2001's Keir Dullea reflects on his star-making role 

Though 2001: A Space Odyssey will forever stand as actor Keir Dullea’s calling card, he has built a formidable acting career on both stage and screen that spans over five decades. Still, he considers himself a theater actor first, evidenced by his recent casting in the new stage production of The Shawshank Redemption at the Gaitey Theatre in Dublin. Prior to landing the role, Dullea was originally scheduled to appear at the Music Box for special screenings of 2001 on May 9 and 10 as part of the theater's Sci-Fi Spectacular. (His fellow shipmate, actor Gary Lockwood, will be appearing instead.) Before heading to Dublin, Dullea spoke with The A.V. Club about whether science could produce a real HAL and why he prefers acting for the stage.

The A.V. Club: Your second film, David And Lisa, was among the first in America that dealt with mental illness. How did it find such a large audience, going against the grain?

Keir Dullea: It was a very low-budget film. It got great reviews, but nobody read them because the film opened during a newspaper strike. So young people, a boy and a girl, were hired to go to all the lines outside the art houses in New York. The girl would go up to every young man, and the boy would go up to every young female, and the girl would say, “Are you David?” and the boy would say the opposite, “Lisa?” And they did that all over the city and suddenly it just took off. It ran for one year at the Plaza. It was what they call a real sleeper in our business, and it was such an honest, intimate film. It was not a Hollywood view of two young disturbed people. It was more of a European film in that sense, and my career took off because of it.

AVC: How were you initially approached by Stanley Kubrick?

KD: I didn’t know I was being considered by Stanley Kubrick at all. I was in London filming Bunny Lake Is Missing, and one day after work, my wife said, “Call your agent in New York.” He said, “You better sit down. You’ve just been offered the lead in Stanley Kubrick’s next movie.” That’s literally how I heard. I was a Stanley Kubrick fan already. I would’ve paid to get in his film.

When I think about Stanley, I just think of this bearded, bemused expression. You knew there was a lot going on behind that face. I found him extremely supportive, very low key. He was diametrically opposite of the Prussian-like [director] Otto Preminger who I couldn’t stand working with. He had great curiosity. I remember once somebody came in with a Pentax camera. It was a new thing on the market, and [Kubrick] was a photography nut. So when the Pentax camera came on set, we didn’t work for a half an hour. He’d just look at this camera, asking questions about it and trying it out. 

Some people might call him anal, but it didn’t bother me. He was a perfectionist, and he was the most prepared director I had ever worked with. That’s why he averaged two and a half films per decade. He would have these huge boards onset, and tacked on them were about 40 or 50 Polaroids. He had taken them for the master shots, and each one had the slightest light changes. They all looked the same to me.

The one thing that unifies all of the best directors is their ability to create a safe atmosphere in which to work, where it’s okay to fall on your face. You’re not going to be slapped across the wrist. If you don’t get it this time, we’ll do it again. Let’s just make it a game. And he was very much into gaming; he was a voracious chess player. I loved going to work everyday. 

AVC: Was there a conscious effort made to make you and Gary Lockwood appear as “machine-like” as HAL?

KD: In a way, HAL was more human than the humans. Stanley had written us backgrounds, and we didn’t think as were shooting, “I have to be more machine-like.” The bios explained how our characters had double doctorates in scientific fields. They were such psychologically steady individuals that what would make you and I go around the bend would only cause them to flick an eyebrow. 

AVC: Was there any discussion about the meaning of the ending?

KD: Stanley did not go into the great esoteric questions that the film poses for the average audience member. He dealt with the subjective level of these two guys who were on a mission and only knew so much. What’s remarkable about him is that he never tied up plots in convenient bows at the end. There’s always an ambivalence about his films that invites many interpretations, and that’s what’s exciting about any work of art. That was what was distinctively different about the sequel [2010: The Year We Make Contact]. It wasn’t a terrible film, but it was a linear plot. From A to B and resolve in C.

AVC: What drew you to playing more disturbed and dark characters in films like Hoodlum Priest and Bunny Lake Is Missing?

KD: It was really just the luck of the draw, and it was the success of David And Lisa that began to typecast me. I’ve done much more comedy onstage. My second Broadway play was Butterflies Are Free, and I remember laughing out loud the first time I read it. I love doing comedy, and I think that’s why I love the theater too because it allows me the chance to play a greater variety of roles. I do, however, have a cameo role in an upcoming film, The Accidental Husband, where Isabella Rossellini and I play a comical German couple. It’s already been released in England, and did not get good reviews, but my daughter says I’m terrific in it.

AVC: Do you prefer stage acting over film acting?

KD: I’ve received my greatest moments of joy onstage, but that doesn’t mean I look down on film. I’ve been privileged to work with some wonderful directors, and have had some very fulfilling experiences making films. The difference between stage acting and film acting is really a matter of scale. If you’re performing in a large, thousand-seat theater on Broadway, you have to be heard by the person in the last row, and still not come across as overacting for the person in the front row. That’s the challenge of the theater, and that’s what makes it, for me, particularly exciting.

AVC: Will mankind will ever create a real HAL?

KD: [Kubrick] certainly projected the reality of advanced systems in a way that a lot of people couldn’t foresee, and Arthur C. Clarke was a great predictor. We don’t have an intelligent computer quite the way he pictured it yet, but I’m sure we will. It’s only eight years after the year 2001. Even if it didn’t come out for another 25 years, that’s a blink in the eye of eternity.