How Stanley Kubrick and Douglas Rain found the voice of Hal 9000, and accidentally invented Siri

Douglas Rain, who voiced Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, died on November 11
Douglas Rain, who voiced Hal 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, died on November 11

It’s a tone of voice that can be heard everywhere, from Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa to the sat-nav on your dashboard. “I’m sorry, I can’t do that.” Calm and polite, friendly but impersonal, it’s the sound of artificial intelligence in the 21st century – and, to fans of 2001: A Space Odyssey, it’s very creepy indeed.

Hal 9000, the murderous computer in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi classic, set the template for how we expect our “smart” devices to sound. Quote lines from the movie to Siri or Alexa, and they’ll crack self-deprecating jokes about it.

The actor who created that eerie intonation, Douglas Rain, died in November 2018, aged 90. He never watched the film that gave him his most famous role, but he delivered a timeless performance; the faceless Hal is, ironically, the film’s most human character. But it almost didn’t happen. Had things gone slightly differently, Hal could have had the voice of the Duke of Norfolk, the detective from Psycho or even Barbra Streisand.

While writing the script together, Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke originally imagined a computer called “Athena” with a female voice. IBM designer Eliot Noyes, who worked on the film, sketched out an idea of what “Athena” would have looked like in illustrations preserved at the Museum of Computer History. In the early production notes, Athena speaks in clipped sentences – "report all changes status this malfunction” – that sound more like telegrams than Hal’s relaxed, conversational lines.

At one point Kubrick made a note to himself about “possible use of recorded voices for later on in the picture for suitable purposes: Joan Baez, Barbara [sic] Streisand, Marianne Faithfull”. It’s unlikely, but not inconceivable, that Athena’s dialogue could have been collaged together from these famous female voices. In rehearsals, Hal’s lines were read by Hart to Hart star Stefanie Powers.

Douglas Rain as Henry V (1966, Stratford, Ontario)
Douglas Rain as Henry V (1966, Stratford, Ontario) Credit: Peter Smith/The Stratford Festival

In the end, the director opted for a male voice. During filming, Hal’s lines were read by the British actor Nigel Davenport (best known for playing Norfolk in 1966’s A Man for All Seasons). Oscar-winner Martin Balsam (Psycho, 12 Angry Men) was hired to record the final voice in post-production.

“Kubrick had him record it very realistically and humanly, complete with crying during the scene when Hal’s memory is being removed,” his son, Adam Balsom, told the New York Times earlier this year. In a 1966 interview, the actor enthused about his own performance: “I sure create a lot of excitement projecting my voice through that machine.” Writing to a colleague, Kubrick praised Balsam’s “wonderful” performance.

But something wasn’t right. Kubrick ultimately decided Balsam’s sounded “a little bit too colloquially American.” Fortunately, there was another voice that the director had been listening to obsessively, which had the otherworldly quality he was looking for.

In 1960, the National Film Board of Canada released a documentary called Universe, that used groundbreaking animation to recreate the surfaces of other planets. Its influence on 2001 is obvious from the very first scene: ominous, blaring orchestral music over a shot of outer space.

Kubrick was mesmerised by Universe, and is said to have watched the documentary 95 times. One of 2001’s special effects supervisors said he would screen it again and again, “until the sprockets wore out, while he tried to figure out how they’d done it”.

"What will the first men to leave the Earth find?" Universe’s soft-voiced narrator asks at one point in the film. "We can, in imagination, journey into these spaces." That narrator was Douglas Rain, a distinguished Shakespearean who started acting professionally at the age of eight, and co-founded the Stratford Festival (essentially Canada’s equivalent of the RSC), where he acted alongside William Shatner. Whether on radio or onstage, Rain was praised for his mellifluous vocal performances. His film breakthrough came with 1957’s Oedipus Rex; for the classical Greek drama, his face was invisible behind a mark.

If Kubrick was bowled over by Universe’s visual effects, he found Rain’s voiceover just as impressive. “I think he’s perfect,” Kubrick wrote in a letter. “The voice is neither patronizing, nor is it intimidating, nor is it pompous, overly dramatic or actorish. Despite this, it is interesting.” To American ears, Rain’s standard Canadian accent sounded unplaceable. Kubrick called it a “bland mid-Atlantic” sound, but it could just as easily have been mid-galactic.

`Stanley Kubrick relaxing behind a camera on the set of 1960's Spartacus
Stanley Kubrick relaxing behind a camera on the set of 1960's Spartacus Credit: David Rose

The director initially cast him for 2001 as a narrator, to deliver an explanatory voiceover that ended up being cut from the script. Then he was asked to read a different part. “I’m having trouble with what I’ve got in the can,” Kubrick said (according to Rain, speaking to the writer Garry Flahive in 2014). “Would you play the computer?”

The actor told Flahive he found Kubrick “charming” and “courteous”, while conceding that the obsessive director’s insistence on “absolute dictatorship” didn’t put everyone at ease: “His sound recordists were terrified of him.”

This time there would be no blubbing in Hal’s “death” scene. Instead, Rain’s version of Hal remained cool and detached, though able to “fake emotion and pain” (as Kubrick put it) when required. The few directions Kubrick is on the record as giving him suggest he was aiming for a kind of melancholy understatement; “closer and more depressed”, “Even softer and kind of in the depths”. The sound of his breathing was edited out – because why would a computer breathe?

Rain was made to record Hal’s final scene – in which it sings “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do” – around 50 times, before Kubrick ended up using the very first take. By all accounts, it was dull, arduous work. “If you could have been a ghost at the recording,” Rain said, “you would have thought it was a load of rubbish.”

He reprised the part for a 1984 sequel – 2010: The Year We Make Contact but he had little interest in a Hollywood career. Rain devoted himself to the theatre, understudying Alec Guinness’s Richard III and playing the great roles of the classical repertoire at Stratford for 32 years.

“Douglas shared many of the same qualities as Kubrick’s iconic creation: precision, strength of steel, enigma and infinite intelligence, as well as a wicked sense of humour,” Stratford Festival’s Artistic Director Antoni Cimolino said after his death. “But those of us lucky enough to have worked with Douglas soon solved his riddle and discovered that at the centre of his mystery lay warmth and humanity, evidenced in his care for the young members of our profession. Douglas dedicated his talent to the stages of his native land… We owe him so much.”

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