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2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Barry Sonnenfeld, A Life in Movies, Pt. 1

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Barry Sonnenfeld–A Life in Movies

part 1

The Men in Black and Get Shorty director on how he wandered into film school, the filmmakers who’ve influenced his work, the dos & don’ts of comedy directing, and more

by Michael Gaughn
July 17, 2023

above | a very young Barry Sonnenfeld shooting Raising Arizona for the Coen brothers

Barry Sonnenfeld says he was never a movie fan growing up, and it’s clear from the interview that follows that he took a very non-traditional, almost reluctant, path to becoming a director. It’s not that he’s not keenly aware of or doesn’t appreciate movies—he put me on to Parasite a full year before it was released and his current favorite film is the hyper-stylized Indian production RRR. He just never felt the need to retreat into movies and movie lore the way wave after wave of filmmakers have since the 1970s.

Barry is actually a bit of a throwback. Until the emergence of the movie brats, movies tended to be made by people who had come from just about anywhere but the film industry. And they tended to be made by people who had already been out in the world and were able to draw on a depth and variety of experience that they were then able to convey through their work. It’s a considerable loss that we’re now saddled with directors—usually from the womblike world of the more affluent suburbs—whose experiences are at best limited and who only really know how to regurgitate the movies they’ve lost themselves in as an alternative to reality.

Given how much of his work is based in fantasy, and that his Men in Black helped pave the way for the current profusion of cheeky action-driven sci-fi fare, it’s easy to mistake Barry for one of the film-obsessed. So it’s surprising to read his autobiography, Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother, and realize how much his early experiences—especially his less than privileged and highly dysfunctional home life—have informed his films. (It’s hard not to see a link between his having had to disperse cockroach hordes every time he entered his parents’ kitchen and the alien infestation in Men in Black, and a surprising number of childhood memories permeate the third installment of that series.)

The interview below is basically a riff on his autobiography—not a repetition of its anecdotes but a kind of parallel commentary that further develops the story of how he came to be a hugely successful and influential director, highlights the movies and filmmakers that have inspired his work, and shows the insight and skill that led him to become a master of his craft.

The common perception is that film directors are all rabid film fans who’ll do whatever they have to to be able to make movies. But it’s clear from your book that you were never a big movie fan and that you kind of wandered into the industry.

That’s right. I didn’t grow up a movie buff the way the Coen brothers did, who shot their own Super 8 movies and did remakes of things like The Naked and the Dead. I ended up going to the NYU graduate film program only for lack of anything better to do. I really wanted to be a still photographer like Elliot Erwitt, Gary Winogrand, or Lee Friedlander, but my parents said they would pay for me to go to graduate film school—which turned out to be a lie. I ended up having to take out student loans and credit card debt at 18%. But I went to NYU and discovered that, along with my ability as a still photographer, I had some talent as a cinematographer. And those two things are very different since so much of movies is about moving the camera.

I will say that, in both my stills and my work as a cinematographer and then as a director, I’ve always gravitated to wide-angle lenses. I shot 95 percent of all my work in stills either with a 21mm or 35mm lens. And in my work as a cinematographer—especially with the Coens and Danny DeVito and some of the stuff I did as a director—my key lens was also a 21mm.

Wide-angle lenses force you to be closer to the action because they see so much. And by being closer, the audience subconsciously feels that the camera is near the actors. You feel a certain energy in the actor’s performance, especially with a wider lens closer—unlike, say, Michael Mann or Ridley and Tony Scott, who tend to use telephoto lenses.

Will Smith told me that when he did Enemy of the State with Tony Scott, he could never even see the camera. It was so far away with a 200mm or 300mm lens, he didn’t even know they were shooting. And there I am two feet away from him with a lens practically in his nostrils. So it’s a very different way of working.

Did Kubrick have any influence on your use of wide-angle in movies or is that more about the two of you being sympathetic in your approach to filmmaking?

