2001: A Space Odyssey’ set the tone for how A.I. sounds 50 years later
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“I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Even if you’ve never seen the movie, you know the voice.
HAL 9000, the seemingly omniscient computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” was the film’s most expressive and emotional figure, and made a lasting impression on our collective imagination.
Stanley Kubrick’s epic, a journey from pre-human history to a possible infinity that doesn’t need humans at all, is probably the most respected, if not the most beloved, science-fiction film of all time.
The story of the creation of HAL’s performance ? the result of a last-minute collaboration between the idiosyncratic director Stanley Kubrick and the veteran Canadian actor Douglas Rain ? has been somewhat lost in the 50 years since the film opened on April 3, 1968. As has its impact: Artificial intelligence has borrowed from the HAL persona, and now, unwittingly, a slight hint of Canadianness resides in our phones and interactive devices.
Mr. Rain’s HAL has become the default reference, not just for the voice, but also for the humanlike qualities of what a sentient machine’s personality should be.
Just ask Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home ? the cadence, the friendly formality, the pleasant intelligence and sense of calm control in their voices evoke Mr. Rain’s unforgettable performance. As we warily eye a future utterly transformed by A.I. incursions into all aspects of our lives, HAL has been lurking.
To Scott Brave, the co-author of “Wired Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship,” HAL 9000 is a mix between a butler and a psychoanalyst. “He has a sense of deference and of detachment,” Mr. Brave said, adding that he saw a ripple effect on, for example, the iPhone’s virtual assistant. “When I listen to something like Siri, I feel there is a lot in common.”
Even when Kubrick was making the film, the director sensed HAL’s larger implications. He said in a 1969 interview with the author and critic Joseph Gelmis that one of the things he was trying to convey was “the reality of a world populated ? as ours soon will be ? by machine entities that have as much, or more, intelligence as human beings. We wanted to stimulate people to think what it would be like to share a planet with such creatures.”
So how was this particular creature created?
The “2001” historian David Larson said that “Kubrick came up with the final HAL voice very late in the process. It was determined ‘2001’ planning that in the future, the large majority of computer command and communication inputs would be via voice, rather than via typewriter.”
To play HAL, Kubrick settled on Martin Balsam, who had won the best supporting actor Oscar for “A Thousand Clowns.” Perhaps there was satisfying echo that appealed to Kubrick ? both were from the Bronx and sounded like it.
Adam Balsam, the actor’s son, told me that “Kubrick had him record it very realistically and humanly, complete with crying during the scene when HAL’s memory is being removed.”
Then the director changed his mind.
“We had some difficulty deciding exactly what HAL should sound like, and Marty just sounded a little bit colloquially American,” Kubrick said in the 1969 interview. Mr. Rain recalled Kubrick telling him, “I’m having trouble with what I’ve got in the can. Would you play the computer?
Kubrick had heard Mr. Rain’s voice in the 1960 documentary “Universe,” a film he watched at least 95 times, according to the actor. “I think he’s perfect,” Kubrick wrote to a colleague in a letter preserved in the director’s archive. “The voice is neither patronizing, nor is it intimidating, nor is it pompous, overly dramatic or actorish. Despite this, it is interesting.”
In December 1967, Kubrick and Mr. Rain met at a recording studio at the MGM lot in Borehamwood, outside London.
The actor hadn’t seen a frame of the film, then still deep in postproduction. He met none of his co-star, not even Keir Dullea, who played the astronaut David Bowman, HAL’s colleague turned nemesis. The cast members had long since completed their work, getting HAL’s lines fed to them by a range of people, including the actress Stefanie Powers. Mr. Rain hadn’t even been hired to play HAL, but to provide narration. Kubrick finally decided against using narration, opting for the ambiguity that was enraging to some viewers, transcendent to others.
It’s not a session Mr. Rain remembers fondly: “If you could have been a ghost at the recording, you would have thought it was a load of rubbish.”
Kubrick was attracted to Mr. Rain for the role partly because the actor “had the kind of bland mid-Atlantic accent we felt was right for the part,” he said in the 1969 interview with Mr. Gelmis. But Mr. Rain’s accent isn’t mid-Atlantic at all; it’s Standard Canadian English.
As the University of Toronto linguistics professor Jack Chambers explained: “You have to have a computer that sounds like he’s from nowhere, or, rather, from no specific place. Standard Canadian English sounds ‘normal’ ? that’s why Canadians are well received in the United States as anchormen and reporters, because the vowels don’t give away the region they come from.”
Mr. Rain has played an astonishing range of characters in almost 80 productions at the Stanford Festival in Ontario over 45 years, understudying Alec Guinness in “Richard III” in 1953 and going on to play Macbeth, King Lear and Humpty Dumpty. Sexy, intimidating, folksy, sly or persuasive, he could deliver whatever a role needed.
Mr. Rain had to quickly fathom and flesh out HAL, recording all of his lines in 10 hours over two days. Kubrick sat “three feet away, explaining the scenes to me and reading all the parts.”
Kubrick, according to the transcript of the session in his archive at the University of the Arts London, gave Mr. Rain only a few notes of direction, including: “Sound a little more like it’s a peculiar request”; “A little more concerned”; “Just try it closer and more depressed.”
When HAL says, “I know I’ve made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you may complete assurance that my work will be back to normal,” Mr. Rain somehow manages to sound both sincere and not reassuring. And his delivery of the line “I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do” has the sarcastic drip of a drawing-room melodrama and also carries the disinterested vibe of a polite sociopath.
Kubrick had Mr. Rain sing the1892 love song “Daisy Bell” (“I’m half crazy, all for the love of you”) almost 50 times, in uneven tempos, in monotone, at different pitches and even just by humming it. In the end, he used the very first take. Sung as HAL’s brain is being disconnected, it’s from his early programming days, his computer childhood. It brings to an end the most affecting scene in the entire film.
Scott Brave said the moment “is so powerful that you feel very uncomfortable; and of sudden, HAL feels incredibly close to being alive and being human. You start to empathize with that experience, and you are responding to the death of a machine.”
For a character that’s been endlessly caricatured ? in “The Simpsons,” “South Park,” television commercials ? HAL has inspired a surprisingly rich range of adjectives over the years. He and his voice have been described as aloof, eerily neutral, silky, wheedling, controlled, baleful, unisex, droll, soft, conversational, dreamy, supremely calm and rational. He’s discursive, suave, inhumanly cool, confident, superior, deadpan, sinister, patronizing and asexual.
Anthony Hopkins has said it influenced his performance as the serial killer Hannibal Lecter in “The Silence of the Lambs.” Douglas Rain himself has never seen “2001: A Space Odyssey.” For the retired actor, who will turn 90 in May, the performance was simply a job.
A.I. voice synthesis can’t yet deliver a performance as compelling as his HAL, but it is becoming more….human. The HAL era is almost over: Soon, an A.I. voice will be able to sound like whoever you want it to. In Canada, even Alexa has a Canadian accent.
