh, he was a great chess player. Matter of fact, you know, the best gift I ever gave Stanley for his birthday was the first computer chess game.

• 52:34Bill Simmons?

  Ooh.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  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 mate me, checkmate me. But, um, but, but when I found out that, that in the eighties, they had made a little, you know, tabletop electric computer chess game. I sent it to Stanley and Stanley called me back a week later and he said, uh, couldn't you have sent me a smarter one?

• 53:02Sean Fennessey?

  That's a real careful what you wish for scenario, though, given what happens in the movie.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Sent me a smarter chess, electronic chess game because he kept beating it.

• 53:11Bill Simmons?

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• 53:56Bill Simmons?

  See terms at fanduel.com/predicts/bonus-offer/terms. 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 a little a, I think if they're making this movie now, they're probably like, you gotta figure out if Gosling can do it or whatever. Um, Kubrick didn't want big name stars. He wanted like anonymous faces, anonymous expressions.

• 54:22Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 54:23Bill Simmons?

  And yet. Like if Steve McQueen is in this movie, does it feel different? Or does he take you out of it?

• 54:29Speaker 01

  It would take me out of it if Steve McQueen were in 2001 A Space Odyssey.

• 54:32Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Because I would have too much baggage to unpack from all the movies I've seen.

• 54:37Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  You know, from basically from, you know, The Blob to Bullet, which came out that year.

• 54:42Bill Simmons?

  So he's bringing the Steve McQueen IMDb baggage with him.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I thought it was really smart to hire Gary Lockwood. And Kira Dillia, of course, was brilliant. And Frank 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 they were more like they were like astronauts who were a little more. There was more anonymity in casting them. And nobody had William Sylvester was an American living in England, working on stage. And nobody had seen him in American movies. And.

• 55:16Bill Simmons?

  Because you went you went both ways with this. Because like in Raiders, everyone knew who Harrison Ford was. 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 D. 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.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  No, not really. I couldn't have put big stars in E.T. because there are there are no. I mean, Drew Barrymore became a big star about about two months after E.T. opened.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  And Henry did had a great career. Henry Thomas, Dee Dee's great. She's a wonderful actor. I love her. But I wanted the same kind of anonymity, you know? I wanted the movie to be known. And I wanted them to be the characters that would become known. Look, 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.

• 56:13Bill Simmons?

  Really?

• 56:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I thought it was it was going to be. The parents were gonna 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 gonna take off the way it did. I had no idea.

• 56:27Sean Fennessey?

  We've also done E.T. on the show, just for the record.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  Have you really?

• 56:29Bill Simmons?

  Oh, we've done, you're the leader in, in directors. We've done nine Spielberg movies. Yeah, you're the, you're the leader in the clubhouse.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  I loved the Close Encounters one.

• 56:39Bill Simmons?

  Oh, thank you.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  That was a great one.

• 56:40Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you're the, uh...

• 56:42Speaker 01

  You guys got it.

• 56:43Bill Simmons?

  We, well, we still have some.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  You've got it.

• 56:44Sean Fennessey?

  That's nice. That's nice to hear.

• 56:45Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, that is nice to hear. Yeah, we still have some left in your catalog, which is extensive.

• 56:49Sean Fennessey?

  Well, E.T. and, and this film too, like, the star of the films, E.T. and How 9000.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  And Jaws is the star of Jaws. And Roy Schreiber was the star. He had done French Connection and stuff. And Richard had done American Graffiti. And Richard had done The Apprenticeship with Duddy Kravitz, which was a huge critical hit. And, uh, and Robert Shaw had done Man for All Seasons. And he was well-known. He had, he had done The Sting before. Big, big hit movie. Won the Oscar for Best Picture. But it was about three anonymous guys that, 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. Maybe 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, have, have offered us. And so, I, I'm gonna take that back.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  I'm gonna back, I'm gonna, I'm gonna kind of back that up a little bit by saying...

• 57:43Bill Simmons?

  I see. I talked you into it.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  You did. You can make, 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.

• 57:54Bill Simmons?

  The only 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 seemed like stars. They just, you could read their faces and something about them. You're like, "Oh, that guy's a movie star."

• 58:09Sean Fennessey?

  Well, also for such a film with so little dialogue, you know, 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. So maybe that isn't what he would have wanted out of one of the astronauts.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, I'm gonna go back to your point. You're right. McQueen could not have been 2001 to space, honestly.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  But maybe Hackman could have done it. I don't know.

• 58:35Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 58:35Bill Simmons?

  Hackman could have done it.

• 58:36Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 58:37Bill Simmons?

  So he was, he was a legendary million takes guy?

• 58:40Speaker 01

  Who was that? Kubrick. Yes.

• 58:42Bill Simmons?

  Um, what's, where are you in the, cause 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?

• 58:51Speaker 01

  I'm six to eight. Probably six to eight takes.

• 58:54Bill Simmons?

  What are you trying to accomplish in the six to eight? What are you trying to find out from the actors?

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Well, I'm, I'm, it, it, it varies, cause 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. So I've done 30 takes before. I've done 30 takes with, with, with certain actors. Um, but I've also done two takes with certain actors.

• 59:26Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  Uh, 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. Um, take one, I'm just getting a feeling of, uh, about how it's sounding and how it's feeling to me. Take two, I'm gonna nail it. Take three, you can use parts of it, but after take three, you're not gonna want to use any of those takes. And he told me ahead of time that he's good for about three.

• 59:56Bill Simmons?

  Take two. Take two guy.

• 59:58Sean Fennessey?

  Take two Tony, yeah.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  And he, we did a couple more takes and that's, I'm telling you, we did five, six takes, but Tony is one of the most intuitive actors. And his choices are almost gifts. He, he, I don't know where it comes from, but when he makes a, a, 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 his best, giving you his best shot.

• 1:00:33Bill Simmons?

  I love shit like this. Like our favorite one ever is Nicholson in A Few Good Men. When they did all the Colonel Jessup courtroom scenes and he was done. And they're like, you can, all right, now you can go, we can use this stand-in, we're gonna get the other one. And he's like, no, no, I'm gonna stay, I'm gonna keep, just keep doing this over and over again. And they're like, really? It's like, yeah. No, I love it.

• 1:00:51Sean Fennessey?

  He loves to act.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Also, it's fun. You, you get actors that, that have done, you know, 300, 400 performances on stage. They want to do a lot of takes.

• 1:01:00Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  You know, because, because every night they bring something else to the theater. They bring something else to the character. They find other ways of expressing things that don't throw the other characters off that, that aren't gonna sabotage the company because they've suddenly come up with a better idea than the playwright. They're not gonna do that. Or some of them, most of them are not gonna 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, I want, when I worked with Leo, Leo likes to watch his own takes. When I did Cash Me If You Can with DiCaprio, he likes to go to the monitor after every take and look at the take back. And it, and it gives him ideas. And he says, let me have one more, let me have one more.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  So I might, I, I might do nine, 10, 11 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 gonna be a big overseer, you know, as a director and say, no, I think it was great on take four. We're, we're moving on. If I got a schedule problem, if I'm losing the light and we're racing the light, yeah, I'm gonna be a little more, come on.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  I hope you felt that enough because we're not doing it again. We can't do it again. But, but short of that, I'm gonna let an actor tell me when they think they've given me their best, their best take.

• 1:02:19Bill Simmons?

  Leo grinds tape, 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.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  Sometimes I have, I have to, especially in the, in this later era of my career, I've gotta 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 made E T, tell me that you, and you know, and your childhood was informed by it. Tell me if you think you have more to give. Don't take cut print as an answer.

• 1:03:07Bill Simmons?

  I don't know if our guy Stanley was doing that.

• 1:03:10Sean Fennessey?

  Seemed like he had a different manner.

• 1:03:11Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:12Sean Fennessey?

  In terms of approaching actors.

• 1:03:15Bill Simmons?

  Making the movie we mentioned, he spent five years developing it, got involved with Arthur C. Clarke, kept doing it. And I'll say, I'll say people, there's a lot of great research on this. There's been documentaries, multiple books.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:27Bill Simmons?

  But he, the most interesting thing of all that stuff, the clip notes,

• 1:03:33Bill Simmons?

  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. Said, no, no, no, you gotta wait. You gotta wait until the movie comes out. And then movie came out, releases the book. But that's, that's a lot of trust you gotta do. So they worked on the script together and seemed a little tumultuous in the research.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  Between them?

• 1:03:56Bill Simmons?

  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.

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  I, I don't know anything about their working relationship, but they, they were, 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.

• 1:04:23Bill Simmons?

  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?

• 1:04:35Speaker 01

  I have, I, I have a deep partnership with Tony Kushner. And I have an equally deep partnership with David Koep.

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  And it has been just, just, I'm just lucky that they're on this planet.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  To to tell stories with me.

• 1:04:53Sean Fennessey?

  Can you talk about like the relationship that you have with a writer like that who you return to over and over again and what what happens when they have an idea that you don't like or how do you come to a common ground?

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  Well, if if there's it it depends. I mean, I mean, both they're two completely different people, number one. Tony Kushner is is a is a Tony Award winning Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and an Academy, multiple Academy Award nominated screenwriter. And David Koep is one of the most commercial screenwriters in Hollywood history.

• 1:05:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  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 what when you I've always said, look, I 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, really nice still photographs. But without a screenplay, I absolutely am

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  lost. And so for me, the writer is the most important person in my life.

• 1:06:17Sean Fennessey?

  Interesting. 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's 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 preexisting 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. There's just not any other movies like this.