You know, Kubrick is my favorite director. My favorite movie is Dr. Strangelove. I also love 2001: A Space Odyssey. I hired Vincent D’Onofrio to be Edgar, the villain in the first Men in Black, in part because of his work in Full Metal Jacket.

What I love about Strangelove—which I think is also the best comedy ever—is everyone is playing the comedy as reality. No one’s trying to be funny. And because the reality is so surreal, stupid, and off the charts, that’s what makes it funny. It’s a perfect movie for expressing my kind of movie acting. The other thing Kubrick did so well is that he played 

Barry Sonnenfeld--A Life in Movies, Part 1
Barry Sonnenfeld--A Life in Movies, Part 1

John C. Reilly and Will Farrell in the Baby Jesus dinner scene from Talladega Nights

scenes out in masters, so you see action and reaction. You see Sterling Hayden and Peter Sellers next to each other while Hayden is talking about Purity of Essence and how he couldn’t get an erection after fluoridation of our water and all that; and in the same shot, you see Peter Sellers—it’s a raking two-shot—reacting.

The worst thing to do in a comedy is keep cutting around to tell people what’s funny. Let the reaction play within the scene. Let the audience decide what’s funny.

So, yes, Kubrick had a great influence on me, especially with how he designed the shots in Strangelove. Early on, there’s the scene with George C. Scott and Miss Foreign Affairs in a bedroom full of mirrors, and Scott is in the bathroom for half the scene off camera. There are no cuts—it all plays in this probably four-minute master—and it’s just thrilling how brilliant and daring it is not to have any cutaways to the other side of the conversation, not to cut to Scott in the bathroom. For me, that’s perfection.

That would seem to be a million miles away from somebody like Adam McKay, who has a very loose approach to directing comedy.

A movie I thought was very funny but is so not the way I make movies was his Talledega Nights. He is all about comedy improv. He writes stuff but then the cast just riffs and goes on forever. There’s the Baby Jesus dinner scene, where you can see that they’re shooting with two or three cameras. You see part of someone’s nose in this shot and someone’s ear over the shoulder in that, because in those kind of comedies, it’s not so much about the stylization or the visualization of the movie but funny dialogue.

It’s an equally valid way of doing it—just I couldn’t do it. I could not go on the set without a shot list, without a plan. I mean, I have seen directors rehearse a scene on set and then say to the DP, “So where do you think we should put the camera?” That’s crazy. It also allows

Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove
left | Tracy Reed and George C. Scott, 
right | Peter Sellers and Sterling Hayden 

making the comedy happen in the master shot—the delivery-room scene from Preston Sturges’ The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek

a publicity still from Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby

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the actors to sit or stand wherever they feel like without telling them, “You’re going to come through the door here, you gonna . . .” It seems like such an inefficient way of spending your 12 hours a day on the set. You don’t want to spend any of that time figuring stuff out. You want to spend it filming—lighting, setting up shots, and acting.

Few directors—especially comedy directors—pace their movies on the set. They try to pace them in the cutting room instead. So they’re never saying to the actors, “Let’s just do one more where everyone talks faster” or “Do one more—pick up the cues between when he says this and you say that.” But then if you feel it’s too boring and you need to pace it up, the only way you can do that is through editing. And the more you edit, the more you cut around, unconsciously, the more the audience finds it less funny.

Again, what’s really funny are master shots, like Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in the same frame [in Bringing Up Baby], with Cary Grant in her aunt’s bathrobe and Katharine Hepburn calling Grant “Mr. Bones,” which isn’t his name, while he’s trying get in a word edgewise with her aunt. And because it plays out in a master, it lets the audience find where the comedy is.

When I was the cameraman on When Harry Met Sally . . . and we shot the orgasm scene at Katz’s with Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, in every preview we had, as big a laugh as Meg Ryan gets acting out her orgasm, when you see Billy doing nothing except staring at her, the laughs go from 40 dB to 60 dB—just because his reaction is the audience’s point of view.

