WM: It is wonderfully done. All the work in the special effects is seamless and there are no ugly borders showing anywhere...

CP: Thanks to Tom Howard. See, it was conceived as an art film, and the fact that we were pretty far away from Culver City made us pretty free as far as doing the work. Ultimately the film was printed in Culver City, of course, at MGM. Harry Jones was the timer there. They had a wonderful lab. I'd worked with them before. The final cut was done at MGM after a run here for a few weeks. Stanley cut 25 minutes from the film to tighten it up. There are no dissolves in the film, no opticals, it was all A and B cut, 65 negative. They made a protection internegative, but everything was done in original Eastman negative, so it has high quality. Stanley was always concerned. He would call me up years later whenever they would bring it out again to go look at the print to see if it were scratched or anything. He was fanatical about print and projection quality.

Con's first version of the Discovery spacecraft in 2001: A Space Odyssey, an 18 inch model. Courtesy of Con Pederson.

When I came back in '68, I took a couple of years off. You know, that was a long time ago but I was kinda worn out already. (laughs) I just started writing science fiction and getting to know the High Sierras like the back of my hand.

WM: 2001 is certainly different from the sort of science fiction that they have made since then. The pacing is so slow in a way and very grand, whereas the things they are turning out now, like Armageddon, there is a cut every two to three seconds.

CP: A lot of what looks like science fiction these days is really car chases. They make as many car chases as they can in Hollywood. It's the concept of action. The idea of doing a film that is an art film -- that's a dirty word in Hollywood because nobody would go see it if they thought of it that way. As a marketing thing, I think it was an accident that 2001 was successful. I never understood that. The first reviews, I have a stack of them, were mostly negative. No one quite knew what they were looking at, and they didn't know how to view it. But the generation of the '60s and '70s was such that it became a psychedelic sort of model, which had never occurred to us because I didn't know a single person in England that used drugs. We were really ordinary people, except that Stanley had this sense of adventure when it came to filmmaking. He was a cameraman. He was a photographer. He was an extraordinary filmmaker. I once asked him kind of stupidly how he thought a certain director would have done something we were discussing, and he said, "How would I know? I've never seen anyone direct." That's a good point. He was a self-educated director. I also asked him why he ended up producing all the time, because we had gone through a couple of producers on the job, and he said, "You can't get a good producer. They can't read your mind." So he was a do-it-yourself-er. He was a micro-manager. I have nothing against that. We got along great.

Con's final version of the Discovery spacecraft in 2001: A Space Odyssey, an 11 foot model. Courtesy of Con Pederson.

Sometimes it worries me because I wonder how he would have done something when I think of doing it myself, which you can't predict. I think that unpredictability is a big part of art, and basically Stanley was infatuated with the lenses and cameras. He spent a lot of time looking through cameras, the thing he knew best -- unlike, say, Hitchcock, who didn't bother with that. He would leave it to the DP. I quit directing after I left Graphic and I never wanted to direct again, because I considered it (if you're ready for this) to be not a very creative position. Too much of it is management. In order to direct you have to spend a lot of time managing and that means managing human relations, details, logistics, all of that stuff. Plus, I hate telephones. (laughs) I went without a phone for two years after that project.

WM: I knew John Whitney pretty well and he had his little sort of wire-frame version of the monolith and he claimed that he had invented the monolith.

CP: Not quite.