It is tempting to think that a work of great art appears in the material world complete and perfectly formed, like a rainbow or an egg, that every note or phrase or scene or brush stroke has been placed just so and for good reason. It is tempting to think that geniuses know what they are doing.

But geniuses being as human as the rest of us, this isn’t always so. Sometimes great art is more like a tossed-together scramble that makes good use of whatever happens to be in the fridge — a synthesis of craft and dumb luck.

Not long ago, I got a lesson in fluke creativity when I had the opportunity to speak to Keir Dullea, the actor who co-starred in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Stanley Kubrick’s notoriously opaque science fiction epic, which I have been obsessed with most of my life.

Image Keir Dullea, as the astronaut Dave Bowman in the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Credit... Dmitri Kessel/Time & Life Pictures, via Getty Images

The film debuted 50 years ago this spring, on a not very auspicious date: April 3, 1968, the day before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. And yet, despite horrible news and mixed-to-bad reviews, “2001” was a hit from the beginning (contrary to subsequent legend that the film looked to be a flop until pot-smoking kids turned on to the psychedelic finale). I saw it for the first time that fall. I was 10, with a film-going résumé limited at that point to Disney and maybe a couple of stray westerns. Like many viewers before and since, I had no idea what to make of “2001” narratively. But I knew that it had immersed me in a new and strange world and that it had also overwhelmed and even terrified me. The weird thing is, I went back to see it as often as I could — I guess I wanted to conquer it.