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, there aren't. There aren't. Can you answer me this? Did Arthur Arthur Clark's book Rendezvous with Rama happen before?

• 1:07:06Sean Fennessey?

  I think it follows.

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  2001 or it's after.

• 1:07:08Sean Fennessey?

  I think it's 73.

• 1:07:09Speaker 01

  Okay, because that that had similar themes.

• 1:07:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:12Bill Simmons?

  So when they were working, as 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.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  Who said that one?

• 1:07:35Bill Simmons?

  Kubrick.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  He said, oh, wow.

• 1:07:37Sean Fennessey?

  That's like me prepping for pods.

• 1:07:39Bill Simmons?

  Like you're watching the entire Kubrick catalog to get ready.

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 1:07:43Bill Simmons?

  He really sounded, uh, demanding and was just, that was it. He's working on something, that's what he's doing. Interesting though, Polanski asked him if he'd ever taken drugs, and Stanley said, I never had and 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.

• 1:08:05Sean Fennessey?

  Oh.

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  I love that. I love that he acknowledges that he had a creative gift.

• 1:08:09Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  I mean, a lot of filmmakers are shy about even confessing that they have any gift at all, that those, those who have been really successful, I don't know anybody in my circle. I mean, I, I paint models with directors at Guillermo del Toro's house every weekend, and not once during those model painting and making sessions has anybody referred to themselves as gifted.

• 1:08:33Bill Simmons?

  Well, it's, 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, maybe he drank some wine, I don't know, but it really sounded.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  We talk about, I mean, we talk about, we certainly talk about stuff we've done and how, how much fun it is to make movies and, and cook up stuff that never existed five seconds ago, and suddenly you get an idea, where did that idea come from? What came from being born and living and experiencing everything? And that's where your ideas come from, but.

• 1:09:02Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  But we never, we never look at each other like we're, I think Guillermo del Toro is a genius, but Guillermo, we'll 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, 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, than directing a movie.

• 1:09:35Bill Simmons?

  I'm the opposite. I tell Sean I'm a genius all the time.

• 1:09:38Sean Fennessey?

  That's actually true, yes. I've been working with him for almost 15 years.

• 1:09:41Bill Simmons?

  So they do the premiere for this movie. And it goes badly and Kubrick's wife said Stanley was tearing himself to shreds. He's saying, oh, my God, they really hated it. He was heartbroken, couldn't sleep, couldn't speak, couldn't do anything, was shattered, felt terrible. And then what we talked about, the young people started coming 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?

• 1:10:10Speaker 01

  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. And 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 is not a person you're going to want to have dinner with the next week.

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  But now, now, if your film is is a huge success or is a middling success or isn't a success at all, it gets you. It just osmosis through the the current, you know, the current social state of the art that we're all enveloped in. And and but I still can get away and and so I don't have to stress out.

• 1:11:07Sean Fennessey?

  There's some, 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.

• 1:11:18Bill Simmons?

  Pauline Kael, not a fan.

• 1:11:20Sean Fennessey?

  Very tough piece. And then there's some that are very laudatory right out of the gate.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:11:24Sean Fennessey?

  And then the movie, it seems like in the first week, it does OK business.

• 1:11:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:11:29Sean Fennessey?

  It's not a bomb, but it just does OK. And then it seems like you said, like, it seemed like people caught on one week in.

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  Something else really helped that movie catch on. The marketing department at MGM.

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  And I 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, Two Thousand and One, A Space Odyssey, the ultimate trip.

• 1:12:01Speaker 01

  And appeal 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?

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  I 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, and I'm not saying he's in denial of that, because I don't really know, you know, if that's the reason it it eventually did so well, and people saw it. I I think it's, I think drugs notwithstanding, the film itself is a drug. You don't need to smoke marijuana to get off on Two Thousand and One, A 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 Two Thousand and One fix.

• 1:12:47Bill Simmons?

  Well, he wins his only Oscar that he won for a movie, which was Visual Effects, nominated for director, screenplay, art direction.

• 1:12:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:57Bill Simmons?

  Do you remember who wins that year for Best Picture?

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  Uh, in sixty-eight?

• 1:13:02Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:13:05Bill Simmons?

  Oliver with an exclamation point.

• 1:13:07Speaker 01

  Oh, Oliver.

• 1:13:08Bill Simmons?

  Oliver.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  Yes, Oliver.

• 1:13:10Bill Simmons?

  You mean? We did it in the sixties, we put exclamation points in our titles. Oliver.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  Oh, of course, that was Carol Reed's first Oscar.

• 1:13:16Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:17Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Painful one for me, one of my favorite directors ever.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  It's one of my favorite musicals ever, though. It's one of my favorite musicals. I love that musical.

• 1:13:23Sean Fennessey?

  Not a fan of Oliver.

• 1:13:24Bill Simmons?

  Don't own that one on four K?

• 1:13:25Sean Fennessey?

  No, I don't.

• 1:13:25Speaker 01

  I can tell you, I'd lay another, another podcast, I'll tell you why I love that movie. Well, I love the choreography, especially by Oda White in that movie. I can talk to you about that later.

• 1:13:34Bill Simmons?

  Ten million dollar budget for, for, uh, Two Thousand and One.

• 1:13:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:39Bill Simmons?

  Double what they gave him. I think he jacked it up. They gave him like 4.5. I was like, I have a 10. Did you ever jack it up higher than that on a movie?

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  Well, Jaws was budgeted for 3.5 million and it cost 10 because it went over schedule 100 days.

• 1:13:57Bill Simmons?

  They were okay with that trade.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  Well, no, they weren't okay with that.

• 1:14:00Bill Simmons?

  Eventually.

• 1:14:00Sean Fennessey?

  Until they were.

• 1:14:01Speaker 01

  They were okay with that the second day of release.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  But not until.

• 1:14:06Bill Simmons?

  They got you back by making seven sequels. Are we, are we done with Jaws sequels? How many have we had? Four?

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  I think we've had three, right?

• 1:14:13Sean Fennessey?

  Three sequels.

• 1:14:14Speaker 01

  Was it four or three?

• 1:14:15Sean Fennessey?

  Three sequels, yeah.

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  The last one was a 3D movie. Yeah.

• 1:14:18Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Jaws 2 was solid.

• 1:14:22Bill Simmons?

  It wasn't bad. Uh, second biggest movie in 1968.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  Was it what, 2001?

• 1:14:29Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  That was great.

• 1:14:31Bill Simmons?

  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 rewatchables.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:45Bill Simmons?

  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, he loved it. We're gonna do some categories. Okay. Hold on, buckle up.

• 1:15:01Sean Fennessey?

  You can see, but he has photographic recall of the sequences. He's gonna be fine in this. This is not gonna be a problem.

• 1:15:06Bill Simmons?

  So I'm gonna give you some choices for most rewatchable. All right. 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.

• 1:15:17Speaker 01

  This is 2001.

• 1:15:18Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:19Speaker 01

  The most rewatchable scene in 2001.

• 1:15:20Bill Simmons?

  I'm gonna give you some choices. Dawn of Man, the beginning with the apes leading up to the leopard, which holy shit, the leopard scene. We didn't even talk about that yet. These are people in monkey costumes. And they're just planning a play acting leopard jumping out and this is something that happened?

• 1:15:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:40Bill Simmons?

  Was that, I, I just couldn't believe it. I thought, I don't know how I thought they did this, but they did it.

• 1:15:45Sean Fennessey?

  They did it with a real leopard.

• 1:15:47Bill Simmons?

  And a guy in a gorilla suit.

• 1:15:48Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:49Bill Simmons?

  Well. And Kubrick was like, I hope this works. I hope the guy in the gorilla suit got, uh, got, uh, got stunt adjustment. Unbelievable. Um, so we got that.

• 1:15:59Sean Fennessey?

  Such a great choice because it just jolts you awake in the movie.

• 1:16:02Bill Simmons?

  Uh, we get the ape figuring out that bones could 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. Um, jogging scene into the eating scene into the Hal interview.

• 1:16:20Bill Simmons?

  Hal does the lip reading thing.

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's my favorite scene in the movie.

• 1:16:23Bill Simmons?

  Okay, explain.

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  Uh, my favorite scene in the movie is where they, for one thing.

• 1:16:31Speaker 01

  These guys should have known that Hal 9000 could read lips.

• 1:16:38Speaker 01

  I mean, they should have known that. After all, uh, you know, he, uh, he holds up a sketch he made. And he says, that's a very good rendering, Dave. So he, 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. Yeah, rotates around. The best moment in that movie though, is, uh, cutting to Hal's, uh, eye. The eye that Peter Jackson, I understand, has in his archive.

• 1:17:21Sean Fennessey?

  Oh.

• 1:17:21Bill Simmons?

  What?

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I hear that Peter Jackson has the prop eye.

• 1:17:24Sean Fennessey?

  That foretells a, uh, a response to one of the categories.

• 1:17:27Bill Simmons?

  Oh my God.

• 1:17:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and, and I think that's my favorite scene in the movie because I didn't see it coming. I must say, like Bowman and Poole, I did not see that coming.

• 1:17:37Bill Simmons?

  It's funny what that they didn't use the NFL coaches calling in the players.

• 1:17:41Sean Fennessey?

  Covering the mouth, yeah.

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  Holding the clipboard against their mouth, right?

• 1:17:44Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, that was their big mistake.

• 1:17:46Sean Fennessey?

