Trivia / 2010: The Year We Make Contact

• Approval of God: In a way. After he was hired, Peter Hyams reached out to Kubrick to make sure he was all right with a sequel to 2001 being made. Kubrick said he didn't have a problem with it, and encouraged Hyams to pursue his own vision of the story instead of feeling obligated to replicate the style of the first film.
  • Played straight with Clarke, though; he and Hyams actually collaborated on the screenplay using email. In 1983.
• B-Team Sequel: Stanley Kubrick was offered the film but had zero interest in doing it.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: Candice Bergen as SAL 9000; subverted as she was credited under a pseudonym, "Olga Mallsnerd".
• Creator-Preferred Adaptation: Arthur C. Clarke's correspondence with Hyams was published in the 1985 book The Odyssey File:
  "[T]he screenplay arrived this morning... I felt like playing a few tricks on you — like a message from my secretary saying that I was last seen heading for the airport carrying a gun. But being the day it is and the delicate condition you are in I'll say right away that it's a splendid job and you have brilliantly chiselled out the basic elements of the novel, besides adding quite a few of your own. I laughed — and cried — in all the right places."
• Fake Nationality:
  • Messed around with. Dr. Chandra is supposed to be Dr. Sivasubramanian Chandrasegarampillai, originally from Madras, but a naturalized US citizen at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. When they cast the Russian-Jewish American Bob Balaban in the role, they dropped any reference to his Indian heritage (and changed his affiliation to the University of Chicago, to boot).
  • Dmitri Moiseivich was played by an American actor, and Captain Tanya Kirbuk by a third-generation Russian immigrant to the UK (see Fake Russian below). Kirbuk's name is, of course, Kubrick spelled backwards without the "c", but it's probably intended to resemble Ukrainian names that end in "-uk". The other Soviet characters were played by four Russians, one Latvian, one Ukrainian and one Czech.
• Fake Russian: Dana Elcar as Moiseievich has the most trouble with his accent; his Russian radio messages are dubbed. Helen Mirren's grandfather was Russian (their family was originally named Mironov) and she can pull off the accent, even though she isn't fluent in the language. Jan Triska, who played the Leonov's communications officer Aleksandr Kovalev, was Czech; the rest of the Soviet crew were actually from the Soviet Union.
• Life Imitates Art: Around the year 2010, scientists began noticing the color of Jupiter's atmosphere is changing, just not as fast as it happens in the film.
• The Other Darrin: Roy Scheider as Heywood Floyd, replacing William Sylvester from 2001. (A still of Sylvester as Floyd, touching the monolith on the Moon, can be seen in the recap sequence in the beginning.) Averted by Keir Dullea and Douglas Rain, who reprise their roles as Bowman and HAL.
• Playing Against Type: Saveli Kramarov, who played Dr. Rudenko, was exclusively cast during his Soviet career as a particularly goofy comic type with certain Cloud Cuckoo Lander and Butt-Monkey tendencies. Needless to say, he hated that and was more than happy to play in a serious Sci-Fi film instead.
• Prop Recycling:
  • The blue 2001-style spacesuit hanging in the Discovery pod bay ended up in the hands of the crew of Babylon 5 years later. (This is precisely the kind of thing that Stanley Kubrick wanted to avoid by destroying all of 2001's sets and props.) They did their best to change what they could on it, "though it was pretty much what it was regardless." To make it further Hilarious in Hindsight, the episodes the suit appeared in both involved time travel, a lost astronaut appearing and disappearing, and a mild degree of Mind Screw.
  • The space pod that appears in Watto's junkyard in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace may also have come from 2010's Discovery pod bay, but this has not been confirmed.
  • Averted for the film itself, though. Specifically to avoid this trope, Kubrick had all props and sets from 2001 destroyed. Everything had to be rebuilt from the ground up using references from the original film.
• Reality Subtext: In the film, Moiseivich explains to Floyd that their ship's name was changed from Titov to Leonov because Titov "fell out of favor". In real life, Gherman Titov was a bit of a rebel who was busted multiple times for drunk driving, fraternizing with women, and other misdemeanors. The Soviet Union considered officially kicking him out of the program more than once, and likely would have eventually if not for Yuri Gagarin's death in 1968. Titov died in 2000, while Alexei Leonov was still alive in 2010 (he died in 2019).
• Science Marches On:
  • This was Clarke's motivation to keep writing sequels to 2001. The plot of 2010 was inspired by the Voyager probes' flybys of Jupiter, especially the possibility of life under Europa's icy crust, and he wrote 2061 in response to the 1986 observations of Halley's Comet.
  • This made Stanley Kubrick's version of the plot, moving the mission in 2001 from Saturn to Jupiter, very fortuitous. The first novel sent Discovery to Saturn, with the Monolith found in the vicinity of Iapetus (spelled "Japetus" in the novel, a common British spelling for the moon). The most interesting feature on Iapetus is a ridge that gives it a walnut-like shape. The real-life idea that Europa is now considered more likely to harbor life than Mars makes this change downright fateful!
  • After Clarke died, the Cassini probe showed that it would now be possible to do a story about a monolith on Iapetus protecting emerging life on Enceladus, since it has even better evidence of liquid water under its crust than Europa does.
• Sequel Gap: Set nine years after 2001, but made 16 years later.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Arthur C. Clarke suggested that Peter Hyams try to get Ben Kingsley, who had just won his Oscar for Gandhi, to play Chandra. Twenty years later, Hyams would direct Kingsley in A Sound of Thunder.
    • What's odd is that the film version of 2001 gave HAL's creator's name as "Mr Langley", rather than "Dr Chandra". You have to wonder why they didn't simply rename the character Langley when they cast a white guy...
  • Tony Banks was connected to the soundtrack initially, but Hyams fired him because he didn't like the music he made for the film.

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