There is no dialogue in the first 25 minutes of the movie (ending when a stewardess speaks at 25:38), nor in the last 23 minutes (excluding end credits). With these two lengthy sections and other shorter ones, there are around 88 dialogue-free minutes in the movie.
This film was shot at MGM's Borehamwood Studios next door to where the TV series The Prisoner was being filmed. Prisoner star Patrick McGoohan borrowed some special effects footage of a starry sky for his episode "Chimes of Big Ben". This footage was not used in the broadcast version of the episode but is visible in an early edit that was later released on video.
Though almost invisible when watching the film on a TV screen, the three satellites in the first space sequence bear German, French, and Chinese markings.
TMA-1 stands for Tycho Magnetic Anomaly-1. The monolith was originally to have been a black tetrahedron; however, it did not reflect light properly. Stanley Kubrick then decided to use a transparent cube, but that proved to be too difficult to use because of the reflections created by the studio lights. Next came a rectangular monolith cast from Lucite that looked unconvincing, and finally the familiar black slab.
Was voted the 26th Greatest Film of all time by Entertainment Weekly.