"It’s like a monolith to me, that movie. Every time it’s re-shown in theaters, I always go. Star Wars was a big hit in 1977 which created a big sci-fi boom. So 2001 came to Japan, and I saw it in theaters when I was in middle school. Before experiencing that, I was just listening to radio dramas. I read the original novel, but the movie was totally different. I didn’t really understand it the first time. Now, I have a different interpretation every time I watch it. As a creator, I have periods of difficult times, but whenever I feel particularly in need of a pick-me-up, I watch 2001. It’s a perfect movie for me. It was a real space experience. Exploration even before man went to the moon. I always wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid, but Japan doesn’t have NASA. You had to go either to USSR or China. Although I felt like I had to give up on the dream of becoming an astronaut, when I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, I felt like I really went to outer space. It’s a life-changing movie because it made me feel like I accomplished a dream."

"I kind of briefly threw The Shining out there, so that gets its own due, which means I can fall back on 2001, I suppose? I think that film speaks for itself, if I could explain that film to you, then I’d be… I don’t know what I’d be, one in ten who could explain it to you, but there was a followup called 2010 with Roy Scheider, which wasn’t a great film, but if it did anything, it helped explain 2001 a little bit, but 2001… I remember my father took me to see that in the theater, and that was so awe inspiring, and just to see where the imagination and creativity could go on screen as an 11-year-old kid, or however old I was. And to have seen that film over and over and over again and ask new questions every time I do, it’s been a pretty profound staple in my house for years. Then you get into all the conspiracy stuff. You attach the lunar landing — Kubrick shot the lunar landing stuff in it, and the rear screen projection that was used in the space scenes and in the ape scenes in the beginning, and how conspiracy theorists surmise that that’s what he used to shoot the moon landing. Did you hear all that? The theory is that NASA got a hold of the footage from 2001, saw it, and got Stanley Kubrick to shoot all the moon landing stuff in his studio and broadcast it across the country. Now, they’re not saying that we didn’t go to the moon, they’re saying that what the people in America saw was shot in a studio, because at that time we didn’t want to broadcast to the world what we may or may not have found on the moon — which actually makes more sense then it just being… It’s not, “We didn’t go.” We went. But we didn’t want the Russians to see, or we didn’t want Japan to see, or China to see what we’re discovering, you know? In case there’s anything there, or anything that we could weaponize, so Kubrick shot all this stuff in a sound stage, and that was the agreement. That’s why NASA gave Kubrick a super, super special space lens that he used for Barry Lyndon, because Barry Lyndon wasn’t shot with any lights. It was all natural light… candles, or sunlight, or whatever, so he used the lens, and that’s what allowed the light to get in for the film process, but there’s so many layers to the Kubrick stuff and I just, as a conspiracy theory fan, I like to have that in the back of my brain while I’m watching those films."