Chess and Violence: Gary Lockwood on 2001

Gary Lockwood, best known to legions of sci-fi and Stanley Kubrick fans as spaceman Frank Poole in 2001, will be appearing this Saturday and Sunday at the Music Box to both introduce the film and participate in a post-screening Q&A. (The Saturday screening will be part of the 3rd Annual Sci-Fi Spectacular, on Sunday the Music Box will also be screening Kubrick's The Shining).

I was honored and thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with Gary in advance of his local appearances, the transcript follows below.

FACETS: People probably assume when they meet you at conventions that you’re a total sci-fi head.

GARY LOCKWOOD: I’m not a sci-fi fan type unless they are really good films, the genre really doesn’t get me much. I did the pilot for Star Trek (“Where No Man Has Gone Before”), people don’t know that and then they go, “Wow, man, you’re the same guy?" [Gene] Roddenberry was a pal of mine. We had worked together for a year, and one night he had me up to his house for a meal. He was married to this very beautiful, sort-of straight woman who was extremely well-educated. He had a beautiful big home. We were standing out on his porch with drinks and, we were a little drunk, and we’re looking out over the city. So he said “I’ve got this idea about a new show. I want to do something in space, like Wagon Train in space,” it was just conversation. And he said “Hey by the way, I’ve got this character, he’s going to be an alien,” and he gave me a thumbnail sketch of the Spock character. And he says something like, “You’ve worked with a lot of different actors, do you have any thoughts as to who would be good in a character like that?" And I said, “Well, you need a really good actor to do stuff like that.” Even though the characters are rather forthright and obvious, it still takes a good actor to pull that off, a unique kind of strange-looking dude, you know? And he said “Yeah, we’ll make him up with other stuff.” And I said, “There was this guy from New York City we worked with last year, and he played a director in one of our shows. He was a strange-looking dude but he was very good.” And Roddenberry says “Yeah . . .” And I said “Yeah, he had one of those names that the mother gives the kid, a favorite son . . . his name was Leonard,” And Roddenberry says “Oh yeah―Nimoy.”

FACETS: So that came from you!

GL: Yeah, and years later I saw Leonard Nimoy at a Director’s Guild screening or something like that. I said hello to him, he acted like I was dogshit under his feet.

FACETS: Did he know that you were “The Man” (who got him the role)?

GL: I don’t know if he has ever known, but I’ve been out on the road and they’ve said “Leonard’s in the green room,” and I go “Good, hand him a fucking martini,” you know? I’ve never had a word with him since, you know what I mean?

FACETS: That’s a bummer, it’d be cool if he’d acknowledge it.

GL: It doesn’t mean shit to me in my life, what’s it going to change? He doesn’t pay for my sushi.

FACETS: I never connected the dots before, but do you think that being in Star Trek specifically or in part led you to being in 2001?

GL: No, not all. God, no. Not with Kubrick.

FACETS: Is it correct that you were an extra on Spartacus?

GL: Yes, I was a stunt man in those days, and not an extra. I did some extra work but mostly I was a stunt man. I had about a week in the mountains in the beginning above Death Valley. There’s a mountain range where the slaves are, in the mines, before they revolt. I was up in the mountains supposed to do a fight scene and then I appeared one day in the warrior school. But I never did anything, I just was there. They just didn’t get to me, and the next day I went on to a better opportunity.

FACETS: It couldn’t have hurt having that on your resume when he was casting for 2001.

GL: No, no, no…Here’s the thing about Kubrick. With him, I don’t know if a resume is of any value. When he asked me to do the film, my agent came up with a fee and said, “This is what you’ll get, is that cool?” And I said “Is that what we’re paying him?” I would have done the film for nothing. One day in a quiet moment with Stanley, I said “Hey, you know, I was in a movie you made once?” “What?” “Spartacus.” “Oh my god, really?” “Yeah.”

FACETS: I believe you’ve said that on 2001 you don’t remember receiving a word of direction, and that’s why you loved working for Stanley.

