Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker. This would shackle the viewer to reality, and I don't want this to happen to 2001. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle.
Any tragic story has to be in conflict with things as they are.
They have something that they feel. I don't think that any genuine artist has ever been oriented by some didactic point of view, even if he thought he was. I think that a preoccupation with originality of form is more or less a fruitless thing. A truly original person with a truly original mind will not be able to function in the old form and will simply do something different. Others had much better think of the form as being some sort of classical tradition and try to work within it.