  That's Bowman's play sheet. What was he? He forgot what they were supposed to be running there. What formation were they supposed to be using? The, the, that's such a great moment of trusting the audience to understand what is happening.

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:17:56Sean Fennessey?

  It's not over explained what's transpiring, but because of the way he shoots the astronauts and then cut, does that cut that you're describing? We get it. We get it in a very clear way.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  But here's what, what also happens. He strategically places that scene just before the intermission.

• 1:18:11Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 1:18:12Speaker 01

  So you go black and it says intermission on the screen.

• 1:18:15Bill Simmons?

  For maximum impact.

• 1:18:18Bill Simmons?

  Hal attacks Poole as he's trying to fix the pod. Dave tries to disconnect Hal. Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?

• 1:18:25Speaker 01

  That's my other favorite scene.

• 1:18:26Bill Simmons?

  Stop, Dave. I'm afraid.

• 1:18:28Speaker 01

  No, I love that. Daisy, Daisy.

• 1:18:32Bill Simmons?

  Uh, 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.

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, that, that's, that's, I, I, the reason I go for the, I'd 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.

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  Is, is, is the slit scanner they used that Doug Trumbull created with Stanley Kubrick. Who conceived this amazing idea to do this Stargate effect.

• 1:19:03Bill Simmons?

  It's out of control. And then the ending would be the last one.

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  Control even now.

• 1:19:06Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Then the ending, Bowman goes through the stages of life, the music, all that stuff. What do you have, Sean?

• 1:19:12Sean Fennessey?

  Uh.

• 1:19:12Bill Simmons?

  For most rewatchable.

• 1:19:13Sean Fennessey?

  I think. One that we didn't mention is when they land on Klavius and are witnessing the monolith and that like selfie moment that they're taking. And.

• 1:19:25Speaker 01

  That was great.

• 1:19:26Sean Fennessey?

  Right, right before that sonic.

• 1:19:28Speaker 01

  That was great.

• 1:19:28Sean Fennessey?

  Hits, you know, that's such a bracing, it's, the film is so quiet at so many times and it, it, it jostles you.

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:19:34Sean Fennessey?

  So abruptly. Um, and I always like to watch that scene because he, at a certain point, he puts the camera on the astronauts' shoulders and it turns into a horror movie. It's before Hal even shows up in the movie.

• 1:19:44Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 1:19:45Sean Fennessey?

  But the movie gets very scary intense and you described it as like a Hitchcockian thriller. Like it is so, you are waiting to find out what's gonna happen.

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:19:52Bill Simmons?

  And then we get this sonic hit and then it just cuts into the future and we don't know what's happened.

• 1:19:56Speaker 01

  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 pantagious theater it was with that, the mono 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, you know, Jupiter mission 18 months later. And then this huge ship comes in, which I think inspired George.

• 1:20:34Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  To do the first shot of Star Wars with that huge imperial destroyer coming over the top of the screen.

• 1:20:43Bill Simmons?

  Uh, 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, but in the 4K, just when they're landing on the, uh, on the space station.

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:59Bill Simmons?

  The detail of everything is amazing. Like you can see every, everything they crevice, every, I just don't understand how they did it.

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  I don't either. Do you remember the scene where the shuttle that takes, that takes, um, you know, Heywood Floyd.

• 1:21:18Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  To Klavius, the shuttle, when it lands, it's on some kind of a huge, uh, almost like a mono. It's like an elevator. It's like an elevator. It's like a, and it comes, starts coming down. Now you see what it looks like. And if you look very carefully, it, 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 and and there's something just something about the the way you could anthropomorphize

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  on what all of these designs remind us of in the of of the ships and the shuttles they were using.

• 1:22:09Sean Fennessey?

  And all the the the opening Dawn of Man sequence and all the space stuff, there they're meant to be these kind of reflections of each other of 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.

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  It was originally that way.

• 1:22:27Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. And so this idea of the development in Egyptian societies and then the, you know, what what that meant to technology and evolution as people, like all of this stuff kind of mixing together in the story and 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.

• 1:22:42Speaker 01

  When I asked Stanley about the what I thought was the Egyptian sculpture coming down, Stanley looked at me, I it was 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 a real interesting rapport.

• 1:23:04Bill Simmons?

  Sean does that.

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, you both, this is how you guys are together.

• 1:23:07Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, is that so, Bill?

• 1:23:08Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. What do you mean, Bill? What's the most 1968 thing about this movie? You mentioned Pan Am and the and the grip shoes and Howard Johnson's, which you say is still around. I'm not positive. I know they've it might be in Middle America, maybe.

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  Maybe somewhere on the East Coast it's around or in Ohio or Indiana possibly.

• 1:23:29Bill Simmons?

  What was the other one that doesn't exist anymore? There's.

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  Well, Pan American.

• 1:23:33Sean Fennessey?

  Bell telephone.

• 1:23:34Speaker 01

  Bell telephone doesn't exist anymore.

• 1:23:35Bill Simmons?

  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?

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:23:46Bill Simmons?

  Nobody would do that.

• 1:23:47Sean Fennessey?

  And it doesn't say overture. It doesn't.

• 1:23:49Bill Simmons?

  No.

• 1:23:50Sean Fennessey?

  It doesn't present that we're all going to sit here quietly. It just starts.

• 1:23:52Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:23:53Bill Simmons?

  It's such like a it's such like a 1960s, 70s choice. I just don't ever think that would happen.

• 1:23:59Speaker 01

  Because there were these big road show epics they'd made, you know, arguably one of the greatest movies ever made, Lawrence Arabia, what, you know? Ben Hur, followed all the, all that roadshow. You had started out with an overture. And then the titles come on. Dr. Jabago starts out with an overture in a dark theater. The titles go out. West Side Story starts with an overture. And then this, the titles come on. And um, one film after the other, you know, that, that said, this is worth, this is, we're going to give you more bang for your buck. You're paying more money to see these movies. Then you do for, on a, on a, in a, in a double bill movie, movie house.

• 1:24:36Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:24:58Bill Simmons?

  Simple times.

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  And, and but, but, but that's called, that's called exhibition.

• 1:25:03Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:03Speaker 01

  That's called.

• 1:25:04Bill Simmons?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  Presentational style.

• 1:25:06Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:25:07Speaker 01

  That's stylish. I miss that.

• 1:25:10Bill Simmons?

  What was your 1968, most 1968?

• 1:25:12Sean Fennessey?

  I have a couple. I mean, Steven's 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, that's so perfectly 1968.

• 1:25:23Bill Simmons?

  Sure.

• 1:25:24Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I mean, the idea that 2001 is a long ways away, uh, is very 1968, you know, we're approaching almost double the time.

• 1:25:31Speaker 01

  That's the other thing you're telling me got wrong.

• 1:25:32Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:25:33Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, we're not even close to that technology.

• 1:25:35Speaker 01

  Close.

• 1:25:35Sean Fennessey?

  In some cases, um, 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. There's something fascinating because we don't, 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 films, it, 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.

• 1:26:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:09Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 1:26:19Speaker 01

  And, you know, they had a whole department that did nothing but put black paint on white stars. Because when, when one of the, 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. You know, Kubrick had an entire department of young people that did nothing but blot out the stars with black paint to make it, to make it look like it was being occluded, occluded by the ship that's entering frame.

• 1:27:01Sean Fennessey?

  Crazy.

• 1:27:01Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:27:10Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, that's stop motion animation is that's the last vestige of a handmade movie.

• 1:27:14Speaker 01

  Even when we were working with Aardman at DreamWorks, releasing Aardman's movies, the last couple of movies they made were, they'd look like they were, you know, done with, you know, armatures and stop motion, but the last couple were done on the computer.

• 1:27:30Sean Fennessey?

  Did you have a most 1968 thing about this movie?

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  The only, no, the only 1968 thing about this movie was the, was the, how can I say this? The, trying to find the right word.

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  2001 had nothing to do with 1968.

• 1:27:54Speaker 01

  There was no 1968 when you're watching 2001.

• 1:27:57Sean Fennessey?

  Right, true.

• 1:27:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:28:14Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, because he ended up cutting it off.

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  To 139, right. But 1968 was completely.

• 1:28:22Speaker 01

  Obliterated by 2001.

• 1:28:24Sean Fennessey?

  We haven't mentioned that either, though, that this is a very tumultuous time in America.

• 1:28:28Bill Simmons?

  Number one tumultuous.

• 1:28:29Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:29Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:30Sean Fennessey?

  Very violent year and a very complicated.

• 1:28:32Speaker 01

  Vietnam is raging.

• 1:28:33Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:34Bill Simmons?

  RFK, Martin Luther King.

• 1:28:35Sean Fennessey?

  And this is like a, it's kind of a retreat from that, but also kind of a, that call to the self and to think about who you are in the world.

• 1:28:43Speaker 01

  It's true. And I think Stanley, look, Stanley knew history and he, he watched the news. He knew he was really up on every current event. And which is also undermines the fact that people think he was a recluse.

• 1:28:57Bill Simmons?

  You know, you know why Sean hates the year 2001?

• 1:29:00Sean Fennessey?

  Why?

• 1:29:01Bill Simmons?

  So it was the year Tom Brady got the Patriots starting job and ended up winning six Super Bowls for the Patriots.

• 1:29:07Sean Fennessey?

  I do hate that.

• 1:29:07Bill Simmons?

  Sean's a Jets fan.

• 1:29:08Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I do.

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  Oh, so you're not a, you're not a Patriot?

• 1:29:10Sean Fennessey?

  Not a Patriots fan.

• 1:29:11Speaker 01

  You're not a Patriot?

