WM: I wonder if you are right, about how it's going to be.

CP: Nobody wants to think that far ahead. It's because, when you look at it, Star Wars for instance is kind of a western. It is kind of a morality play, which has an awful lot of mythological models for the kind of story that it usually involves and I remember an incident when Kubrick called me just after he'd seen Star Wars, it was I think almost two years after the first Star Wars and he had just seen it, believe it or not. And he said, "It's a comic book! It's a comic book!" and I said, "Stanley, it is making a fortune." And he says, "Well, think of what we could do now. They got all these computers. You got all these computers now. Think of what we could do. You got any ideas?" And of course, I had just finished this thing that takes place a billion years in the future, but I had no desire to go back to England to do another science fiction film. So I said, "No, Stanley. I haven't been keeping up with science fiction lately and I really don't have any ideas."

He had sent me a copy of The Shining shortly before that. In fact, he wanted me to kind of comment on what I thought about it, because he knew I was into science fiction. Well, I had never read Stephen King. I didn't consider him a science fiction writer at all, because it was more horror stories. I don't begrudge him all that fame and success, but when you come out of science fiction and see somebody on the edges of it making a lot of money and nobody, Arthur Clarke included, as good as he is, makes any money in science fiction. But I read the book, The Shining, in a snow storm. It snowed six feet that night up in Mammoth. I read the whole book cover to cover in a night. That was a very sympathetic way to read the story, it takes place in the Rocky Mountains in a hotel. So I wrote a letter to Stanley and I made some suggestions, I don't remember all, but one thing, I pleaded with him, knowing him, "Don't shoot in Scotland. Don't shoot in the Swiss Alps. Shoot in the Rockies. You gotta get real Rockies." He said, "I know the Rockies. You know they are different from any mountains in the world. They are distinctive." Surprisingly he did a second unit shoot in the Rockies and that was good, because he is so, was so, kind of hermetically sealed as it were, kind of isolated. He wouldn't fly even though he went about getting a pilot's license at one time. He will only come off the island on ship. That was his way of thinking and of course, he never did leave England. So I thought maybe he would try to build a set that was too big. But he did do everything in sets in England. Everything he did was under control because it was more important to him to be able to walk from one room to another, or from one place to another and have it all there. He didn't want to go very far for anything. I resisted going back to England, even though I sometimes had the urge, just because three lousy winters there and that's why I didn't live in Minnesota anymore. (laughs) I didn't like the weather.

A space shuttle takes the astronauts of 2001: A Space Odyssey to the moon excavation site known as TMA1 (Tycho Magnetic Anomaly One). © 1968 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc.

Well, be that as it may, he was great. He was wonderful. A generous man. Brilliant guy and surprisingly folksy. Probably when you think about Hollywood very few people knew him here. People would go over there briefly and maybe work on a picture or something like that, but working with him for 2 and a half years very closely was a very special thing. He made an effect on me and oddly enough I think I made an effect on him too. I sort of sometimes made sense to him which I am surprised to say. He often needed somebody to bounce off; he was always asking questions about whether he was doing the right thing. People don't know that about him but he was not like most artists; they are always kind of adventuring, they are always sort of wondering how this is going to work. He was always doing things where there was a high probability of failure but he substituted something for fear and I don't know what it was. You could say it was bravery or recklessness but I don't know that much about human nature, and I decided when I flunked psychology in college that I wasn't going to find out. I think art involves too much mystery and I don't really want to know why we do art, and why we've been doing art for 35,000 years that is as sustainable as the ice age paintings that communicate so well to us after all those years that we say, "That's an old masterpiece, that's really amazing!" What drives us to draw with sensitivity, to communicate something that we see, not just what it looks like but what it is. It's the visual arts and the correlative verbal arts of writing and expressing ideas, like poetry for instance. I think all artforms are equally wonderful. I wouldn't have said that when I was younger. I like film less now than I did then, and I like the avant-garde and experimental less now. In the long run, my favorite films are really from the 1940s -- John Ford's things, but Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast is really the most perfect, wonderful film ever made. Why would anyone dare to make a cartoon version of it? And, by the way, 2001 isn't even my favorite Kubrick movie: I'm afraid that's A Clockwork Orange.

William Moritz teaches film and animation history at the California Institute of the Arts.