2001: A Space Odyssey (Trailer )

2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 science fiction film directed by Stanley Kubrick, written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke. The film deals with themes of human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence, and extraterrestrial life, and is notable for its scientific realism, pioneering special effects, and provocatively ambiguous imagery and sound in place of traditional narrative techniques.
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Writing of 2001: Shortly after completing Dr Strangelove (1964), Stanley Kubrick evinced a fascination with the possibility of extraterrestrial life, determining to make "the proverbial good science fiction movie". Researching for a suitable collaborator in the SF community, Kubrick was advised to seek out Arthur C. Clarke by a mutual aquaintance, Columbia Pictures staffer Roger Caras. Although convinced Clarke was "a recluse, a nut who lives in a tree", Kubrick agreed to Caras cabling the Ceylon-based author with the film proposal. Clarke responded that he was "frightfully interested in working with enfant terrible", adding "what makes Kubrick think I’m a recluse?".

In early conversations, Kubrick and Clarke jokingly called their project How the Solar System Was Won, an allusion to the 1962 Cinerama epic How the West Was Won. Like How the West Was Won, the Kubrick production would be divided into distinct episodes. Clarke considered a number of his stories before selecting "The Sentinel", published in 1950, as the starting point for the film. The collaborators originally envisaged that the final writing credits would be "Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, based on a novel by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick", to reflect their pre-eminence in their respective fields. They planned to develop a novel first, free of the constraints of a normal script, and then to write the screenplay. However filmic ideas required for a final script developed parallel to the novel, with cross-fertilisation between the two. Clarke wrote later that credit for the screenplay to "Kubrick and Clarke", and for the novel to "Clarke and Kubrick", would be "the nearest approximation to the complicated truth". In the end the screenplay credits would be shared while the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, released shortly after the film, would be attributed to Clarke alone. (From Wikipedia)