• 1:29:12Sean Fennessey?

  No, I'm a New Yorker. I'm sadly a Jets fan.

• 1:29:15Bill Simmons?

  Our next category, don't judge us, but we love the movie Boogie Nights.

• 1:29:19Speaker 01

  So do I.

• 1:29:20Bill Simmons?

  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 ours. Here's, 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.

• 1:29:55Sean Fennessey?

  He burned all the models in the movie.

• 1:29:57Bill Simmons?

  He makes the movie and then destroys all the other pieces of it so it can never come back in any way.

• 1:30:02Sean Fennessey?

  This is like me deleting sports tweets. This is crazy.

• 1:30:04Speaker 01

  Well, what he's doing is he's striking the sets.

• 1:30:07Bill Simmons?

  Right?

• 1:30:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:08Bill Simmons?

  Do you, you didn't, do you care about what happens to stuff from your movie after the movie?

• 1:30:12Speaker 01

  I save everything. I mean, I have a huge, huge collection of props from all of my films.

• 1:30:18Bill Simmons?

  That's really smart.

• 1:30:19Speaker 01

  Everything.

• 1:30:19Bill Simmons?

  I don't know if you've noticed what's happened in that world. There's the whole prop auction world.

• 1:30:23Speaker 01

  But I save everything not to give it to Heritage Foundation to sell. I save everything in an archive and I, and.

• 1:30:30Bill Simmons?

  So could you have like a little mini Hall of Fame at this point?

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

  What? No, but if the Academy Museum needs anything that I've got, anything in my collection.

• 1:30:36Sean Fennessey?

  Jaws is on display right now, right?

• 1:30:37Speaker 01

  Jaws is on display right now at the Academy Museum.

• 1:30:40Bill Simmons?

  What's the single greatest thing you have from one of your movies?

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  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's movie.

• 1:30:55Sean Fennessey?

  I saw it.

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  You saw it, you did see it.

• 1:30:57Sean Fennessey?

  I saw it.

• 1:30:58Bill Simmons?

  In the office?

• 1:30:59Sean Fennessey?

  I had a heart palpitation.

• 1:31:00Speaker 01

  Well, I moved to New York, as of January 1st, we became residents of New York State, and I've moved everything to New York City, so that lives with me in New York.

• 1:31:10Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, oh, I saw it at just the last minute then, I guess.

• 1:31:13Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, you did, last minute. What did you have for Floyd?

• 1:31:15Sean Fennessey?

  I just love when a movie refuses to explain itself, that there is, 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. This movie is completely disinterested in that, and I wish that we had more, like, 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 just my, that's one of my favorite things about movies, and this is, is this maybe the single, like, the signature

• 1:31:58Sean Fennessey?

  example of, well, what do you think at the end of the movie?

• 1:32:02Bill 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 and stuff like that. This movie, you could come away, like, my son, 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 at 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.

• 1:32:26Speaker 01

  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 left 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.

• 1:32:55Bill Simmons?

  But then he said, "Oh, you think I'm done doing this? Here's The Shining."

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  That's right, and it all started over again, didn't it?

• 1:33:02Bill Simmons?

  I mean, Room 237, an entire documentary about how to interpret The Shining.

• 1:33:07Speaker 01

  That's absolutely right.

• 1:33:08Bill Simmons?

  I'm not even sure, what's your interpretation of The Shining?

• 1:33:09Speaker 01

  Of The Shining? Well, I recreated some of The Shining in Ready Player One. Uh, um, I'd love that movie. Um, it took me a while to love it. I didn't love it when I first saw it.

• 1:33:22Bill Simmons?

  Do you believe in the, the?

• 1:33:24Speaker 01

  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. When I, um, when I saw the movie, I was, it came out. I had finished Raiders and 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, he's, he's, he's got, he's really careful about his honesty, but he's honest. He'll tell you if he doesn't like something and I'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, and he stopped me right there. He says, no, you didn't. I said, why?

• 1:34:09Speaker 01

  He says, because I can tell you didn't like it a lot. You, you might have liked it, but you didn't like it a lot. What, what did you really think of The Shining? And I told him that there were certain things that confused me because I, I was in love with the book. I love, I loved when the, when the heaters, the, the, the, the generators blew up. I mean, I loved the topiary animals coming to life.

• 1:34:31Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:34:31Speaker 01

  You know, there's a lot of things in the book I loved. And, and, and I, and, but I, I just said, and, and he said, is there anything that you? Would, would tell me other things that you didn't like. You didn't, you, you, you didn't like it because I didn't include those things that I cut out of the book. And I said, I, Stanley, I liked the movie. I'm not saying I didn't like it. But I, would I have liked it more had Jack Torrance had an encounter with those topiary animals that were reanimated? Yeah, that, that would have been a fun, 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.

• 1:35:12Speaker 01

  But I said, but I thought Jack was kind of big. He was big. His 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, I thought you let him have his head, so to speak, you know? And he went running, not for the bar, and he went running for the hills. He, he really expressed himself. It 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, where's Cagney?

• 1:35:57Speaker 01

  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, with his character. You're not going to get it. If you, if you did not put Cagney at the top of your top 10 list. End of conversation. That was it.

• 1:36:16Bill Simmons?

  Jesus. James Cagney.

• 1:36:18Sean Fennessey?

  That's great.

• 1:36:19Speaker 01

  But I, but do you see the wisdom of that?

• 1:36:21Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:36:22Speaker 01

  I mean, that's brilliant.

• 1:36:23Sean Fennessey?

  But were you listing more naturalistic leading men?

• 1:36:27Speaker 01

  I don't even remember the names that I just said because he had me on the spot.

• 1:36:31Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  I mean, he was, look, Stanley is witty and he's funny. The other, 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, 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.

• 1:36:54Bill Simmons?

  What's aged the best is the next category.

• 1:36:56Speaker 01

  What is it?

• 1:36:57Bill Simmons?

  What's aged 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?

• 1:37:05Speaker 01

  What is aged the best?

• 1:37:06Bill Simmons?

  Aging like a fine wine, like all these years later, wow.

• 1:37:09Speaker 01

  How 9000 has aged the best?

• 1:37:11Bill Simmons?

  I think that's the correct answer.

• 1:37:13Sean Fennessey?

  I agree. That's number one.

• 1:37:14Bill Simmons?

  This is like probably the easiest what's aged the best we have.

• 1:37:17Sean Fennessey?

  There are hundreds of things in this movie, though.

• 1:37:19Bill Simmons?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:37:20Sean Fennessey?

  That can feel very prominent.

• 1:37:21Bill Simmons?

  Rip through a couple.

• 1:37:22Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, one had established the sci fi blockbuster as a Hollywood staple.

• 1:37:25Bill Simmons?

  Yep.

• 1:37:25Sean Fennessey?

  Um, 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. Um, 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. Um, 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. Um, and also, uh, 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.

• 1:38:08Sean Fennessey?

  I thought that that was so clever and that him, him kind of seeing the future on that one in particular made me laugh.

• 1:38:15Bill Simmons?

  You had a lot of what I had. I also would add a mysterious government cover up of something unsettling.

• 1:38:20Sean Fennessey?

  Hmm.

• 1:38:20Bill Simmons?

  It's aged well.

• 1:38:21Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:38:21Bill Simmons?

  Uh, a movie that pulled off no dialogue in the first 25 minutes or the last 23 minutes, just as an achievement, seems, I, I can't imagine anyone even trying to pull that off now.

• 1:38:33Speaker 01

  Not just Rafifi.

• 1:38:34Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:38:35Sean Fennessey?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:38:36Bill Simmons?

  Um, Space Oddity from David Bowie came from this movie?

• 1:38:39Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 1:38:40Bill Simmons?

  The solo astronaut space traveler movie gimmick, which then eventually became The Martian, Project Hail Mary, like just sending people out by themselves.

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:38:50Bill Simmons?

  I feel like this probably invented this. This story has aged the best. Uh, Kier Delaie said that, uh, 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? That cuts it just furious. The Who contacted Kubrick about directing Tommy after this movie. And he said, no, because he was doing, he was doing a Clockwork Orange.

• 1:39:20Speaker 01

  Brilliant of the Who to tap into Stanley for that.

• 1:39:22Bill Simmons?

  Well, they were upset, so the next album they did, Who's Next, was them urinating out of a monolith. Thought that is the best. Using classical music over a real score. And then, I, we gotta talk about the, the moon stuff with, with, 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. And then he has fun of it in The Shining and Danny's wearing an Apollo 13 shirt.

• 1:39:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:39:57Bill Simmons?

  And all these people think he filmed the moon landing. What are your thoughts on this?

• 1:40:00Speaker 01

  Well, because, 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, but we never talked about this, Stanley and

• 1:40:20Bill Simmons?

  I. So you think he loved that people thought this and he's like, I'm leaning into this to fuck with them?

• 1:40:24Speaker 01

  I think he loved that people thought that the moon landing was fake and Stanley directed the fake moon landing. I 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, he would love that.

• 1:40:37Sean Fennessey?

  There are sequences in the movie. The moon surface, Klavius landing, where you're like, huh, this is a little too close to the imagery that we saw one year later. It definitely feels like it is inspired by, 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 then we did obviously have a lot of footage of space at this point. So there, 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. How similar they are to a lot of stuff in the movie.

• 1:41:17Bill Simmons?

  My hottest take is, we did land on the moon, but they also had Stanley film or use space stuff just because they couldn't have actually shown video and they did the hybrid model. Great shock order of word. For the most cinematic shot, named after the great Gordon Willis. We call it Great Shot Gordo.

