As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi masterpiece, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” we are coming across interviews with filmmakers that hold that film in such high-regard. Obviously, when you’re talking about a film that is so beloved, from a director so legendary, the number of people in Hollywood that come out of the woodwork to revere it is immense. One such ‘2001’ fan is none other than “Gravity’s” Alfonso Cuarón.
In an essay penned for Entertainment Weekly, the filmmaker discusses his love for ‘2001’ and its effect on Cuarón’s own masterpiece, “Gravity.”
“From the first frame I felt I was witnessing something transcendental…I also recognized that I was witnessing an unattainable benchmark, a film composed in thematic, non-textual motives that attacked in a purely cinematic way with some of the fundamental metaphysical questions in many of its categories. At the end, like these questions, the answer is mystery,” writes the filmmaker, as he describes seeing ‘2001’ for the first time.
And because he recognized Kubrick’s film as an “unattainable benchmark,” he had to be careful while producing “Gravity.” He didn’t want to have his confidence shattered. “I have seen ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ many times throughout my life, and when the notion of ‘Gravity’ took shape, I watched every non-fantasy space film I could find. I revisited many, some brilliant, but I consciously decided not to revisit ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ as I knew that it would paralyze me,” he says.
But even still, avoiding revisiting ‘2001’ was for naught. As he worked on “Gravity,” and he views the finished product, Cuarón couldn’t help but notice the influence Kubrick had on his film. Cuarón writes, “Even if I was trying to only reference real footage from space, it’s clear that the ghost of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ was haunting me…It’s impossible not to see a floating object and not to think of the biro pen in the Pan Am shuttle, not to think of Sandra Bullock floating away into the void without referencing Frank Poole’s spiral into the abyss.”
It wasn’t just images that influenced Cuarón, either. The entire structure of the film, down to the lack of dialogue was owed, not just to ‘2001’, but to Kubrick’s entire filmography. “The sparse dialogue and use of silence in ‘Gravity,’ it’s not only a legacy of ‘2001,’ it is a legacy of all Kubrick’s work that, like many other film masters, believe in the power of cinema as an experience that can convey themes through its own language,” he says.
This sounds like a perfectly reasonable excuse for a “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Gravity” double-feature, right?