You want to make the actors talk fast so you can stay on the master shot. Look at any Preston Sturges or Howard Hawks comedy—those actors are not even listening to what the other actors are saying. They’re coming right in with it. There’s no reaction. They’re just right on top of it. They’ve overlapping. It’s thrilling to watch. You don’t get directors controlling the pace on set these days. You have them trying to control it in the cutting room, which is wrong.

In Part 2, Barry talks about making Blood Simple with the Coens, his transition from cinematographer to director, and making The Addams Family and Get Shorty.

Billy Crystal reacting—or not—in When Harry Met Sally . . .

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

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Review: 2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

review | 2001: A Space Odyssey

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As close as you’ll get to having the full experience of Kubrick’s space-travel epic without building a Cinerama at home

by Michael Gaughn
November 11, 2020

1968 (as I mentioned in my review of Rosemary’s Baby) was the year Hollywood, no longer able to lure people into theaters, blew everything up and started all over again. 2001: A Space Odyssey was the most radical product of that very radical year—not only because it flouted all the conventions of mainstream storytelling but because it went full-court Brecht to subvert the audience’s addiction to identifying with the protagonist, refused to use dialogue to Mickey Mouse viewers through the action, openly pissed on the convention of the traditional Hollywood music score, and stubbornly refused to be wedged it into any identifiable genre.

2001 is utterly sui generis—no film had looked anything like it before then; no film has looked anything like it since. It exists in its own, somewhat rarefied, universe.

Kubrick would never do anything that overtly adventurous again. Sure, Clockwork Orange was more outrageous but kind of in the same way as Dr. Strangelove; and “outrageous” isn’t the same thing as “adventurous.” 

But neither adventurousness nor outrageousness on their own, or even together, are enough to make a film great. (The path from 1968 to the present is littered with the corpses of films that managed to do both, but little else.) 2001 is great because it sets an impossibly high bar and almost achieves it. Adventurousness and outrageousness are symptomatic of that ambition, but neither is essential to realizing it. 

Which is why—to again return to an earlier review—I have to give The Shining the edge as Kubrick’s most accomplished work. Almost everything he does big and bold in 2001 he achieves quietly and more deftly in that later film. 2001 is the product of an artist so giddy he can’t help showing off; The Shining is the work of a master so confident in his abilities that he can just quietly drop clues and then wait as the rest of us scurry to catch up.

But why even go into all this? Because both 2001 and The Shining hinge on the experience of pulling you deep inside the film—not in a superficial, escapist way but so you begin to have the sensation of actually occupying the same physical space as the characters.

That the 4K HDR presentations of both films are reference-quality seriously ups the “you are there” ante—but with a crucial difference. And there’s the rub. The Shining is almost one-to-one true to the movie Kubrick created. When you watch it at home on a high-quality system, you’re seeing what he wanted you to see. 2001 in 4K HDR is just as extraordinary—but as a title card in the closing credits reminds you, this was originally a Cinerama presentation. And, unlike most of the other filmmakers who dabbled in Cinerama, Kubrick didn’t deploy it as a gimmick (Grand Prix, anyone?) but made it absolutely central to creating that sensation of taking an epic voyage into space.

So, is 2001, viewed in 4K HDR, in any meaningful way inferior to The Shining? On the technical level of the transfer, no, they’re both excellent—almost flawless. But since you can’t do Cinerama at home (at least not without a hell of a jerry-rigged setup that would have to verge on ludicrous), The Shining is truer to the original film.

All of the above is really just an exercise in praise by faint damning. The Kaleidescape download of 2001 is one of a handful of films so well served by the 4K HDR treatment that it has to be part of the foundation of any serious film collection. If there’s a single significant hiccup in this presentation, I didn’t see it.

To get lost in 2001 today, you have to get beyond ticking off what has and hasn’t come to pass and look past all that Swinging ‘60s clothing and furniture and get on the wavelength of the film Kubrick actually created, which exists in an elaborate and self-consistent world that merely uses the trappings of reality to achieve escape velocity.

