 |
 |
brian sanders
The Independent Magazine
Saturday, 20th January 2001
Creative space
Visitors were discouraged and photographers banned from the set of Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey’. One man, however, was given unparalleled access to record this epic in the making. Until now, the results have never been seen. Jojo Moyes on the work of illustrator Brian Sanders.
Clicking on an image will open a larger
version in a new window.
All images are under 50Kb.
<Life
through a lens> "The flag was from the opening scenes
— the bit where people are going to the moon with air hostesses,
and this was the moon station. Stanley (centre) checked the setting
of that camera at every single moment Geoff Unsworth. who is drinking
coffee on the right was an amazing cameraman. He went on to work with
Stanley on other films. He was the man who filmed Barry Lyndon, and
Kubrick helped to design the lens that enabled them to film that practically
by candlelight. Unsworth was an incredibly gentle, unaffected man and
I was very impressed by him."
<Full
metal jacket> "I had a brief to cover the filming however
I wanted, as long as I gave it to Stanley afterwards. So, often, I would
do drawings or pictures on the set and then go back to my studio in
Soho and make either larger-scale collages or paintings says Sanders.
This collage shows the exploration team venturing down the ramp of the
moon pit 'I did this in the studio afterwards, using silver foil —
very space age Stanley never expressed an opinion on individual pieces
of work. None of his associates could tell me what he thought either.
The works never appeared anywhere in the end - it was a terrible anti-climax.
I understood how the actors in A Clockwork Orange felt when he withdrew
it from show."
<Eyes
wide shut> 'It was absolutely forbidden to take cameras on
to the set especially on the day that Snowdon came in. Stanley didn't
want anyone taking photographs of Snowdon, which we felt was quite ironic,
as he was a photographer himself. He was just visiting out of interest
— I think he was a friend of Kubrick's. In the year that I was
there, there were not many VIPs on set but lots of known actors of the
time. The actors — Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester
and Robert Beatty — were almost throwaway people on the film,
compared to the technology.
Leonard Rossiter, who played Smyslov, later became one of Britain's best known comedy actors.
<Remote
control> This, like the large moon pit, shows the scale of
the sets Kubrick created. "The camera, which is mounted at the
front of the centrifuge tube, is the thing that's turning around while
Keir Dullea walks forward. But because there's no one with the camera,
the men down at the bottom left are monitoring a TV screen so that Kubrick
could direct remotely, from the bottom left." Kubrick, in blue,
is in the group to the right, Unsworth is to his right, with the balding
head. “They're all asking: 'Is it OK? Shall we come down?' to
the man who's looking at the camera image. It shows the intricacies
of how every shot was put together."
<Hard-hat
area> When the actors were wearing their space helmets, they
were actually breathing compressed air from a bottle, because otherwise
everything would have steamed up under the lights on set. Although it
took a long time to do so, the actors were very eager to get in and
out of the helmets; I think they saw them as a bit of a drag. There
was a radio fitted in each one to give them direction. I thought they
were rather strange compared to normal space helmets, but they were
beautifully designed — the astronauts would have had almost 180o
vision."
<Word
perfect> The actor William Sylvester played Dr Heywood R Floyd,
one of the astronauts going to the moon to inspect the monolith. One
day, on set, he didn't have very much to say but he had evidently had
some emotional disturbance at home, and wasn't really himself—
I don't know what it was. But Stanley was so patient Sylvester had a
few lines and Stanley took him gently through them, and he did it word
perfect — before then, he hadn't been able to actually get the
words out. Any other director would have probably torn his hair out."
<Downtime>
"Because it could take so long to get in and out of the suits,
the astronauts tended to keep them on for whatever else they were doing.
I loved the guy on the left having a smoke in his. The continuity woman
(far right) would look after the actors card hands when they went back
to the set. There was always a lot of waiting around [of the three years
it took to make 2001, a year was spent on preparation, a year and a
half on shooting special effects, and only six months working with actors]
and there was a little group of people who would be together... It reminds
me of when I later worked on the poster for the film Oh What a Lovely
War, where all the 'officer' actors would a lineup together, away from
the 'men'."
<Top
secret> This illustration shows how the camera was set up
for the famous centrifuge scene. "The day they set up the centrifuge
scene, I was told I wasn't allowed to do pictures of it because Stanley
didn't want anyone to see how it worked, that it was the camera that
went around rather than the centrifuge. It was an enormous wheel, which
must have been a good 35ft high, on an axis that turned, and lights
were mounted all around it. When they first started it up, the lights
started to explode because the leads got caught. It was quite a hairy
moment Gary Lockwood, who played one of the astronauts, just ran on
the spot while the camera went round and round him. There was an escape
route for him to get off quickly if anything happened, but from where
I was sitting it looked like quite a brave thing to do"
