Weston, who went on to perform in numerous James Bond films, says: “One of the great things about Stanley was he had an incredible, tremendous artistic integrity.
2001 A SPACE ODYSSEY HELMET FULL
Tempers were soothed after the stuntman was given a swish dressing room with a fridge full of beer and a large raise in his fee. The director did not return for two or three days, Weston recalls. Having recovered from the oxygen deprivation, Weston was so outraged that he decided to confront Kubrick, only to find that he had fled the scene. So it simply built up inside, incrementally causing a heightened heart rate, rapid breathing, fatigue, clumsiness, and eventually, unconsciousness.” Even when the tank was feeding air into the suit, there was no place for the carbon dioxide Weston exhaled to go. In his book, Benson writes: “Given the complexity of the shots, and the amount of time it took simply to remove the platform used to prepare the stuntman’s wires and suspend him, 10 minutes wasn’t enough. More seriously, a small tank within Weston’s backpack contained only 10 minutes’ worth of compressed air.
He insisted that Weston wore a wig that made his hermetically sealed spacesuit become all the more overheated. Photograph: Doug Trumbullīut Kubrick did not make things easy. Stuntman Bill Weston recovering from oxygen deprivation after the stunt. His stunts involved being suspended horizontally from wires connected to a drill motor against a black abyss of outer space recreated by vast curtains of black velvet. Yet the most complex shots of his film included Weston playing the dead astronaut Frank Poole, spinning lifelessly. Kubrick, like his lead actors Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, was afraid of flying. Kubrick was a supreme visual stylist with a perfectionist’s attention to detail.Ģ001 was so realistic that the Soviet cosmonaut Alexey Leonov, who became the world’s first spacewalker in 1965, said after seeing the film in 1968: “Now I feel I’ve been in space twice.”īenson says that, decades before digital effects, the 2001 stunts “constitute an extraordinary, largely unsung moment in film history”. It starred Kirk Douglas, who also played the hero in Kubrick’s Roman classic Spartacus. Kubrick’s masterpieces include Paths of Glory, one of the most powerful anti-war movies. Its author, Michael Benson, included in depth interviews with Weston and the visual effects supervisor Doug Trumbull, who photographed the daredevil stunts, among others. Nothing could go wrong if Stanley was in charge.Stanley Kubrick on the set of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Talk about someone holding your life in their hands! When asked by Vanity Fair if there were any other protections in place aside from the man holding the rope, Dullea's response was, "I would have been dead." He quickly followed this with, "I had been working with Stanley for months, and I totally trusted him. Vanity Fair states that "as the actor fell, the rope sped through the gloved hands of a circus roustabout," the only protection Dullea had from crashing into the ground.
The camera was positioned below his projected body making the shot seem like a horizontal ejection when in reality, Dullea was falling headfirst towards the ground. Dullea had to perform the scene himself, and an article for Vanity Fair explains that this was "somewhat harrowing for Dullea, who, with no helmet to hide behind, had to forgo a stunt double." Dullea had to "dive headfirst through the escape hatch, secured by a hidden rope attached to a harness underneath his costume" from two stories up. Clarke, they decided it would work, and so filming began. After discussing this possibility with Arthur C.
In order to make this scene accurate, Kubrick heavily researched whether or not a helmetless person could survive brief exposure to space if it was just through a quick transition from pod to ship.
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