Mailer underlines the fact that “John F. Kennedy had made his declaration concerning the moon not six weeks before Hemingway was dead”.

“To discover what has made Kubrick so respected—and controversial—a director, and to plumb both his own complexities and those of 2001, Playboy interviewed Kubrick at his elegant mansion outside London, a short drive from MGM’s studio at Borham Wood, where he is working on his latest film—a biography of Napoleon. Interviewer Eric Norden found Kubrick—”a slim, relaxed man with thinning hair, dark beard and intense eyes”—sprawled in a chair on the spacious expanse of lawn overlooking his elegantly tended gardens. “As Kubrick crossed one scuffed shoe over a wrinkled pants leg,” writes Norden, “I began by asking him to decipher the metaphysical message of 2001. Though his answer was enigmatically evasive, he was far more voluble about his space odyssey, and the destiny it prophesies for the human race, than about himself as man or moviemaker. It may be that he feels his private life is too dull to talk about, or perhaps too interesting, or simply nobody’s business but his own. But I think it’s more likely that he is one of those rare men whose self-concern is plural and impersonal, to whom the present is less real than the possible, who live less in the world of tangible reality than in the uncharted country of the mind.”” (read more)

I first came to know the existence of this interview through Sister Of The Raging Sea.