>>180124, >>180125
All The Right Movies @ATRightMovies - 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY was released 58 years ago this week.
The film's most iconic character is HAL-9000 - the sentient computer whose calm voice and unblinking eye defined how we think about A.I.
The story of how HAL was created is one of the greatest creative evolutions in Hollywood 👇
In the earliest drafts of Arthur C. Clarke's scripts, the ship's computer was a walking humanoid called Socrates. He moved through Discovery One's corridors and in one scene refused to harm crew members, citing Asimov's First Law of Robotics.
would date. He replaced the robot with a single unblinking lens, which was a nod to the Cyclops from Homer's Odyssey. Like the Cyclops, HAL has one eye. Like Odysseus the archer, Bowman must destroy the one-eyed giant to survive.
The name evolved too. Socrates became Athena and was a female AI with a female voice. Then Athena became HAL 9000: Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer.
This caused a coincidence Clarke spent decades swatting away. Shift H-A-L one letter forward and you get I-B-M. Clarke wrote he'd have changed it had he spotted it. IBM knew the plot involved a homicidal computer and agreed to participate -provided malfunctions weren't shown as IBM failures.
Finding HAL's voice, though, nearly broke the production.
Stefanie Powers read HAL's lines on set so the actors had something to react to. She later confirmed she was "the first voice of HAL the computer." British actor Nigel Davenport then spent weeks at Borehamwood reading the lines off-camera. Kubrick decided he was too English and let him go.
After Davenport left, assistant director Derek Cracknell filled in. His Cockney accent turned "Better take a stress pill, Dave" into "Better tyke a stress pill, Dyve" which Kubrick wasn't having.
Oscar-winner Martin Balsam then recorded the complete dialogue. Kubrick initially called him "wonderful" but grew dissatisfied. Balsam had played HAL with full emotion, reportedly crying during the disconnection scene. Too human and too American.
Then Kubrick remembered a documentary. The Canadian film Universe - which he'd watched about 95 times in prep for 2001 - had been narrated by a Winnipeg-born, Old Vic-trained stage actor called Douglas Rain. Almost nobody outside Canadian theatre knew his name but Kubrick had his man. Rain recalled: "Kubrick said, 'I think I made him too emotional. Would you consider doing his voice?'"
By most accounts, Rain completed all of HAL's dialogue in nine and a half hours. He performed barefoot, feet resting on a pillow, to maintain the unhurried calm voice Kubrick wanted. He never saw the full script, never saw a frame of footage, and never met co-stars Keir Dullea or Gary Lockwood. His goal was "a cool, soothing voice."
Kubrick's direction was remarkably sparse: "Even softer and kind of in the depths." "Try a little more dandy." Then in post-production, Rain's breaths were removed - giving HAL an unearthly quality audiences would feel but never consciously notice.
Rain was quietly frustrated that HAL overshadowed 50 years of classical theatre. As Dullea reported: "His attitude is, 'I've done Shakespeare and the classics for 50 years, and all anyone wants to talk to me about is a film that I worked on for two days.'"
A robot with legs. A Greek goddess. A female voice. A British voice. An American voice. Then a Canadian, barefoot on a pillow, created the most iconic AI voice in cinema history.