10 Ridiculous Ways You Won't Believe Films Accomplished Shots

9. Stanley Kubrick Built A Set In A Ferris Wheel For 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Stanley Kubrick didn't do things by halves. This was the man who spent years of painstaking research on his passion-project Napoleon movie, only to then abandon said project and work just as painstakingly on 1975's Barry Lyndon instead. This is the man who rebuilt Vietnam at the site of an old London gas works, who spent over a year shooting Eyes Wide Shut (a total of 400 days, holding the world record for the longest continuous shooting period) just to get it right.

So when Stanley Kubrick set a movie in space, you can only imagine his disappointment when he was reminded that man had yet to reach the moon, rendering him unable to go up there and film it himself. Instead, Kubrick had to make do with boring old Earth for the production of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and, for a scene set aboard spacecraft Discovery One, Kubrick had to resort to funfair technology to get the shot he wanted.

For the scene in which Keir Dullea's pilot, Dave Bowman, jogs along the circular hub of the ship, in which the floor is a never-ending track bolstered by in-built gravity flooring, Kubrick had the set built into a rotating Ferris wheel, at a cost of $750,000.

The result is a stunningly simple visual effect, though it's better not to think about the fact that Kubrick was essentially filming his actor jogging around a giant hamster wheel.