With just ten minutes of air to mitigate the CO2 buildup in the first place, they were operating at the outer limits of Weston's endurance. This, in turn, required that after the stuntman's release from his platform, and after the inevitable discussion down below, the camera still had to be moved back into position. Added to this, ever since Hannan's injury, Kubrick had checked the camera frame only from off to the side, "because he was still terrified of something dropping on him," remembered Weston. It took almost five minutes to move his launch tower out of the shot and that much time to bring it back. If he did it twice, it was an emergency, and he needed to be recovered immediately. When Weston started to get groggy from the CO2, "I was doing the alphabet backward, and as long as I could do it, I guessed I was okay." He'd arranged a signaling system with Dunning's wire man: if he extended his arms directly outward in a crucifix shape, he was near his limit and should be brought in very soon. In view of the perilous circumstances, he'd worked out his own way of mitigating the risks. Weston had only those ten minutes of air siphoning into the helmet, with the exhaled carbon dioxide building up the whole time. Though Kubrick and Cracknell could use megaphones to issue orders from below, there was no real communication between the stuntman and the ground. So it simply built up inside, incrementally causing a heightened heart rate, rapid breathing, fatigue, clumsiness, and eventually, unconsciousness. And there was another problem: even when the tank was feeding air into the suit, there was no place for the carbon dioxide Weston exhaled to go. Given the complexity of the shots, and the amount of time it took simply to remove the platform used to prepare the stuntman's wires and suspend him, ten minutes wasn't enough. While he did have a small tank of compressed air stashed in his backpack, it contained only ten minutes' worth-and this was unregulated, simply feeding into his helmet via a tube until empty. Kubrick's intransigence meant Weston's space suit was hermetically sealed. The director also insisted that Weston wear his Bowman wig in the sweaty, overheated environment of the suit-a directive the stuntman soon evaded by discreetly flipping the thing into a corner of his high launch platform. When Weston countered by proposing that the air holes he was suggesting could be screened by black gauze, which should have taken care of any possible light leakage, Kubrick still refused. He was worried that light might leak through and be visible through the visor. In his ceaseless drive for realism, Kubrick had turned down the suggestion that air holes be punched into the back of Weston's helmet. He'd also spent hours hanging at odd angles in the overheated HAL Brain Room for shots where Dullea's face didn't need to be visible through his helmet. Prior to his space walks above Stage 4, he'd been outfitted with a salt-and-pepper wig and doubled for Keir Dullea in the emergency air lock scene. Then twenty-five, he'd become a stuntman after "some freelance soldiering in Africa." He'd done a number of films prior to "2001," but nothing remotely as ambitious as this. (Image credit: Courtesy Doug Trumbull)Ī square-jawed, striking presence who looked not unlike the young Clint Eastwood, Weston was over six feet tall and had been brought up in India under British colonialism. Kubrick explains the god-like entities chose the famous bedroom (which he says is an “inaccurate replica of French architecture”) because “they had some idea of something that might think was pretty, but wasn’t quite sure.” Kubrick compares the bedroom in “2001” to the spaces where animals live at the zoo that “we think is their natural environment.Bill Weston launching from a platform 30 feet above the concrete studio floor. It just seems to happen as it does in the film.” “2001: A Space Odyssey” MGM/Stanley Kubrick Productions/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock They put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him, and his whole life passes from that point on in that room. “When you just say the ideas they sound foolish, whereas if they’re dramatized one feels it, but I’ll try. The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by god-like entities, creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form. “I’ve tried to avoid doing this ever since the picture came out,” Kubrick says. Strangelove’ Stage Adaptation from Armando Iannucci
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