I remember seeing the monster in Little Shop of Horrors and being suitably impressed there too. Later I met Bran Ferren at Disney, who was responsible for it. He said yes it was difficult -- not the engineering, but giving complicated instructions to forty people simultaneously pulling levers and ropes to control the monster!

Stork: What else about working with them?

Minsky: I remember showing Kubrick superballs, before they had been sold in England. You know, those fantastic rubber balls that bounced so high. He loved them, and bounced them all over the halls.

As you know, Kubrick's initial alien artifact was a clear tetrahedron. But when he showed it to people, they all said, "what's that?" After all, it isn't a pyramid, or cube. Stanley was so upset that he dropped the tetrahedrons, though in the Stargate section of the film they appear briefly.

Stork: But wasn't this about the time of Buckminster Fuller, geodesic domes, the cult of the carbon bond, and so on?

Minsky: To an extent. Nevertheless, in the general public, a tetrahedron was somewhat foreign. Thus, instead, of course, Kubrick decided on the famous black monolith.

Stork: So, you said before that you didn't know what the final film would be like.

Minsky: Right. I remember sitting with Carl Sagan at the Boston opening of 2001 and thinking that it was the most awesome film I'd ever seen.

Stork: Why?

Minsky: Everything! I especially liked the putting down of the humans. All that boring dialogue and the dumb staff meetings, meetings to "beef up morale"! And after the momentous statement that the monolith must have been deliberately buried, one of the moon astronauts says "Well, how about a little coffee?" I always thought that it was Kubrick's idea that the universe was too majestic for short-sighted people. Of course, HAL stole the show.

Stork: In virtually all of Clarke's writing he comes across as an optimist, whereas all of Kubrick's films show a dark pessimism. Did you sense this interplay in 2001?

Minsky: Certainly, though I never tried to identify which scene was due to which author. Clearly, though, the last scene is due to Clarke, based on his story "Childhood's End." Nevertheless, I think both are quite mystical, in a way. Kubrick's vision seemed to be that humans are doomed, whereas Clarke's is that humans are moving on to a better stage of evolution.

Stork: Did you see the screenplay beforehand?

Minsky: No. I had no detailed idea, really, what the film would be about.

Stork: In fact, most of the actors, and even some of the principals didn't know what the film was about, specifically. Douglas Rain, the Canadian actor who was the voice of HAL, did all his recording in a weekend, not really knowing how it fit in. Keir Dullea -- playing David in the pod during the Stargate scene -- was told to "look amazed" and had no idea what the final film would show.

Minsky: I heard that the same thing occurred in a scene in Alien, where the creature pops out of the chest of a crewman. The other actors didn't know what was to happen; the director wanted to get true surprise.

I was on the ferris wheel set in Borehamwood, England, just before it was done. It was a technical marvel, made at some unheard-of expense. The basic idea was that the ferris wheel (along with the camera attached to it) would rotate. The actor would always be at the bottom, running like a mouse in a treadmill. In the final footage, the viewer naturally assumes that the camera is still and it is the actor who runs around the circular room. Very clever.

For the scenes in which the camera follows the actor as he runs "around the walls," filming was trickier. Here the camera also stayed near the bottom of the treadmill, supported by a thin metal plate that slipped through the black cracks between the floorboards, all the way around the circumference. It was quite a set, and difficult and unpleasant for the actors -- they could only stay in the set for about eight minutes.

Well, the set had lots of difficulties. For one thing, the stage crew occasionally left tools or lightbulbs on the set. Then, when it started rotating, the bulbs would fall free and pop on the ground.

Once when I was standing at the base, they started rotating the set and a big, heavy wrench fell down from the 12 o'clock position of the set, and got buried in the ground a few feet from me. I could have been killed! Kubrick was livid and quite shaken and fired a stagehand on the spot.