The classic 1936 movie Stanley Kubrick couldn’t stand: “What are you trying to do to me?”
A director doesn’t necessarily have to be a fan of a particular genre to tackle it, but it definitely helps. Stanley Kubrick made one of the greatest sci-fi movies of all time, and he always had a soft spot for it.
We know that the mercurial filmmaker was so impressed by Ridley Scott’s Alien that he called him on the phone right after he’d seen it, because he had absolutely no idea how he’d pulled off the iconic scene where a Xenomorph bursts out of John Hurt’s chest and then squirrels across the floor of the Nostromo.
Kubrick was also fond of Fritz Lang’s seminal Metropolis, as are most auteurs who’ve dabbled in sci-fi, to be honest, with Mike Hodges’ The Terminal Man, Steven Spielberg’s ET the Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris among his other personal favourites.
Of course, Kubrick only helmed one sci-fi flick in his career, but if you’re only going to do it once, then 2001: A Space Odyssey is a decent way to do it. It could have been two, had he not passed the AI Artificial Intelligence baton over to Spielberg, but as far as one-and-dones go, you can’t do much better.
Throughout the development of his pioneering, trailblazing, influential, and altogether timeless masterpiece, the director collaborated closely with Arthur C Clarke, with the legendary writer and futurist co-writing the screenplay and penning the tie-in novelisation. Naturally, they’d talk shop during the process.
It seems impossible for two people to work on a sci-fi film together without talking about sci-fi films, but when Clarke offered Kubrick a recommendation for one of the medium’s must-see examples, the Full Metal Jacket and A Clockwork Orange architect couldn’t have hated it any more if he tried.
Adapted for the screen by HG Wells and based on his novel, 1936’s Things to Come is widely celebrated and highly regarded as a landmark in sci-fi cinema. One of the finest British films of its era, Clarke was so confident the dystopian tale that unfolds over decades would appeal to Kubrick that he screened it for him, only to discover he couldn’t have been more wrong.
“What are you trying to do to me?” Kubrick moaned once the credits had stopped rolling. “I’ll never see anything you recommend again!” Clearly, he wasn’t exactly taken with director William Cameron Menzies’ picture, loathing it so much that he quickly informed Clarke that if he ever suggested another movie worth watching, there was no chance he’d watch it.
It’s a case of each to their own, really, but given that Kubrick was known to be fond of several of cinema’s other stone-cold sci-fi masterpieces, Clarke was well within his rights to believe he’d be partial to another one, only for the opposite to be true.
