![]() The red lens that served as the 'eye' of the HAL 9000 computer in '2001: A Space Odyssey' - one of the iconic images in movie history. "This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it," HAL quietly tells astronaut Dave Bowman before proceeding to explain matter-of-factly that it had learned of Bowman's and Poole's plans to disconnect it by reading their lips. HAL concluded that the first command superseded the second. He had been given conflicting programming: Ensure the success of the mission at all costs, while also protecting the lives of the crew. HAL's reasoning and explanation were cold, precise and - at least in its mind - unavoidably logical. Rain's sinuous, detached reading of HAL's lines made the computer's murders of three astronauts as they slept in suspended animation and its subsequent stranding of astronaut Frank Poole to die in open space all the more shocking. The HAL 9000 computer was the sentient controller of life support, systems and - although it wasn't revealed until later in the movie - the very mission of Discovery One, the spacecraft that is sent to Jupiter to investigate a mysterious black obelisk in the landmark 1968 science fiction film directed by Stanley Kubrick and co-written by Kubrick and Arthur C. dxcffgGEiA- Stratford Festival November 12, 2018 Our thoughts and prayers are with his family. Jackson, the director of the ‘Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Hobbit’ trilogies, bought the prop when it was sold by Christie’s in London for £17,500 in 2010.Īs Jackson points out, the plate was partially disassembled when he arrived, with the “eye” hidden behind the lens cap, pointing out the rear – the director didn’t think to take the cap off at the time.Īs for HAL’s point-of-view shots in the film, these were taken on a Cinerama Fairchild-Curtis wideangle lens with a 160° field of view.Today we lost Douglas Rain, a member of our founding company and a hugely esteemed presence on our stages for 32 seasons. Want to see how it works? The video below is of Mythbuster’s Adam Savage visiting film-maker Peter Jackson in New Zealand in 2016. Then they simply shone a light through it. But how did they add the glow? Simple – they used the camera’s very own red filter (R60) which screws on to the back of the lens. The on-screen HAL 900 – the single “eye” in blazing red – was played by one of Nikon’s most extreme lenses, its 8mm f/8 fisheye. The HAL 9000 lens in Peter Jackson’s prop store (Pic: Adam Savage’s Tested/YouTube) HAL 9000 needed to be all-seeing – the film’s plot hinges on his ability to detect a conversation between two of the crew. He had to find a visual presence for him aswell.Īs the recent exhibition at London’s Design Museum showed, Kubrick was a gifted stills photographer aswell as a film director. ![]() ![]() Kubrick cast actor Douglas Rain as the voice of HAL, but the voice was only part of the persona. While in charge of a spacecraft whose secret mission – hidden from its unfortunate crew – is to make contact with a possible alien entity, he starts to malfunction. HAL 9000, the eerily calm computer in Stanley Kubrick’s epic science fiction film ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, was voted the 13th greatest villain in the American Film Institute’s 100 Years… 100 Heroes & Villains. It is, without doubt, one of the most quietly chilling villains in movie history. KF article top HAL 9000: so that’s what a red filter does… (Pic: Stanley Kubrick Productions/MGM)
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