WM: Was Graphic Films a private company?

CP: Yep. They're still in business.

WM: Were you animating for them?

CP: I was directing for them at that point. That's when my son was born, so that would be '61. He's now a professor of psycho-linguistics at Oregon University. He's a world traveler, which I am not.

WM: You were a natural person to work on 2001 since you had such an extensive background in both Space and animation. How did you actually get onto 2001?

Left to right: Con Pederson, Douglas Trumball, and Benjamin Jackson working with a multi-plane apparatus for Graphic Films' To the Moon and Beyond. Photo courtesy of Graphic Films.

CP: We did some work at Graphic Films in '63 and '64 for the New York World's Fair, Flushing Meadows. It was called To the Moon and Beyond. Such stuff was being made a lot then because of Kennedy's plan to go to the moon within the decade. This was around the time of Mercury and Gemini. I both wrote and directed To the Moon and Beyond which was projected on a dome surface in 10 perforation 70mm film. We did the film in about five months. It was rather a rush. They had built the theater, and were building the projectors but they didn't have anything to project. We, foolishly maybe, leaped into the breach. It happened that Kubrick saw the film later that year -- it ran for awhile. He was interested in the space aspect of it and contacted our company. He then invited me to New York to see the script. He had a studio apartment on the West Side which was filled with storyboards, the development of 2001. It was a great script.

WM: Were the storyboards a lot like the finished film?

CP: Not really, because an awful lot of them were atmospheric. The original plan called for a large sequence of other worlds, very imaginative, but very specific types of worlds all over the place, to show the multiplicity of the cosmos. There were hundreds and hundreds of pictures of concepts and worlds, but it didn't really look like the story itself, the actual script, which nobody really saw. He had sold the film at that point to MGM. Bob O'Brien, who was the President of MGM then, was pretty much batting for him. It had a five and a half million dollar budget, which was a lot of money in those days. Now, you couldn't get an actor for that. The script itself was pretty neat. I was impressed and all excited about it. The trouble was, Kubrick stayed in the north of London and we were north of Los Angeles. (laughs) It was difficult to provide ideas and layouts and concepts for him, and he couldn't really see tactically how we would be able to work on the physical film with that distance between us, so in the summer of '65 he hired us to go over to England, Doug Trumball and myself. Doug was a young guy whom I had hired in '62 or '63 to do airbrush work. He was a terrific artist, just out of school, and fit immediately into the animation business doing backgrounds.

WM: So he was working at Graphic with you?

CP: Yes. We worked together on quite a few jobs there over a couple of years, and we both ended up going over to England to do lots and lots of stars and planets for starters.

Con Pederson, along with Douglas Trumball, was hired to do star effects, but ended up doing much more for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. © 1968 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc.

WM: And the other two people who have credit: Wally Veevers and Tom Howard?

CP: Wally Veevers was an old time special effects director. He went way back to Hitchcock as one of the most preeminent special effects directors in England. He knew everything about movies you needed to know to get things moved around. He was really terrific. I'd say he was the main ingredient in the special effects without a doubt, because every set up on every stage he had engineered the way it was going to work, working closely with the art department. The other name, Tom Howard, was head of the lab, so his primary assignment in the last year of production was to coordinate with Technicolor because they did all of our film work.