Steven Soderbergh Recut '2001: A Space Odyssey' and Shaved Over an Hour Off Kubrick's Classic
Steven Soderbergh may be retired from directing his own feature films, but he’s still actively re-working some old classics.
The Oscar-winning filmmaker uploaded to his personal website his own recut of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the latest in a series of personal edits that include Psycho, Heaven’s Gate, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. All of the cuts are credited to “Mary Ann Bernard” — the same pseudonym Soderbergh uses while editing some of his own film and TV projects.
“Maybe this is what happens when you spend too much time with a movie: you start thinking about it when it’s not around, and then you start wanting to touch it,” Soderbergh wrote on his site. “I’ve been watching 2001: A Space Odyssey regularly for four decades, but it wasn’t until a few years ago I started thinking about touching it, and then over the holidays I decided to make my move.”
Soderbergh pares down the massive two hour, 40-minute sci-fi masterpiece to a more austere one hour and 50 minutes, and rearranges some of its iconic score.
The Oscar winner, who recently made the jump to television with his Cinemax period drama The Knick, also said that unlike some film devotees, the meticulous Kubrick would have made use of new digital filmmaking technology.
"I believe SK would have embraced the current crop of digital cameras, because from a visual standpoint, he was obsessed with two things: absolute fidelity to reality-based light sources, and image stabilization,” Soderbergh explained. “Regarding the former, the increased sensitivity without resolution loss allows us to really capture the world as it is, and regarding the latter, post-2001 SK generally shot matte perf film (normally reserved for effects shots, because of its added steadiness) all day, every day, something which digital capture makes moot. pile on things like never being distracted by weaving, splices, dirt, scratches, bad lab matches during changeovers, changeovers themselves, bad framing and focus exacerbated by projector vibration, and you can see why i think he might dig digital.”
You can watch Soderbergh’s edit on his site.
