On the face of it Kubrick and Skolimowski are like day and night. The American director had settled in England to film big pictures that revolutionised the genre and indeed cinema itself. He had easy relations with the chief studio executives of MGM and Warner Bros and a large country home in rural Hertfordshire from which he ran pre- and post-production on his projects with the special luxury of the final cut. Located in London, the self-exiled Skolimowski tended to live from hand to mouth, was nomadic like Polanski, and chased money and producers everywhere for independent, on-the-hoof projects. Kubrick took popular genre into new dimensions: at times Skolimowski seemed like a one-man Anglo-Polish option to the nouvelle vague. Yet both were to the 1970s what Antonioni, Losey and Polanski had been to the 1960s in UK cinema: visionaries with an expatriate eye who got under the skin of the indigenous culture and its many complexities. In addition, they were both masters of the film fable, more effective than Anderson after If, more urgent and alive than Greenaway in the 1980s. In 1968 Kubrick was able to use the expertise of British film technicians at Elstree Studios for his great science-fiction masterpiece, 2001: a Space Odyssey, a futuristic epic that puts everything else in the genre into the shade.