By the time he began conceiving 2001: A Space Odyssey, New York–born and bred photographer turned director Stanley Kubrick had established himself as one of the most important voices in American cinema with 1964’s Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a scabrous, absurdist comedy that dared to poke fun at humankind’s seeming full-throttle race toward nuclear apocalypse. Though he had directed such acclaimed films as the smaller-scale noirs Killer’s Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956); the antiwar courtroom drama Paths of Glory (1957); and 1962’s controversial film adaptation of Nabokov’s Lolita (evidence that Kubrick was willing to bring the “unthinkable” to the big screen), Dr. Strangelove, with its four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Director, was evidence of a bold, philosophical approach to filmmaking that indicated darker, even grander avenues: it was a portrait of man’s grand folly—the capacity for “human error” (to anticipate one of HAL 9000’s most memorable lines) begetting nothing less than our own mass extinction.

While the project that became 2001 would perhaps be more hopeful than his previous film, there is an inherent cynicism about the human condition, evident in all of his subsequent movies, that partly fuels such a radical, dark vision. As much as the specter of nuclear apocalypse, the space race had been on the minds of many Americans in the late fifties and sixties, and Kubrick was interested in producing a more realistic and ambitious science-fiction film than what he had previously seen. The film’s speculations about extraterrestrial life and artificial intelligence would be more intellectually engaged than those of other directors, forgoing the usual clunky, tactile effects for something more ethereal and undefinable, a way of dramatizing the unknowable.

To help him start working out his ideas, he wrote an introductory letter to science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke in March 1964 suggesting they collaborate on a movie about space travel and extraterrestrial life. Clarke believed that his 1948 story “The Sentinel” was a good starting point for discussion with Kubrick, and soon the two were working together in New York, where Clarke had traveled from his home in Sri Lanka. After years of intense discussions and story shaping, Clarke would write a novel concurrently with Kubrick’s film going into production, with both being released the same year.

Soon after they began their collaboration officially, Clarke introduced Kubrick to Harry Lange and Fred Ordway, former NASA officials who had recently left to open a consulting firm; both would end up central figures to the film: Lange as production designer and Ordway as a primary conduit to the latest in industrial space research. Other important early collaborators included the company Graphic Films, which Kubrick commissioned in summer 1965 to provide concept art for the moon landing sequences and moon base structures after seeing their movie To the Moon and Beyond at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair. Graphic Films’ Con Pederson and Douglas Trumbull, who would eventually come on board, along with Wally Veevers and Tom Howard, as special effects supervisors for 2001. (Read “Graphic Films and the Inception of 2001: A Space Odyssey” on Sloan Science & Film.) Once he had moved to England to shoot the film, the crew expanded over the next three years to include such essential players as Geoffrey Unsworth as director of photography, who would shoot on 70mm film; fashion designer Hardy Amies, who would create the streamlined, modernist costumes; and Ray Lovejoy as editor (though Kubrick had a heavy hand in the edit himself).

Kubrick would ultimately shoot 2001: A Space Odyssey in England, at MGM-British Studios in Borehamwood and also at Shepperton Studios in Surrey. The filmmaker and studio originally aimed for a 1966 release date, though the production became so massive and unwieldy that everyone on crew and at MGM assumed that date would have to be significantly pushed. It was also a film that, thanks partly to its episodic structure and conceptual complexity, was being regularly sorted out and reimagined during the production process. The shape that Kubrick and Clarke’s film finally took was the result of much work and imagination and constant reshifting of ambitions and expectations. 2001 moves from the epochal “Dawn of Man'' sequence, in which a group of hominids, led by the ape Moonwatcher (performed by actor and mime Dan Richter), discover violent weaponry and thus how to assume power, to another wordless passage expressing the mundaneness of future space travel, set to Strauss’s “The Blue Danube.” Soon the film jumps to its first set of characters, including Heywood Floyd, a doctor of astronautics investigating a top-secret discovery of a strange object that seems to have been “deliberately buried” in a lunar crater on the Moon. These first two sequences are united by the presence of a monolith—an unsettlingly smooth, geometric object poking out of the earth—which emits a strange, high-pitched frequency and seems to act as a harbinger.

2001’s central metaphorical image, the monolith will recur throughout the film, but first Kubrick and Clarke make another radical detour. In the most plot-driven section, we meet Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood), astronauts on a mission to Jupiter aboard the nuclear-powered U.S. spacecraft Discovery One, a dynamically designed spacecraft that creates gravity by slow rotation. The enormous centrifuge set—which cost $750,000—moved in a circular motion at three miles an hour, resulting in some of the film’s most arresting images (such as Poole jogging around the ship as though a hamster in a wheel). Though three other astronauts are onboard, put into hypersleep for the duration of the mission, the Discovery, of course, has one more crucial crew-member: the sentient computer HAL 9000, whose deceptively subdued, computerized voice (supplied by Canadian actor Douglas Rain, whose narration for the NFB documentary Universe inspired Kubrick to cast him, replacing earlier narration by Martin Balsam) masks more sinister, and therefore more human, motivations. After HAL malfunctions—or perhaps, more chillingly, makes an autonomous and dangerous decision—Dave and Frank decide it’s safest to disconnect the computer, leading HAL to retaliate, killing Frank and the sleeping crew-members. After extricating himself from HAL and the Discovery, Dave jettisons himself into the unknown in a small space pod, determined to fulfill his mission.