The 4K resolution can’t reveal every detail of the original 70mm print, but it shows so much more than any previous home video incarnation that it’s shocking to realize to what extent Kubrick created outside his era, how unencumbered he was by the stylistic ticks of that time (or even of the future). On the level of film technique and film grammar, 2001 still holds.

What really takes the experience to a new, truer level is the HDR. Yes, many of the special effects now even more obviously look like still photos traveling across painted backgrounds. But shots of actual physical objects in motion, like the space station, the Discovery, and most of the extravehicular footage of the pod, are stunning. The brightness of objects in space is one of the things 2001 got basically right, and the HDR makes them look so crisp and cold they’re almost tactile.

Scenes to check out include the scientists walking down the ramp into the lunar excavation, where Kubrick shoots directly into a large worklight, with the light so intense you almost have to look away. The beginning of the final act, where the floating monolith guides Bowman into the Stargate, is especially compelling because of the convincing luminosity of Jupiter and its moons. And the virtual hotel room where Bowman goes through his transformation, which Kubrick created to mimic the look of early video, is more convincing with the white and other light tones pumped just enough to glow without becoming bloated or diffused.

As for the audio: Talking about the soundtrack of 2001 has always been kind of a ticklish business because this is essentially a silent movie. Kubrick rediscovered and then reinvented the core grammar of silent film, much of which had been glossed over and obliterated by the tyranny of the microphone during the Studio Era, and used it to not just drive this film but all of his subsequent efforts. It’s not that the audio is superfluous; it’s just not redundant with the visuals the way it had been since the introduction of sound—and continues to be.

(Curiously, another product of 1968—Blake Edwards’ The Party, which was much maligned at the time and is now revered—is also basically a silent film. Edwards, on a parallel track with Kubrick, dipped back into silent comedy to bring a sense of grace and redemption that had been missing from movie comedies since the Chaplin era.)

So, things like The Blue Danube, the heavy breathing, and the various warning sounds all sound perfectly fine. But this is a film of stripped-down and barren environments, without warfare or roaring engines, so there’s, thankfully, little audio-demo fodder to be found.

As for the extras—all I can say is “beware.” I’ve already sufficiently dumped on the team that created (although that seems far too kind a word) the promotional videos disguised as mini-docs included with Full Metal Jacket and The Shining. Their efforts here are equally awful. The other videos here are just as irritating and, for the most part, pointless. It would be great if somebody could unearth the Primer to2001” Keir Dullea hosted on CBS in the late ‘60s. It would make all these other efforts seem superfluous.

The trailer included here isn’t the one from its initial release or even its legendary initial re-release but a contemporary stab that feels like a cliché film-school exercise (people are going to look back 20 years from now at our addiction to dips to black and laugh their asses off) and indulges in exactly the kind of manipulative melodrama Kubrick despised. 

The only extra worth going out of your way for is the extended audio-only interview Jeremy Bernstein did with Kubrick in 1966. You get to hear the director walk through his whole career to that point, beginning as a failed high school student who became the youngest photographer ever at Look magazine and then went on to learn filmmaking, in a world without film schools, by making his own features. Not only is it better than anything any writer has ever done on Kubrick, it confirms, beyond a doubt, that Peter Sellers’ Quilty in Lolita is basically an extended Kubrick impression—which puts that deeply flawed film in a whole new light.

Michael Gaughn—The Absolute Sound, The Perfect Vision, Wideband, Stereo Review, Sound & Vision, The Rayva Roundtablemarketing, product design, some theater designs, a couple TV shows, some commercials, and now this.

PICTURE | The Kaleidescape download of 2001 is one of a handful of films so well served by the 4K HDR treatment that it has to be part of the foundation of any serious film collection.

SOUND | Things like The Blue Danube, the heavy breathing & the various warning sounds all sound perfectly fine, but this is a film of stripped-down and barren environments, without warfare or roaring engines, so there’s little audio-demo fodder to be found.

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