• 1:41:35Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a good title for that. Yeah, I've heard that before.

• 1:41:37Bill Simmons?

  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?

• 1:41:44Sean Fennessey?

  Um, 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.

• 1:41:56Bill Simmons?

  He never really cracked it.

• 1:41:57Speaker 01

  Well, I know how they did the shot, but you just took my answer.

• 1:42:00Sean Fennessey?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:42:01Bill Simmons?

  Oh, that was your answer?

• 1:42:02Speaker 01

  That was what I was gonna say with the floating pen was one of my favorite shots. Uh, 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, it's been stuck with a very light tape or a little light adhesive onto the glass. But the glass is slowly turning on a motor. It's not hand turning because that, that, that would be uneven. You could tell that it was a human turning it. So there's a little motor turning the glass.

• 1:42:36Sean Fennessey?

  Apparently double sided tape had just been invented. They adhered it with double sided tape.

• 1:42:42Speaker 01

  But let me tell you my other favorite shots.

• 1:42:44Bill Simmons?

  Let's.

• 1:42:45Speaker 01

  My other favorite shot is everything at the Donner Man involving, um, the, uh, first time ever front projection screen were used to make you think you were actually outside. You never saw a process shot, a process shot like that before in the history of movies. Stanley got this Scotch three, sort of 3D, um, uh, 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 Hasselblad

• 1:43:28Speaker 01

  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 could almost with a light meter, uh, read an F 11 or an F 16 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.

• 1:43:58Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:59Speaker 01

  You can see the, you can see the front projector reflected in the leopard's eyes. That thing, that schrottoyance 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.

• 1:44:23Sean Fennessey?

  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.

• 1:44:32Speaker 01

  Exactly. So when I made Two Thousand, when I made Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I got the same front projection. Doug Trumbull brought that front projection material into, to the studio.

• 1:44:44Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:44Speaker 01

  And there's one, a couple of scenes when I have my actors against the front projection material. And Doug Trumbull and Richard Urisich and his whole special effects group had to generate the effects first. And then project the effects. It was mainly lightning and clouds.

• 1:45:02Bill Simmons?

  Hmm.

• 1:45:03Speaker 01

  And that was done in the cloud tank on Close Encounters. We had a cloud tank and it made very realistic clouds. And we put lights behind, in, inside the water, behind the actual paint that was being jetted with great force into the water, which creates cumul, uh, cumulus clouds. And we had lights behind it. And when he photographed that in 65 millimeter, we had a 65 millimeter or 70 millimeter projection onto our front projection material. And it made it look like we were really outside during a distant electrical storm.

• 1:45:35Bill Simmons?

  I think Sean's gonna explode.

• 1:45:36Sean Fennessey?

  I'm in heaven, yeah.

• 1:45:38Bill Simmons?

  I think Sean just passed out.

• 1:45:39Speaker 01

  But I learned so much from Doug. I mean, Doug Trumbull taught me so much about special effects, which of course he and Stanley had devised.

• 1:45:45Bill Simmons?

  You have a Hall of Fame, great shot order, award winner, Brody.

• 1:45:51Bill Simmons?

  The

• 1:45:52Speaker 01

  Got the beach trombone shot.

• 1:45:53Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, that was.

• 1:45:54Sean Fennessey?

  Which you can recreate at the Academy Museum right now.

• 1:45:57Speaker 01

  You can. You could do that with an iPhone, your own iPhone.

• 1:45:59Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:46:01Bill Simmons?

  When did you think of that one?

• 1:46:03Speaker 01

  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 you start with a hundred millimeter lens, you put it on a dolly, and as you're as you're doling in, you're zooming back. Come on, that's been done before. But I didn't know that. I did. I did it first in Sugar Land Express.

• 1:46:30Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:31Speaker 01

  Not as effectively.

• 1:46:32Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:32Speaker 01

  When the snipers are getting the bead on the the police car with my main principal characters approaching the house where they supposedly the the the 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 I was able to use it effectively in Jaws.

• 1:46:51Bill Simmons?

  Wow. Uh, quick ones. Sarah Connor Award for would modern technology ruin 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 and

• 1:47:02Speaker 01

  They did.

• 1:47:02Bill Simmons?

  You know, so I it wouldn't ruin it, but I think it would hurt the legacy and the greatness.

• 1:47:07Speaker 01

  Today's technology?

• 1:47:09Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:09Speaker 01

  You say you say if we if he if he had the same digital tools that we have today?

• 1:47:14Bill Simmons?

  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? Like the stuff we had back then. And now if he had all this AI stuff.

• 1:47:29Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, it would be cool, but I I don't know. Would you have people dotting out stars and

• 1:47:33Speaker 01

  No, you wouldn't. You wouldn't.

• 1:47:34Bill Simmons?

  You'd lose that stuff.

• 1:47:35Speaker 01

  If you if you didn't, if you used AI, you would you would uh, unemploy about four hundred people, wouldn't have jobs.

• 1:47:42Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:47:42Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, I, I, it's funny, you know, Project town Mary's come up a couple of times and they shot that movie as prac- very practically, relatively speaking, they built sets and they shot on sets, which is not common for movies like this nowadays. And um, 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 why, 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. I mean, when you watch A New Hope, the, everything is tactile. You feel like everything feels worn and, and lived in and real. And that stuff matters.

• 1:48:22Speaker 01

  It, it, it's just, there's, there's a lot of virtue in analog. When you look at TCM as much as I watch it, um, you see a lot of virtue in, uh, like in, like in, like in, for instance, San Francisco, you, you see the San Francisco earthquake, the great quake. Uh, and, and you, 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, uh, in order to make it appear as if it was all the Chicago burning after Mrs. O'Leary's cow knocked, knocked over the lantern. Uh, uh, you know, I, I watched those films in

• 1:49:05Speaker 01

  the context of the age and era they were produced, but I appreciate them as much as watching effects in a modern day, in Avatar, 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 era Avatar films.

• 1:49:25Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. Uh, Kid Cudi Pursuit of Happyness Award for Best Needle Drop, that has to be the opening credits.

• 1:49:32Speaker 01

  Oh, by far. You named it. That's it.

• 1:49:34Bill Simmons?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:49:35Speaker 01

  Come on.

• 1:49:36Bill Simmons?

  The Sean Fantasy Award for stealth homage that gives every movie nerd a criteria orgasm.

• 1:49:43Sean Fennessey?

  Yes, this award is named after me.

• 1:49:45Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:46Speaker 01

  And what is the, what is the category? It's your category, but what is it again?

• 1:49:50Sean Fennessey?

  It's an homage that's in the film to a previous film or an aspect of film history, so.

• 1:49:55Bill Simmons?

  That only a psycho like Sean or you would, would notice.

• 1:49:58Sean Fennessey?

  There's a great one in this one.

• 1:49:59Bill Simmons?

  Okay, let's hear it.

• 1:50:00Sean 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 of the wazoo of this movie. It's appeared on The Simpsons several times, Mad Magazine, Airplane Two. But there's one in the film that is Kubrick winking at himself, which is that in Doctor Strangelove, Major Kong says, "Fire the explosive bolts." And in 2001, the entry hatch sign reads, "Caution, explosive bolts."

• 1:50:35Bill Simmons?

  Oh.

• 1:50:36Sean Fennessey?

  Which is his own little.

• 1:50:37Speaker 01

  I never saw that. You know something?

• 1:50:40Bill Simmons?

  Look at Sean teaching you about movies.

• 1:50:43Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:50:53Sean Fennessey?

  That's great.

• 1:50:54Speaker 01

  It really does.

• 1:50:55Bill Simmons?

  Best moment in the history of the category.

• 1:50:57Sean Fennessey?

  A criteria orgasm right there. We just saw it.

• 1:51:02Bill Simmons?

  I only have a couple of what's aged 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 that time. He wrote Kubrick joke.

• 1:51:18Speaker 01

  Kubrick joke basically saying that England would surpass America with the number of channels in the future.

• 1:51:24Bill Simmons?

  So I researched how many BBC channels there are now in 2026. We have BBC One, Two, Three, and Four. We have BBC News, BBC Parliament, CBBC, which is children's content, CBeebies preschool programming, BBC Scotland, and BBC Elbow, which.

• 1:51:43Bill Simmons?

  Scottish Gaelic language service. So only 11. So he was wrong. Sorry, Stanley. Missed it.

• 1:51:49Sean Fennessey?

  There's still time.

• 1:51:50Speaker 01

  By one.

• 1:51:51Bill Simmons?

  One, one, one short. Sorry, buddy. You mentioned the sequel as a what's age the worst. Couldn't agree more. I don't, I don't really have any other ones.

• 1:51:59Sean Fennessey?

  Well, just the idea that we could shut down AI, I think maybe under some

• 1:52:04Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, true.

• 1:52:05Sean Fennessey?

  Debate right now, you know?

• 1:52:06Speaker 01

  Well, you know, the whole thing about shutting things down, you know, the, when I made Ready Player One, I had a great time making it. Well, it's 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, and the kids win the oasis, they, they, you know, they, they, they, they get the Easter egg and and they're happily ensconced 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 normalized. That was the whole reason I think I made that movie to basically say that sometimes we, we have weekends, weekends, we're supposed to take our weekends off.

• 1:52:50Speaker 01

  But there are no weekends in terms of the amount of demand on our time and our lives.

