HAL then killed the crew in self-defense, or perhaps murder with aggravated circumstances, depending on your perspective.
However, this one error led to Dave and Frank thinking that HAL was untrustworthy and needed to be disconnected. In this reading, this is the only true malfunction HAL has throughout the film. Regardless, Rain's voice was perfect for the eerily calm AI.Īnother, slightly more complex version of this idea was that HAL had a different, much smaller glitch when he reported to Dave that there was a problem with the ship's antenna. And in his case, that was Canada. Perhaps this common perception that Canadian accents are difficult to place for Americans is why they manage to get work so often as news anchors in the United States. Yet it turns out that Rain, like everyone, did come from a specific place. He was initially considering using Rain as the narrator for the 2001: A Space Odyssey, but once he decided to not include any narration in the film, Kubrick realized that Rain's eerily calm delivery and difficult to place ' bland mid-Atlantic accent' were exactly what he was looking for in a voice for HAL. In the end, Kubrick settled on Douglas Rain, who had previously narrated a 1960 documentary called Universe, which Kubrick apparently liked a great deal. To find a new HAL, Kubrick sent out set assistant Benn Reyes to find an actor with a voice that would be 'neither patronizing, nor is it intimidating, nor is it pompous, overly dramatic or actorish.
