Steven Soderbergh Cuts His Own Version of 2001: A Space Odyssey

FAMED director Steven Soderbergh has officially retired from filmmaking. But his latest work might be his ballsiest yet.

07/05/1997 PIRATE: Scene from 1968 film "2001: A Space Odyssey". /Films/Titles/2001/A/Space/Odyssey

ALREADY toting one of the most impressive resumes in the business, filmmaker Steven Soderbergh’s latest move may be his ballsiest.

The director behind hits such as Sex, Lies and Videotape, Out of Sight, Ocean’s Eleven, Traffic and Erin Brokovich announced his retirement in 2013, but has since taken to reworking other people’s films and posting the results on his Extension 765 blog.

Steven Soderbergh Picture: Peter Kramer

Having already taken to cult classics Psycho, Heaven’s Gate and Raiders of the Lost Ark, he has now shocked sci-fi fans with a his own cut of Stanley Kubrick’s cinematic masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Soderbergh wrote on his website that he had been watching the film regularly for four decades and only recently decided to leave his mark on the cult classic.

“Maybe this is what happens when you spend too much time with a movie: you start thinking about it when it’s not around, and then you start wanting to touch it,” he wrote.

“It wasn’t until a few years ago i [sic] started thinking about touching it, and then over the holidays i [sic] decided to make my move.”

Soderbergh wrote he has seen the every conceivable format of the film, but he believed none of them looked as good as a Blu-ray.

“I believe SK would have embraced the current crop of digital cameras, because from a visual standpoint, he was obsessed with two things: absolute fidelity to reality-based light sources, and image stabilisation,” he wrote.

With the original running 2 hours 41 minutes long, Soderbergh’s remake cuts nearly an hour from the movie.