• 1:52:58Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 1:52:58Speaker 01

  And demanding that we make our identities known and shared with strangers. There, why can't there be one or two days that we take off from that? And get back down to having picnics outside somewhere.

• 1:53:12Sean Fennessey?

  It's a great idea. I wish I could just put my phone in the ocean, but I can't.

• 1:53:14Speaker 01

  My kids are gonna hate me for that so much when they hear this, when they listen to this podcast. Come on, dad. Say, dad, you are a

• 1:53:24Speaker 01

  square.

• 1:53:25Bill 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. Uh, casting what ifs, Kubrick wanted Sterling Hayden for Floyd and MGM vetoed it.

• 1:53:48Speaker 01

  Yes, I know. I know. Yeah.

• 1:53:50Bill Simmons?

  Uh, they wanted Henry Fonder, George C. Scott, landed where it landed. He

• 1:53:55Sean Fennessey?

  I read Holden as well.

• 1:53:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I read Holden also. Yeah, I read that too.

• 1:54:00Sean Fennessey?

  Which is, I

• 1:54:01Speaker 01

  Holden would have been good for Floyd.

• 1:54:02Sean Fennessey?

  Floyd, that's what I was thinking too.

• 1:54:04Speaker 01

  But Holden would have been, it would have been like Janet Leigh in Psycho, you know what I'm saying? He never reappears in the movie again, you know, and it would be, it would be sort of front-loading a movie that really needs to, you know, start with a clean slate.

• 1:54:19Bill Simmons?

  He looked at a bunch of actors, famous ones for The Moon Watcher, The Lead Ape, including your guy Robert Shaw. That would have been interesting.

• 1:54:27Speaker 01

  Really? Now, where are these facts from?

• 1:54:29Bill Simmons?

  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.

• 1:54:40Speaker 01

  Okay, so you'll, will you wink at me if it's, if it's urban legend? Just give me a little.

• 1:54:47Bill Simmons?

  We don't know. That's the thing with the internet. You never know. What's the most, what's the biggest urban legend about Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T.? What's the one that's taken hold that you're like, how did, why is that a thing people think?

• 1:55:00Speaker 01

  The biggest urban legend that is occurring right now involves my movie coming out, Disclosure Day.

• 1:55:07Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:08Speaker 01

  That somehow, 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. Am I starting to believe that? Yes, I am. However, I am not.

• 1:55:50Speaker 01

  I made this movie independent of any influence except, you know, what I know and what I've been following for the last seven decades.

• 1:55:58Sean Fennessey?

  So you're saying you didn't do it with them, but maybe they have a point?

• 1:56:01Speaker 01

  Perhaps they do.

• 1:56:03Bill Simmons?

  So not working with deep state, but you see it, okay. Kubrick rejected Martin Ballsum for Hal.

• 1:56:09Speaker 01

  Oh, Martin Ballsum.

• 1:56:10Bill Simmons?

  Thought it was a little too...

• 1:56:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, but he's a little New York-ish.

• 1:56:13Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I can see that. And then Pink Floyd was approached to perform music, and they turned it down due to other commitments. Yeah.

• 1:56:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, wow.

• 1:56:23Sean Fennessey?

  It's a bit hard to believe.

• 1:56:24Bill Simmons?

  Missed out on that one. Yeah, that's why, that's on the fringe of, I'm not sure how true that is. Uh, Dionne Waiters Award, which, so that's like, somebody who's not the star of the movie, but comes in hot for like, ten, fifteen minutes. I think it's Hal. I think Hal's the...

• 1:56:38Sean Fennessey?

  I...

• 1:56:38Bill Simmons?

  Who do, who do you have?

• 1:56:39Sean Fennessey?

  I have Daniel Richter as Moon Watcher, the chief ape. Cause that's an amazing performance that he gives in that suit.

• 1:56:47Bill Simmons?

  You're right.

• 1:56:47Speaker 01

  I don't know, I, I think it's Vivian Kubrick, who wants a bush baby, and whose father calls her squirt.

• 1:56:53Sean Fennessey?

  She is my number two on my list.

• 1:56:56Bill Simmons?

  Um, recasting couch, director or city? We, so we wouldn't put any name actors in this?

• 1:57:04Speaker 01

  And re, uh, no, we wouldn't.

• 1:57:05Bill Simmons?

  Okay.

• 1:57:06Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:57:07Bill Simmons?

  Half ass turn of research, I'll blow through some of these really fast. Uh...

• 1:57:11Speaker 01

  It's interesting that one of the astronauts that Hal kills is named after my cameraman, Janos Kaminski.

• 1:57:18Bill Simmons?

  Hmm.

• 1:57:19Speaker 01

  Kaminski is one of the, uh...

• 1:57:21Bill Simmons?

  I didn't tell you this.

• 1:57:21Speaker 01

  Astronauts in, uh...

• 1:57:22Bill Simmons?

  I was a soccer dad with him for years.

• 1:57:24Speaker 01

  Were you really?

• 1:57:25Bill Simmons?

  Yeah. We thought it was so funny when...

• 1:57:27Speaker 01

  With Bruce?

• 1:57:28Bill Simmons?

  We, yeah, well, no, it was his daughter Helena.

• 1:57:30Speaker 01

  With Helena, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:32Bill Simmons?

  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 seven year old girls, and they were like, the most beautiful...

• 1:57:42Sean Fennessey?

  Great shot gordos.

• 1:57:43Bill Simmons?

  ...new soccer's you've ever seen, of these photos that he would take.

• 1:57:45Speaker 01

  I think when I, when I first met Janos, I don't know when I said it to him, I said, hey, do you know you're in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

• 1:57:51Bill Simmons?

  Right. Well, he, he would disappear, cause he was going to make movies with you.

• 1:57:56Speaker 01

  That's right, exactly.

• 1:57:56Bill Simmons?

  Like, yeah, he's not, he's not here, he's making movies with Steven.

• 1:58:01Bill Simmons?

  So...

• 1:58:03Bill Simmons?

  Kubrick was so dissatisfied with the script, that he approached some other writers, all of whom turned him down.

• 1:58:08Speaker 01

  On 2001?

• 1:58:09Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:10Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:58:10Bill Simmons?

  Cause he was disloyal. There's a lot of stuff about this, about him and Clark.

• 1:58:14Speaker 01

  He's a great writer himself, as you know, Stanley writes a lot of his own movies.

• 1:58:17Bill Simmons?

  Two hundred and five special effects. Shots in this movie.

• 1:58:21Speaker 01

  Now, you know how, you know what a paltry amount of shots that is compared

• 1:58:25Bill Simmons?

  By the time we

• 1:58:26Speaker 01

  Compared to a streaming movie on Netflix?

• 1:58:28Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:28Speaker 01

  Today?

• 1:58:29Bill Simmons?

  Two of five, a lot back then, not a lot now.

• 1:58:32Speaker 01

  Not a lot now.

• 1:58:33Bill Simmons?

  Talking thousands.

• 1:58:33Speaker 01

  Not a lot now.

• 1:58:34Sean 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.

• 1:58:40Speaker 01

  A lot of sustained shots.

• 1:58:40Sean Fennessey?

  So if he is getting a special effect shot.

• 1:58:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:58:43Sean Fennessey?

  If they put a tremendous amount of time into what you're looking at and holding on it.

• 1:58:47Speaker 01

  But remember what Stanley was trying to create. He was trying to, he was trying to lure us into a, a, I guess, a 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, when, when Pooh was jogging, uh, uh, uh, in his daily workout, he cut about two minutes out of that jog. Uh, what makes the jog work, though, is the Cacheturian score.

• 1:59:26Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:26Speaker 01

  You know, and it, it just lulls you. You don't lean forward at that moment, watching 2001. You sit back and, and you, I, 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.

• 1:59:51Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:52Speaker 01

  In terms of suspense and betrayal and all of the other great neat things that happen in the movie.

• 1:59:57Bill Simmons?

  Patience.

• 1:59:58Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:00:00Speaker 01

  Yes, patience.

• 2:00:01Bill Simmons?

  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.

• 2:00:11Speaker 01

  Look at that.

• 2:00:12Bill Simmons?

  Goes way back there. So that happened. Only a cut there, 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.

• 2:00:26Speaker 01

  That's a big line item on a movie that cost only ten.

• 2:00:28Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:29Speaker 01

  Well, a lot, lot in its era, ten's a lot in sixty seven.

• 2:00:32Bill Simmons?

  Leggett'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.

• 2:00:38Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 2:00:39Bill Simmons?

  Lamar, I mean, there's been books written about this movie. Documentaries, there's been multiple Kubrick books, so you can dive into if you want. Apex Mountains, so this is something we do where we try to figure out. Sean's already laughing. 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.

• 2:01:03Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:01:03Bill Simmons?

  But they're at the point of their career where they could have done anything.

• 2:01:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:01:06Bill Simmons?

  Right? That's like the ideal.

• 2:01:08Sean Fennessey?

  I have lived to see you explain this to Steven Spielberg. This is incredible.

• 2:01:12Bill Simmons?

  I would say, so for you, you had multiple apexes, but in eighty two, when you have E T and Poltergeist, at that point, you could have probably gone into any, any studio on the planet, been like, I'd like to do this, and they would have been like, here's a check, Steven. That's an example, right? So for Kubrick.

• 2:01:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, I'm with you. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm trailing.

• 2:01:35Bill Simmons?

  Sean was, Sean was dying to say.

• 2:01:37Speaker 01

  I'm trailing behind you, but I am behind you still.

• 2:01:39Bill Simmons?

