The 1964 space mission that convinced Stanley Kubrick to seek out anti-alien insurance
For decades now, Hollywood and the world of entertainment as a whole have been obsessed with answering the question: Are we alone in the universe?
Just this week (at the time of writing), Stephen Spielberg is gearing up to release his new movie Disclosure Day, a film that tackles the idea of alien occupation and government cover-up. While most of the time the plots of these movies come from a plethora of conjecture and what-ifs, Spielberg has spoken about how this film made him optimistic that we may make alien contact soon.
“My view has become more realistic,” he said, “There’s a lot of mystery and things that are undisclosed, but I’ve become more optimistic that people are going to be able to discover things that we have not been allowed to discover.”
Of course, a movie about disclosing the secrets we harbour about otherworldly beings will always open itself up to some kind of conspiracy, so much so that the legendary director has had to come out and say the movie hasn’t been made in affiliation with the ‘deep state’. He said, “The biggest urban legend that is occurring right now involves my movie coming out, Disclosure Day, that somehow I have made this movie in concert with deep state factions.”
Spielberg isn’t alone in being at the centre of a conspiracy because of a sci-fi flick. When Stanley Kubrick released his film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, years later, plenty of rumours began circulating about how his big screen offering was proof that the moon landing was fake. It was deemed that Kubrick could have done the effects for the footage, given that his film came out a couple of years earlier. This was one of many conspiracy theories that began floating in zero gravity as the film rocketed to fame.
Kubrick probably wasn’t that surprised that so much speculation came out following the release of his film, as in the process of making it, he too found himself believing in otherworldly life. The creative endeavour of making A Space Odyssey was certainly a journey. Given Kubrick famously prefers adapting movies from books, he wanted there to be a novel on the story he wanted to tell prior to actually putting together a plan for his film. As such, he enlisted the help of Arthur C Clarke.
Kubrick was drawn to Clarke because he had both knowledge of outer space and a vivid imagination. The two would work together trying to put the story together, and in doing so, it became clearer and clearer to Kubrick how his film would eventually end up looking. Clarke recalled the instructions he was given by the famous director: “If you can describe it, I can film it”.
The further the filmmaker got into the writing process, the more involved he became in the world of science fiction. Clarke wrote in his journal about late-night phone calls he would receive from Kubrick, who was keeping up to date with world news and whether or not contact from other life forms had happened yet. “Much excitement when Stanley phones to say that the Russians claim to have detected radio signals from space,” he wrote.
This fascination led to Kubrick developing conspiracies before anybody had even seen the film. He became so dead certain that alien life making contact was imminent, that he took out an insurance policy in case his fictional story became fact, and was scooped up by the news while the film was being made. Yes, the modes of filmmaking have changed, and the themes surrounding various motion pictures are different, but it seems that conspiracies surrounding extraterrestrial movies are timeless.
