The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

This book by Piers Bizony, The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, published by Taschen in collaboration with the Kubrick Estate and Warner Bros., is part of the Darwin Bookshop because it opens the control panels and celestial machinery behind one of cinema’s most enigmatic masterpieces. More than a behind-the-scenes account, this is a deep-space excavation — gathering production stills, annotated script pages, concept art, correspondence, and technical drawings to trace how Kubrick’s obsessive vision reshaped the future of film.

With its long, horizontal format echoing the visual grammar of widescreen cinema, the book itself feels like an artifact from the spacecraft Discovery One. Inside, readers encounter the brutalist poetry of HAL 9000, the silent theatre of spacewalks, and the prehistoric violence of bones turned tools. It shows how analog effects were used to build an image of the digital unknown — a film made without computers that defined how artificial intelligence and cosmic scale would look on screen. Kubrick’s project was part science fiction, part philosophical riddle, and this book gives access to the machinery behind its myth. A definitive volume for readers tracking the evolution of cinematic language through design, vision, and control.

Technical Sheet

Title: The Making of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey
Artist / Author: Piers Bizony
Date: n.d.
Technique / Printing Method: Offset printing
Medium / Materials: Hardcover
Dimensions: 16.9 x 37.6 cm
Pages: 528
Publisher / Editor: Taschen
ISBN: 978-3-8365-8437-1
Language: English
Condition: New