Why Christopher Nolan thinks ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ is “the punk rock of movies”
We mostly associate punk with music and clothing – frenetic guitars, ripped clothing, and tartan – but what about films?
While there are plenty of films out there about punk, from Sid and Nancy to Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains, there’s a difference between movies that merely capture the subculture and those that utilise the very essence of punk as their modus operandi. To make a film with a punk sensibility is to go against convention in a completely unrestrained way. To Christopher Nolan, Stanley Kubrick’s epic sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey is the ultimate punk film.
Released in 1968, several years before punk emerged as an era-defining time for counter-culture, Kubrick’s film has gone down in cinema history as one of the most significant works of art within the medium, groundbreaking in its approach to structure, visual effects, and scope.
Coming after the release of acclaimed films like Dr Strangelove and Lolita, Kubrick’s take on the sci-fi genre was a significant leap forward in his career. It was one of his first experiments with colour, which allowed him to produce one of the most mesmerising sequences in the history of film – the Star Gate scene. With neon lights shooting across the screen as Kier Duella’s David Bowman’s face is reflected back at us in terror, the movie took audiences on a psychedelic trip in a way that mainstream cinema simply hadn’t done before.
Nolan, who has made sci-fi movies of his own, like Interstellar, was obsessed with 2001: A Space Odyssey when he was a kid, and he credits it for deeply inspiring his love of movies and his desire to become a filmmaker. To him, the movie isn’t just a great sci-fi epic; it paved new ground for cinema, with Kubrick harnessing a shamelessly punk attitude as he unconventionally played with narrative.
In the book The Nolan Variations by Tom Shone, the filmmaker is quoted as saying, “A studio executive was once talking about Memento, and he articulated the idea that you can ask the audience to make a large narrative leap in the first third of the movie, not in the last third. That has stuck with me. When people start talking about what they call plot holes, they’re not necessarily taking into account how storytelling works, the rhythm of it. The cut from the bone to the spaceship in 2001 jumping ahead millions of years, followed by a sequence in excruciating detail how this guy gets to the Moon?”
He continued, “It’s wonderful, it’s an amazing sequence, but it’s what we would call in script-writing terms ‘shoe leather.’ It’s the most beautiful shoe leather. That’s why I say 2001 is the punk rock of movies. It’s not that it breaks all the rules. It’s a film that doesn’t acknowledge that there are any rules.”
Kubrick’s film blazed a trail for all future sci-fi movies, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find a director of a movie set in space who doesn’t hold 2001 as the ultimate benchmark. Nolan owes much of his approach to cinema to Kubrick’s incredible movie, which has endured for decades as a piece of art that feels beautifully timeless.
