It’s not at all surprising that Stanley Kubrick was an early adopter of home audio recorders and had scads of them back during the 1960s. Last year, I posted two items from the New Yorker of that era (here and here) in which Jeremy Bernstein visited the director during the long gestation of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Via Open Culture, here’s a 1966 audio recording from those interview sessions that were made not by the journalist, who didn’t even work with a tape machine at that point, but by the auteur.

From Bernstein’s notes about how he came to know fellow chess enthusiast Kubrick:

“I met Kubrick soon after Dr. Strangelove opened in 1964. I had just started writing for the New Yorker when its editor William Shawn asked me if I would consider a piece about science fiction. I never much liked science fiction but said I would look into it. My friend and colleague Gerald Feinberg, a physics professor at Columbia and a great science fiction fan, recommended Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke was not very well known then, but I set about reading everything he had written and found that I liked it a great deal. I wrote an enthusiastic article, and soon after it appeared I got a note from Clarke saying he was coming to New York from Ceylon (as it then was), where he lived, and would like to have lunch. In the course of lunch I asked him what he was doing. He said he was working with Kubrick on a ‘son of Strangelove.‘ I had no idea what he was talking about, but he said he would introduce me to Kubrick. So we went to Kubrick’s large apartment on Central Park West. I had never met a film director and had no idea what to expect. When I first saw Kubrick and the apartment, I said to myself: ‘He is one of ours.’ What I meant was that he looked and acted like almost every eccentric physicist I had ever known. The apartment was in chaos. Children and dogs were running all over the place. Papers hid most of the furniture. He said that he and Clarke were doing a science fiction film, an odyssey, a space odyssey. It didn’t have a title.

When I looked at my watch and saw that I had to go, Kubrick asked me why. I explained that I had a date to play chess for money in Washington Square Park, with a Haitian chess hustler named Duval who called himself ‘the master.’ I was absolutely floored when Kubrick said: ‘Duval is a potzer.’ It showed a level of real familiarity with the Washington Square Park chess scene. He and I ought to play, he said, and indeed we did – during the entire filming of 2001: A Space Odyssey.”