Getting help from the pros

Kubrick wanted scientific credibility for 2001: A Space Odyssey, and so he hired NASA designers Harry Lange and Frederick Ordway to develop spacecraft interiors, mission hardware and futuristic technologies.

Ordway recalled: “Kubrick wanted to make certain that every special-effects shot would be completely convincing, yielding a realism never before accomplished in motion pictures.”

Yet Kubrick began filming without knowing how to depict aliens - so he consulted astrophysicist Carl Sagan, who warned him against showing humanoid life.

Sagan wrote in The Cosmic Connection: “Any explicit representation of extraterrestrials was bound to have an element of falseness … better to suggest than to show.”

Kubrick ultimately followed that advice.