GL: I sure did. I really did, yeah. I thought it was great. After the first day or so I said, “This is how I see the part, do you want to change anything?” And he goes “No . . . no, no,” almost like, “That’s your job.” I remember one day I did a scene where my parents are talking to me and I’m just laying there being suntanned. All I’ve got on is a pair of shorts and my parents send up a happy birthday message. And I didn’t do anything but just watch it and then HAL and I exchange some dialogue at the very end. I don’t like to do a lot of takes. Stanley knew that, and he said “Now I’d like to do another one.” So I looked at him and I said “Do you want to fix something?” And he said, “No, but it’s a big setup and takes a lot of time, I just want to get another one. As a matter of fact, I’d like to do it exactly the same, could you do that?” And I said, “Yeah, absolutely!” And then he kind of laughed. Most actors get pissed off when you say something like that. I like actors okay, but I think there’s a side to them . . . that they’re full of shit. So I did it again, and Stanley turned to John Alcott, the cameraman, and he said “Did he do it the same?” Because John was looking through the lens, and he goes, “Absolutely!” Stanley just kind of laughed and he said, “OK, thanks.” That was one of those things I remember.

Here’s the thing about Kubrick. He was a film guy and I try to explain this to people, a lot of people think that directors are people who by and large guide actors. That’s not really very true. I know that this is not going to go over with people who believe the directors are guiding these actors through these roles. 95% of the time the actor knows what’s best, more than the director, as far as performance. On rare occasion, maybe—if you didn’t quite get that angry here, you got more over there—OK. But for the most part, a director’s job is setting camera angles and creating the pace. For a guy like Kubrick who was an absolutely, totally knowledgeable man about the language of film, the camera is a typewriter. His attitude was not to interfere with you very much.

You’ve got to remember, Kubrick was hands-down the smartest guy that was ever in the movie business. A director is like a king on a movie, it’s like owning a small country. Every actor that ever meets me―or anybody that’s related to any job in the movie business, I don’t care if he’s in production or whatever, particularly if he’s younger than I am and he’s come up through some kind film school―trust me, there comes that moment in the conversation: “So, did you like working for Kubrick?” Or “Was Stanley really weird”? There are only two people that get interviewed on 2001, I’m one and Keir Dullea [who played Dave Bowman] is the other, there hasn’t been a question on the planet that hasn’t been put forth. 95% of the time, the leading question is Kubrick.

FACETS: On the DVD commentary track, you mentioned how it was your idea that led to the scene where HAL reads your and Keir's lips and thus finds out that he will likely be disconnected.

GL: It was pretty much my idea, so I’m proud of it.

FACETS: You were saying that you had felt the type of things that you and Keir were in the midst of shooting which would supposedly, ultimately send HAL haywire were too tame and too subtle, you felt strongly that the situation called for something more dramatic.

GL: I became a little bit upset as you probably had gathered, and I had never been upset with Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick—two geniuses—and here’s some little schmuck actor getting upset. You know how you feel, like the whole project is on this supreme level, and it was just my instinct that said “this direction that we’re going in now is not the right one.” I’m not trying to sound like some brilliant guy, it’s just an actor’s instinct. When I had said something negative about what we were doing, Kubrick wrapped the set that day and he brought me to his room. I thought I was going to be fired!

FACETS: Instead he poured you a drink, right?

GL (laughing): He poured me a drink and he put on some Chopin. He said, “You go home and figure it out,” or something. I called him back and he sent a car for me real late at night.

The lip-reading sequence was really a great idea even though it was pretty much my whole thing. The idea of us going in the pod, and then two actors talking about a third party―in this case, HAL―we were free to talk about disconnection, time-lag differential . . .I always looked upon that scene as an opportunity for Stanley and Arthur―more Stanley, really, than Arthur―to make it the dustbin of whatever information was lacking with the audience.

FACETS: So ultimately it seems like you And Kubrick were pretty much on the same page.

