ONE of America’s most iconic filmmakers was offered advice from Jodrell Bank about the space age and the possibility of alien life before making his magnum opus.

It has been revealed that director Stanley Kubrick’s team visited Jodrell Bank to interview its founder Sir Bernard Lovell during pre-production of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Lovell was one of 21 scientists and leading thinkers Kubrick had handpicked to comment on the film’s themes.

Kubrick was particularly interested in their thoughts on extra-terrestrial intelligence ‘to help the audience realise that the basic subject matter of the film is not fantasy but possible if not probable fact’.

His assistant, Roger Caras, travelled around the world in 1966 filming the interviews, with the original intention that they would be used as a foreword to the film.

The interview tapes were not used in the final film but the transcripts were published in 2005 in ‘Are We Alone? The Stanley Kubrick Extraterrestrial-Intelligence Interviews’.

Now Lovell’s musings on alien cultures, intelligent computers and the origins of life have been unearthed for a second time as part of the British Film Institute’s Days of Fear and Wonder.

The celebration of sci-fi will see 2001: A Space Odyssey beamed on to the 76-metre Lovell Telescope for a unique open air cinema experience today, Friday.

There will also see a screening of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror Alien, which is currently celebrating its 35th anniversary, at Jodrell Bank on Saturday.

The weekend of interstellar cinema is called Watch The Skies and has been curated by Abandon Normal Devices, a Lottery funded group which aims to blur the boundaries between cinema and art.

Scientists from the University of Manchester will also be addressing some of the central questions 2001: A Space Odyssey poses in a discussion before the main feature.

The talks will take place in Jodrell Bank’s Discovery Centre, which will be open to visitors to the event.

To answer some of the big questions they will be drawing on Jodrell’s archive material about the space race available, including the first picture sent from the surface of the Moon (which sadly does not show evidence of Kubrick’s black monolith).

On Friday there will also be a specially commissioned short film from Manchester’s Soup Collective celebrating Lovell’s legacy.

He died in August 2012, aged 98.

Then on Saturday, US electronic musician Oneohtrix Point Never is presenting the soundtrack to Magnetic Rose, an anime short film from Katsuhiro Otomo, the creator of Akira.

The music will feature alongside rarely seen footage of Sputnik 1, the Russian satellite, whose rocket was tracked by Jodrell Bank on October 4, 1957.

- Tickets are £15. Visit abandonnormaldevices.org/wts - Visitors are advised to bring warm clothes as well as umbrellas in case of rain for the outdoor evening event

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JODRELL Bank’s founder told researchers for 2001: A Space Odyssey that he believed in the existence of alien life.

In the 1966 transcripts, Bernard Lovell spoke about the scale of the universe, the vast number of stars, how many planets might exist and whether life might have evolved elsewhere.

He said: “I think one must assume that life must have developed in many other places in the cosmos.”

As far as intelligent life was concerned, Lovell added: “At least on some of the planets belonging to some of the stars in the cosmos there must be organisms in extremely highly developed states of consciousness”.

Lovell also commented on the possible impact of contact with extra-terrestrials.

He said: “I think the very fact that it could be demonstrated that intelligence of our type existed elsewhere in the universe would obviously have profound philosophical and theological repercussions.

“The implication would, of course, depend on the nature of the contact, whether it was a benign contact or an aggressive contact.”

But taking an optimistic view, Lovell added: “The most useful contact would be with some civilisation which was in advance of ours but not so dramatically in advance that it had no concept of our problems or the perils of our own age”.