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 made a career out of being cinema’s good guy, but when it comes to his own favourite film, the two-time Oscar winner goes in a slightly different direction.

“I’ve seen it about 120 times, or something like that,” he told Collider in 2012, when talking about 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 long stretches of minimal dialogue, 2001 is a slow, smart feature. And that’s what Hanks considers 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 began in late 1965 at Shepperton Studios, followed by extensive work at MGM-British Studios in Borehamwood.

Hanks’ also mentioned his love for 2001: A Space Odyssey in a 2023 interview with The Guardian, where he reminisced on the first time he watched 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 regularly discusses the film’s influence and even invoked it during the marketing of his own sci-fi experiment, Cloud Atlas (2012). Speaking about the Wachowskis’ sprawling, time-hopping epic, Hanks referenced the legacy of Kubrick’s most mysterious 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 regarded as one of the most important science fiction films in cinema history. Co-written with British author Arthur C. Clarke, 2001 follows a loose narrative about human evolution, artificial intelligence, and space travel, beginning with prehistoric apes who experience an evolutionary jump after encountering a monolith.

It then jumps to 2001, where astronauts discover another monolith on the Moon, sending them on a mission to Jupiter with the help – and hindrance – of the HAL 9000 supercomputer.

Despite its initial polarising reception in 1968, 2001 has become a cultural icon in its own right. It was nominated for four Academy Awards and won one – Best Visual Effects, the only Oscar Kubrick would ever receive.

“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.’”