Ever since its release in 1968, people have debated over the meaning of the ending to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Though now, fifty years later, a new interview has been unearthed in which Kubrick quite openly discusses the meaning of the film’s final scenes.
Enough debate! In a newly unearthed interview, Stanley Kubrick explains the ending to 2001: A Space Odyssey. And yeah, it kinda makes sense.
“When you just say the ideas they sound foolish, whereas if they’re dramatised one feels it, but I’ll try,” Kubrick tells journalist Junichi Yaoi.
“The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by god-like 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. It just seems to happen as it does in the film.”
They choose this room, which is a very inaccurate replica of French architecture (deliberately so, inaccurate) because one was suggesting that they had some idea of something that he might think was pretty, but wasn’t quite sure. Just as we’re not quite sure what do in zoos with animals to try to give them what they think is their natural environment.”
Anyway, when they get finished with him, as happens in so many myths of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some kind of super being and sent back to Earth, transformed and made some kind of superman. We have to only guess what happens when he goes back. It is the pattern of a great deal of mythology, and that is what we were trying to suggest.”
Listen to the interview yourself above.
Via Metafilter
