Rain’s accent isn’t mid-Atlantic at all it’s Standard Canadian English.Īs 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. 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. Rain remembers fondly: “If you could have been a ghost at the recording you would have thought it was a load of rubbish.” Kubrick finally decided against using narration, opting for the ambiguity that was enraging to some viewers, transcendent to others. Rain hadn’t even been hired to play HAL, but to provide narration. 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. He met none of his co-stars, not even Keir Dullea, who played the astronaut David Bowman, HAL’s colleague turned nemesis. The actor hadn’t seen a frame of the film, then still deep in postproduction. It was determined during ‘2001’ planning that in the future the large majority of computer command and communication inputs would be via voice, rather than via typewriter.” The “2001” historian David Larson said that “Kubrick came up with the final HAL voice very late in the process. So how was this particular creature created? We wanted to stimulate people to think what it would be like to share a planet with such creatures.” 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. “When I listen to something like Siri I feel there is a lot in common.”Įven when Kubrick was making the film, the director sensed HAL’s larger implications. Brave said, adding that he saw a ripple effect on, for example, the iPhone’s virtual assistant. “He has a sense of deference and of detachment,” Mr. To Scott Brave, the co-author of “ Wired for Speech: How Voice Activates and Advances the Human-Computer Relationship,” HAL 9000 is a mix between a butler and a psychoanalyst. incursions into all aspects of our lives, HAL has been lurking. As we warily eye a future utterly transformed by A.I. 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 HAL has become the default reference, not just for the voice, but also for the humanesque qualities of what a sentient machine’s personality should be.

Hal 9000 a space odyssey