10 directors who adore Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’
As one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in history, countless generations have been inspired by the work of Stanley Kubrick, but the seminal sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey might just be his single most inspiring feature, which is saying something.
The notoriously meticulous director may have become a byword for cinematic excellence with a back catalogue comparable to anyone who’s ever wielded a megaphone, but his existential 1968 epic that pushed the boundaries of visual majesty forward while asking weighty thematic questions has become a touchstone for some of the modern greats to have followed in his footsteps.
The best indicator is that of the following ten directors who have praised 2001 at various points during their own careers, each of them has a distinctly unique voice of their own. They’ve handled incendiary dramas, billion-dollar blockbusters, monolithic franchises, cerebral thrillers, and virtually everything else in between, with the common denominator being the looming shadow of Kubrick’s classic.
Claire Denis admitted that “it’s not possible to imitate a single thing from 2001,” but even though she “wasn’t sure I understood this mysterious philosophising, I accepted all of it.” Darren Aronofsky celebrated the way Kubrick “dared to reimagine space and time,” lauding it as “the first sci-fi movie to deal with real physics,” praising how it still holds up as well today as it did more than half a century ago.
Ridley Scott – himself the director of at least two of the finest sci-fi stories ever told on the big screen – acknowledged that 2001 “influenced everybody”. Steven Spielberg, who picked up where Kubrick left off by finishing A.I. Artificial Intelligence following the icon’s death, was no less effusive in his assessment.
Reflecting on a conversation they had, Spielberg remembered Kubrick always seeking to shift the cinematic paradigm: “He kept saying, ‘I want to change the form. I want to make a movie that changes the form,'” he recalled. “And I said, ‘Well, didn’t you with 2001?”
It left David Fincher with his mind “fairly blown”, so much so that it instilled him with the feeling that not only did he “have to be prepared for space travel” but “it made me start to prepare for the afterlife.”
Edgar Wright, meanwhile, exclaimed that “we’re still reaching to make movies as good as this even now,” while a failure to grasp the ending didn’t affect Terry Gilliam’s opinion: “It always stuck with me, the ending from 2001. I don’t quite understand it, but I know it gets me thinking.”
The great Christopher Nolan called Kubrick “inimitable”, offering that “I don’t think I have the confidence to do that” in his own work when discussing the jump cut forward in time. Martin Scorsese was left enthralled by the “extraordinary audacity” of 2001 and its structural choices, too, with Alfonso Cuarón labelling it as “unlike anything I’d ever seen.”
A sci-fi heavy hitter himself, George Lucas praised 2001 as “the first time people really took science fiction seriously,” stating that “Stanley Kubrick made the ultimate science fiction movie,” expanding on how “it is going to be very difficult for someone to come along and make a better movie.”
James Cameron was in a similar boat, calling it “the all time great science fiction film”. Known for pushing the technology of cinema forward, the Titanic and Avatar director would even brand “the ideas behind the spectacle” as “the most important special effect of all.”
Directors who love 2001: A Space Odyssey:
- Claire Denis
- Steven Spielberg
- Darren Aronofsky
- Ridley Scott
- Terry Gilliam
- Edgar Wright
- David Fincher
- Christopher Nolan
- Martin Scorsese
- Alfonso Cuarón
- James Cameron
