When most people think of Tom Hanks, they think of many of the great film classics - Forrest Gump, Cast Away, Big, Toy Story - the kind of feel-good favourites that reappear on holiday TV schedules or rainy Sunday afternoons.
Hanks has built a career out of being cinema's good guy, but when it comes to his own favourite film, the two-time Oscar winner opts for a slightly different direction.
"I've seen it about 120 times, or something like that," he told Collider in 2012, when discussing Stanley Kubrick's 1968 science-fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, and adding it to a shortlist of all-time favourites that also includes Fargo and The Best Years of Our Lives.
At 149 minutes and with lengthy stretches of minimal dialogue, 2001 is a slow, intelligent feature
And that's what Hanks sees as its selling point: "Audiences crave something they've never seen before. They want to be dazzled... and 2001: A Space Odyssey played in theatres for four and a half years. Now it's the classic that it is, for all time."
Although an American film due to its U.S. setting and financing, 2001 was primarily shot in Britain.
Principal photography started in late 1965 at Shepperton Studios, followed by extensive work at MGM-British Studios in Borehamwood.
Hanks also expressed his admiration for 2001: A Space Odyssey in a 2023 interview with The Guardian, where he recalled the first time he saw it: "It blew the back of my head off. It was a Sunday, it was kind of rainy and it was cold. It was the day the Oakland Raiders beat the Kansas City Chiefs, November of 1968."
He frequently talks about the film's impact and even referenced it during the promotion of his own sci-fi venture, Cloud Atlas (2012).
Discussing the Wachowskis' expansive, time-travelling epic, Hanks alluded to the legacy of Kubrick's most enigmatic film: "Lana [Wachowski] said: 'I want to take something as important, as groundbreaking, and as new and scary as Moby-Dick was the day it was published - and 2001: A Space Odyssey...'"
Kubrick's 1968 film is widely considered one of the most significant science fiction films in cinema history.
Co-authored with British writer Arthur C. Clarke, 2001 follows a loose narrative about human evolution, artificial intelligence, and space travel, starting with prehistoric apes who undergo an evolutionary leap after encountering a monolith.
It then leaps to 2001, where astronauts find another monolith on the Moon, propelling them on a mission to Jupiter with the assistance - and obstruction - of the HAL 9000 supercomputer.
Despite its initially divisive reception in 1968, 2001 has become a cultural landmark in its own right. It received four Academy Award nominations and secured one - Best Visual Effects, the sole Oscar Kubrick would ever win.
"Marketing people don't want to hear that," Hanks joked about 2001's cerebral approach. "They want to hear, 'This is a story about a guy who's trying to get laid, and he can't do it until he meets the cheerleader.'"