  So for Kubrick, what, what was the moment where he had the most of everything going at the same time as a director? Was it this movie?

• 2:01:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say this, this is the movie where he headed together. This is, this is the movie that, this is the movie that made Stanley famous, not just among critics and, and, and journalists and people that write about film, but this is the movie where the public discovered him.

• 2:02:05Bill Simmons?

  Would you put space movies for the apex of space movies?

• 2:02:08Speaker 01

  Well, this is certainly the, this was certainly the big bang.

• 2:02:12Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:12Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:02:27Bill Simmons?

  We have a category called Cruz or Hanks.

• 2:02:30Speaker 01

  You've worked with both.

• 2:02:31Bill Simmons?

  You know both of these guys.

• 2:02:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love them both.

• 2:02:34Bill Simmons?

  What, what?

• 2:02:35Speaker 01

  Cruz or?

• 2:02:36Bill Simmons?

  If Cruz, you had to have Cruz or Hanks in this movie. Who would you pick?

• 2:02:42Speaker 01

  Hanks.

• 2:02:43Bill Simmons?

  It has to be Hanks.

• 2:02:44Speaker 01

  Cause he made Apollo 13.

• 2:02:46Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 2:02:47Speaker 01

  He did, he's the astronaut guy.

• 2:02:49Bill Simmons?

  Sean, can't believe I asked you this.

• 2:02:50Speaker 01

  If he could be, if he could be an astronaut, Tom, he would give it all up to be an astronaut.

• 2:02:54Sean Fennessey?

  The, I think the answer is both. I think, I think Bowman is Cruz. And I think, I think Floyd is Hanks.

• 2:03:02Bill Simmons?

  Can I give you Cruz as the lead ape? How amazing that would have been Cruz, just like throwing himself into it.

• 2:03:08Sean Fennessey?

  A very physical performer.

• 2:03:08Bill Simmons?

  Teaching himself how apes walk for like nine months to prepare for 10, 10 minutes.

• 2:03:13Speaker 01

  I think it would have been cool for any of, of, of the movie stars to, look, Daniel Craig was a stormtrooper in Force Awakens.

• 2:03:21Bill Simmons?

  Right, right. We have another category. Called Spielberg or Scorsese.

• 2:03:28Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:03:28Bill Simmons?

  That we have to do since you're here.

• 2:03:30Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:03:31Bill Simmons?

  I mean, I think, I think it's.

• 2:03:32Speaker 01

  Wait, I gotta clear my palate for this one.

• 2:03:33Bill Simmons?

  No, I think you won this one.

• 2:03:35Speaker 01

  Wait a minute, hold on.

• 2:03:36Bill Simmons?

  What was the most, what was the biggest battle we had of that category? Usually it's pretty apparent.

• 2:03:41Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah. Oh, of all time? I don't know.

• 2:03:42Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, I don't.

• 2:03:43Sean Fennessey?

  I mean, this one is, this one is a no brainer.

• 2:03:44Bill Simmons?

  This one's a no brainer.

• 2:03:45Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:46Bill Simmons?

  Picking nits. So this is where we pick little nits in the movie.

• 2:03:50Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:03:50Bill Simmons?

  The ape costumes in 4K.

• 2:03:53Sean Fennessey?

  Sure.

• 2:03:54Bill Simmons?

  It feels a little 1968 ish. Like you could really. Couple of times it feels like, yeah, that's probably a guy there. But I mean, for 1968, amazing.

• 2:04:02Sean Fennessey?

  We accept that it's not, they're not real apes.

• 2:04:04Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:04:15Bill Simmons?

  Pro, but.

• 2:04:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:04:18Bill Simmons?

  Would Hal actually be able to read their lips? Are we, like even now in AI, would we actually get there?

• 2:04:24Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 2:04:25Bill Simmons?

  You think so?

• 2:04:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's a walk in the park for AI.

• 2:04:28Sean Fennessey?

  They're reading our lips right now. Hopefully not.

• 2:04:32Bill 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?

• 2:04:46Speaker 01

  Well, I, I've given that a little bit of thought. I think 2001 is the, um, it's not a year. I don't think it's a year specific to anything. I don't think it takes place in a year. 2001 is about the millennium. So it is.

• 2:05:02Bill Simmons?

  So it doesn't matter?

• 2:05:03Speaker 01

  It doesn't matter.

• 2:05:04Bill Simmons?

  Okay. Um, I had one more, but did you have?

• 2:05:07Sean Fennessey?

  That's a great answer.

• 2:05:08Bill Simmons?

  That's a great answer. You just solved it. Did you have a nitpick before we go?

• 2:05:12Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah, if Hal's so advanced, why can't he anticipate Dave's move to remove his central function? You know, there, the, Hal's flaws, I think are often overlooked in it. 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, some questions around that.

• 2:05:45Bill Simmons?

  Hal, a little overrated.

• 2:05:46Speaker 01

  I can, I can join you in that nitpick a little bit. When Hal knows that Bowman is inexorably approaching his last mile, the green mile.

• 2:06:02Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:02Speaker 01

  He's going to get, he's going to be executed. Uh, why doesn't Hal turn off all the lights? Why doesn't Ha- Ha- Hal, not everything is, has manual override.

• 2:06:13Bill Simmons?

  Why didn't he turn off the lights?

• 2:06:14Speaker 01

  Why doesn't he close certain ports and, and 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 needs to be severely

• 2:06:30Bill Simmons?

  Hal wanted to be shut down.

• 2:06:32Speaker 01

  It's like, it's like Grady saying, saying to Jack Nicholson, what he should do to his children.

• 2:06:39Bill Simmons?

  Right.

• 2:06:39Speaker 01

  Because Grady did it to his.

• 2:06:40Sean Fennessey?

  That's right.

• 2:06:41Speaker 01

  He needs to correct them.

• 2:06:45Speaker 01

  Hal knew he needed to be corrected. And at that moment, Bowman was Jack Torrance.

• 2:06:54Bill Simmons?

  Wow.

• 2:06:54Sean Fennessey?

  Love it.

• 2:06:55Bill Simmons?

  That was amazing. Did you have another nitpick from this?

• 2:06:59Speaker 01

  No, it's almost a perfect film.

• 2:07:00Bill Simmons?

  Okay. I had one more. This movie was rated G? What were we doing in 1968?

• 2:07:07Sean Fennessey?

  Well, what's really in it, though? I mean, what's, what? We were talking before we started recording. Could you bring a kid to see this movie?

• 2:07:13Bill Simmons?

  Would you bring? How old's your daughter now?

• 2:07:15Sean Fennessey?

  She's gonna be five.

• 2:07:16Speaker 01

  No, I wouldn't bring a kid to see 2001: Space Odyssey even today.

• 2:07:19Bill Simmons?

  PG for this one.

• 2:07:20Speaker 01

  But, but I'm not sure what that was about. I, I think the film, I would have gone PG for it.

• 2:07:27Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, it's a PG.

• 2:07:28Sean Fennessey?

  The most violent thing in the movie is probably the Tepir being beaten in that like little quick cut with the bones, right? I mean, obviously we see Poole floating and being killed, but.

• 2:07:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:37Sean Fennessey?

  I don't, you know.

• 2:07:39Speaker 01

  Don't forget Jaws was PG. So maybe 2001 should have stayed a G.

• 2:07:43Sean Fennessey?

  By comparison.

• 2:07:44Speaker 01

  If you're grading on the curve of, of that era between 65 and 75.

• 2:07:48Bill Simmons?

  And I'm gonna do my imitation of Quint getting chewed to death.

• 2:07:51Sean Fennessey?

  I'm ready for it.

• 2:07:52Bill Simmons?

  I'm not doing it.

• 2:07:52Sean Fennessey?

  I'm ready and just do it.

• 2:07:53Bill Simmons?

  I can't.

• 2:07:54Sean Fennessey?

  Just, just, just do it.

• 2:07:54Bill Simmons?

  If he ever comes back, I'll do it the second time.

• 2:07:56Speaker 01

  I will come back for certain.

• 2:07:58Bill Simmons?

  If you come back and do Jaws with us, I will do Quint.

• 2:08:01Speaker 01

  I'd love to do Jaws with you. That'd be fun.

• 2:08:03Bill Simmons?

  All right, he just promised. Just want to ask her who gets it. Kubrick. Best director?

• 2:08:09Sean Fennessey?

  For director.

• 2:08:09Speaker 01

  Best director.

• 2:08:10Bill Simmons?

  Would you go best film or best director?

• 2:08:12Speaker 01

  I would go best film and best director.

• 2:08:14Bill Simmons?

  Just two Oscars. Probably an answerable question.

• 2:08:17Speaker 01

  I would also have given Doug Trumbull an Oscar along with Stanley for special effects.

• 2:08:23Bill 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 told that he's, he's basically lying to them about the mission. And these two things kind of short circuited him?

• 2:09:01Speaker 01

  No, 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, you know, 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.

• 2:09:27Sean Fennessey?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:09:28Speaker 01

  He's a narcissist.

• 2:09:29Sean 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 could only come, these machines could only come from us who built them.

• 2:09:48Speaker 01

  You're absolutely right. That's right. Because you are a mirror of who created you, you know? 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.

• 2:10:03Bill 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 a, I have one good one. Do you have any other ones?

• 2:10:16Sean Fennessey?

  Um, I mean, I think who delivered the monoliths is like the ultimate question of the movie.

• 2:10:22Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:10:23Sean Fennessey?

  That's the most unanswerable thing.

• 2:10:24Bill Simmons?

