Remember when Stanley Kubrick chained a drugged leopard to a rotting horse?

For 2001's 58th anniversary, we look back at a wild interview with SFX supervisor Douglas Trumbull, including a wild story about a dead, painted horse Nearly six decades after its wide release on April 3, 1968, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is hailed as a classic and a watershed moment for science fiction cinema: “one of the most influential films ever made,” film scholar Howard Suber called it in his essay for the film’s Criterion Collection release. But great things sometimes come from remarkably rough beginnings. A 1978 interview with Douglas Trumbull, the film’s visual effects supervisor, available on The Internet Archive, has some remarkable behind-the-scenes stories about the original draft and the shooting process, including how Kubrick rigged one of the movie’s most infamous shots. For context, it’s helpful to know that Trumbull was a groundbreaking effects artist whose striking short film, To the Moon and Beyond, shown at the 1964 World’s Fair, caught Kubrick’s attention and led to Trumbull spearheading the effects sequences for 2001. He went on to handle effects for Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, in additio

Apr 3, 2026 → Apr 3, 2026