GL: Yeah, pretty much all the time. He would sometimes send me to other sets and then ask my feedback about things. One day before we shot the space pod scene where we both get in the pod, he sent me over to the stage where they had a pod and he said, “I don’t want it to be awkward when you guys have to get in and out of the pod. Could you go over there and figure out what’s the smoothest way to get in and out?” So I went over there with one of the prop guys. I looked at the pod and I’m a physical kind of guy anyway, so I said “This is the most expedient way to do it, only we can’t do it that way.” And so I said to the guy, “If you were to build a bar just inside the top of the entryway, you could paint it black like the inside of the pod and you’ll never see it. And then what we do is go up these steps and then we reach and we grab this bar and we walk our way in and then we go to the right or the left.” And I said, “That’s the only way to do it so that it’s not awkward.” I went back to the set an hour and a half later and Stanley said, “What did you think?” And I said, “I told the guy to build this bar and we can grab it, it’ll be one constant beautiful movement, it won’t be a jerky, duck-your-head kind of thing, but it’s got to be OK by you. I don’t think you’ll ever see it. You certainly don’t have to see it when you do a reverse, you could certainly eliminate it, but from the other angle you’ll never see it. It’s up inside the entrance to the pod.” And he liked that. He was a guy who appreciated that kind of thing.

FACETS: So what was your reaction the first time you saw the finished film?

GL: Well, I had seen so many pieces over a period of years because I had lived in London and would sometimes have a meal with Stanley. Sometimes on Friday afternoons I would watch rushes with him. Because I was an artist as a kid, and I had a visual-graphic kind of mind, we would sometimes watch the rushes together, and he would actually say, “What do you think?” There were so many images that we had photographed that were so brilliant and so unbelievably artful and so far-out. Just lens selections and things of that nature and I’d look at it and I’d just go “Oh my god!” And so in my head, I thought I knew pretty much what the big picture would look like, within reason. When I saw it for the first time all put together it was much straighter than I thought, you see what I’m saying? Less abstract.

FACETS: Which is saying a lot!

GL: Yeah, well, the whole world thought it was the most far-out thing that ever walked. Storywise, the thing I think people forget about 2001, because it was so expertly made, those who like it really “buy in,” do you know what I’m saying? They buy that he’s really out there in Jupiter when he’s on Stage 28 in Pinewood. They’re looking and they’re watching and everything that they see is so beautifully done.

So at one point a year or two later, I had a moment with Stanley and I said, “You know, you chose to really eliminate a lot of unbelievable shots.” And he said, “I understand, but I began to realize that the more I could stay in a very direct, straightforward story direction, I had a better chance of zapping people in the head.” So he stayed away from abstract visuals. Because you can take camera lenses and create all kinds of magic with them just by their position.

FACETS: I’m sure there are a lot of amazing outtakes from the whole Jupiter sequence, for example, it could have just gone on forever.

GL: Absolutely. The outtakes of that movie, they’re all gone, but my god . . .It’s sad in a way that Stanley protected his films so much because there are outtakes that would last throughout history, absolutely beautiful imagery. My favorite scene in the whole movie is when Keir disconnects HAL.

FACETS: I believe Keir made a comparison to Of Mice and Men, right, when George shoots Lenny?

GL: Keir Dullea is a guy who does things like that, he works in the theater and he’s kind of an actor type, so he always gives you that. I’m more into design and architecture, I don’t have the actor’s point of view all that often. I’m looking at that disconnection scene and I’m looking at the little plastic things coming up and what a beautiful idea that was, and the speed in which they’re moving, and Keir almost looks like he’s having sex, you know? He’s disgruntled and his eyes are popping out of his head, and HAL is slowly degenerating and the dialogue is adjusting. Man, if it ever gets more brilliant than that movie, then I want to see it.

FACETS: When was the last time you talked to Stanley?

GL: A couple of years before he died, I just talked to him one day. Just shooting the breeze, mostly about football, he was a big football fan.

FACETS: I heard the stories about how he’d have tapes of NFL games sent over to him―

GL: Tapes, are you kidding? Listen, Stanley and I, on Tuesday nights during football season, I would go out to his house and his servant would prepare a beautiful meal. He had two 35mm projectors in a projection room built into his home, and I’d watch the NFL game of the week that he got sent to him from New York. I guess he was friends with Ed Sabol [founder and president of NFL Films] or something, I don’t know. They’d make this game of the week film and we’d watch it in 35mm and because I was a quarterback, he would stop the film. He’d say to his chauffeur, “Eddie, stop that,” and he’d ask me something. He really enjoyed football. He asked me one day why I thought the game was so great and I said, “Well, it’s kind of like a combination of chess and violence.”

―Dan Mucha