  That's a definitely an answerable question. Right. All right. Here's my, here's my good one. Did this movie ruin the name Hal?

• 2:10:30Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 2:10:32Bill Simmons?

  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? Craig, do you know any Hals? I don't know any Hals.

• 2:10:42Speaker 01

  Could, could this have been the end of the Hals?

• 2:10:46Bill Simmons?

  I think Hal was such a villain and so scary in this movie, that was it. Hal was out.

• 2:10:51Sean Fennessey?

  You know, I love a Hal, though. I love when Falstaff is calling him Hal, you know? I love, Henry Ora-Herald can be a Hal. That's a great name. It's a great nickname.

• 2:10:58Speaker 01

  No Hals. I don't, I, I never even thought to name one of my boys Hal.

• 2:11:05Bill Simmons?

  Just gone.

• 2:11:06Speaker 01

  Not because of.

• 2:11:07Bill Simmons?

  It was too tied to the computer and the whole thing. All right. The one piece of memorabilia you'd want from this movie.

• 2:11:16Bill Simmons?

  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. And it's gone.

• 2:11:30Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:11:31Bill Simmons?

  But what would be your answer for this?

• 2:11:32Speaker 01

  Well, I, I, I actually, I actually bought the one piece of memorabilia I wanted from this movie.

• 2:11:38Sean Fennessey?

  It's never been uttered on this show before.

• 2:11:40Bill Simmons?

  Yeah, you just trumped us.

• 2:11:42Speaker 01

  I, I, I, I have, um, I have, uh, David Bowman's, uh, spacesuit. Which I donated to the Academy Museum. I don't possess it.

• 2:11:53Bill Simmons?

  Sean just passed that again.

• 2:11:54Speaker 01

  And I donated it to the museum. Yeah.

• 2:11:56Sean Fennessey?

  Wow. That's good. Well, you said Peter Jackson owns Hal's eye.

• 2:12:00Speaker 01

  I understand Peter Jackson owns Hal's, uh, eye.

• 2:12:04Sean Fennessey?

  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 these, all the models and everything like, so how did some of these things survive?

• 2:12:22Speaker 01

  You know, to me, Stanley isn't, 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, he was not himself, unlike myself. I'm a collector of a lot of memorabilia, also a lot of my own memorabilia. I collected, uh, Stanley is not sentimental. He's not going to be collecting his own memorabilia.

• 2:12:46Bill Simmons?

  My only other answer, Bo, is just because he was from New York Jets fan?

• 2:12:51Bill Simmons?

  Kubrick could have explained a lot with some of the darkness of the movies.

• 2:12:55Sean Fennessey?

  I mean.

• 2:12:55Bill Simmons?

  Although they did win in 69.

• 2:12:57Sean Fennessey?

  Season is the year that they won the, the Super Bowl.

• 2:12:59Bill Simmons?

  Maybe that was it. That's why I decided to move to England.

• 2:13:01Sean Fennessey?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:03Bill Simmons?

  Coach Finstock, Mr. Miyagi, what for best, worst life lesson from this movie? I guess it's keep questioning what's out there.

• 2:13:11Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. The, the, the best, well, the best life lesson in, in this movie is, uh, you know, never, ever close your mind off to an impossible possibility.

• 2:13:26Bill Simmons?

  That's better than mine.

• 2:13:27Sean Fennessey?

  I don't have a follow up. Yeah, that's I can't do better than that.

• 2:13:30Bill Simmons?

  All right, I can't. We only have two more categories left.

• 2:13:34Speaker 01

  I love these categories. These are great.

• 2:13:35Bill Simmons?

  We had more. I cut them down because I didn't know how long we had here. I would have thrown more at you.

• 2:13:41Bill Simmons?

  Best double feature choice.

• 2:13:43Speaker 01

  Oh, I know.

• 2:13:43Bill Simmons?

  And you could put either this is first or second with the other one.

• 2:13:47Speaker 01

  You want to go first?

• 2:13:49Sean Fennessey?

  Well, my pick would be AI for all the reasons that I talked about.

• 2:13:51Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 2:13:52Sean Fennessey?

  And the lineage and the relationship that you both have, and the movies that feel like are talking to each other.

• 2:13:57Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:13:58Sean Fennessey?

  It's a pretty good one. Good choice.

• 2:14:00Speaker 01

  Mine would be George Powell's Destination Moon, made, I think, in fifty two or fifty, fifty one, fifty two, because it was the most scientifically realistic film about man's first trip to the moon, not not taking into account, you know, you know, Georges Moliere's film.

• 2:14:21Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:21Speaker 01

  The first film, which was more of a pageant, less of a of a science project. But Destination Moon, which which also is a tremendous exercise in suspense, echoes a lot of what then became, in Stanley's vision, two thousand one, 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.

• 2:14:49Sean Fennessey?

  Can I tell you something? Destination Moon finally being issued on Blu-ray in June.

• 2:14:53Speaker 01

  It is. Wow. Great.

• 2:14:55Sean Fennessey?

  See? Full circle.

• 2:14:57Bill Simmons?

  My double feature choice is Disclosure Day, opening on June twelfth.

• 2:15:01Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 2:15:02Bill Simmons?

  Steven Spielberg.

• 2:15:03Speaker 01

  And I've seen it.

• 2:15:03Bill Simmons?

  Backup choice would be The Shining. I don't know why, but I think it would be really, and you'd watch two thousand one 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 or, you know what I mean? Just watching it fresh for five hours.

• 2:15:22Speaker 01

  But I think the the the connection between that movie, The Shining in two thousand one, 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.

• 2:15:33Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:34Speaker 01

  Audacious choices.

• 2:15:35Bill Simmons?

  Who won the movie? Uh, Stanley Kubrick. Craig, you're up. What'd you think of this movie? It came out, uh, were you reborn?

• 2:15:43Speaker 04

  1994.

• 2:15:44Bill Simmons?

  All right, so you're 26 years late.

• 2:15:46Sean Fennessey?

  Don't screw this up, Craig.

• 2:15:47Speaker 04

  No, no, no. 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 a 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, I think I was a little bit underwhelmed, and I, I think I didn't, I didn't like the lack of clarity at the ending. I didn't enjoy that it was just like ambiguous and essentially, you know, was left up for interpretation, and I have completely pivoted. And now that is why I appreciate the movie. Um, believing, you know, the ambiguity, letting yourself use your life experience to kind of inform what you think about the movie, um, 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,

• 2:16:32Speaker 04

  and how mesmerizing the visuals are. Um, it almost feels like, I mean, these big synchronized spacecraft sequences, you almost feel like you're watching like, 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. It's like you're at a magic show, and you like turn to the person next to you, and you go, wow, how did they do that?

• 2:16:53Bill Simmons?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:53Speaker 04

  Um, I love it. The, the one thing that you guys didn't mention that I think is what the reason why the movie is so successful and, and so perfect, Hal's voice, the choice of Hal's soft, but chilling tone, I think makes the entire film.

• 2:17:08Speaker 01

  I have to concur.

• 2:17:09Sean Fennessey?

  That's a good point, Craig. I thought you would open the pod by saying, "Open the pod bay doors, Steven." You know, like, I thought you could have, we're literally, we're in the pod bay right now.

• 2:17:18Speaker 04

  It's so comforting, but also ominous, and you know there's something beneath it that is, that is chilling.

• 2:17:22Bill Simmons?

  I'm just gonna walk up the wall later, just do a 360 around there. Well, that's it. You just completed your first rewatchables.

• 2:17:29Speaker 04

  A long one, you did it.

• 2:17:31Bill Simmons?

  You did two, you gave us two hours, too. That was amazing.

• 2:17:33Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:17:34Bill Simmons?

  I would have thrown in more categories.

• 2:17:36Speaker 01

  This was so much fun.

• 2:17:37Bill Simmons?

  Sean passed out twice. You have Disclosure Day coming.

• 2:17:40Sean Fennessey?

  I'm elated.

• 2:17:41Bill Simmons?

  We're running this on June 1st, so you have Disclosure Day coming.

• 2:17:45Speaker 01

  June 12th.

• 2:17:45Bill Simmons?

  12 days later.

• 2:17:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:17:47Bill Simmons?

  And then, are you, are you thinking about the next movie already or no?

• 2:17:51Speaker 01

  No, I'm just thinking about Disclosure Day. That's all I got on my mind right now.

• 2:17:55Bill Simmons?

  And you promised you'd come back.

• 2:17:56Speaker 01

  Except today, and now I'm all, all I'm thinking about is 2001: A Space Odyssey.

• 2:18:00Bill Simmons?

  But you promised you'd come back for Jaws at some point.

• 2:18:03Speaker 01

  Left you Jaws. I would love to do it.

• 2:18:04Bill Simmons?

  That was on tape. We videotaped it.

• 2:18:05Speaker 01

  It doesn't have to be the 50 year anniversary that's behind this. Let's do it.

• 2:18:09Bill Simmons?

  And I'll do my Quint getting eaten impersonation at some point.

• 2:18:12Speaker 01

  I want to, I want to see that. I definitely want to see that.

• 2:18:14Bill Simmons?

  Steven Spielberg, an absolute honor.

• 2:18:16Speaker 01

  Thank you, Bill.

• 2:18:17Bill Simmons?

  Thanks for being here.

• 2:18:18Speaker 01

  Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Sean.

• 2:18:20Bill Simmons?

  Thank you. And that's it for the Rewatchables.

• 2:18:22Speaker 01

  What an honor to be here with you guys. Thank you so much.