INTELLIGENCE QUOTIENT

Roald Rynning discovers how Spielberg made sure that he remained truthful to Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi vision in A.I. Artificial Intelligence

For the 54-year-old director (who has also produced an additional 45 films), Spielberg's latest sci-fi drama seems like the third part of a trilogy that began with 1977's Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 1982's ET. It draws on similar themes of separation and abandonment merged with an undercurrent of hope. But A.I. has a much darker vision, which isn't surprising as the picture was the late director Stanley Kubrick's pet project for nearly 20 years.

Kubrick bought the rights in 1983 to the 1969 Brian Aldiss short story Super-Toys Last All Summer Long (upon which A.I. is based). The celebrated creator of such movies as Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey wrote a 90-page treatment, supervised the design of a 1,000 storyboards, and made up pages of elaborate notes for the film before his death in March 1999. Spielberg had visited the set of Kubrick's 1980 horror The Shining and had forged a bond with his mentor through numerous phone calls and faxes. The two became even closer after Kubrick saw Spielberg's 1993 hit Jurassic Park. Watching the digital dinosaurs on the screen, Kubrick realized that special-effect technology could perhaps create the robot child he needed for A.I.. Famous for his long shooting schedules, Kubrick had been concerned that casting a real boy as David simply would not work. He felt that by the time he would finish filming (it regularly took Kubrick a year to shoot a film, his last film, Eyes Wide Shut took over two years), "the kid would have had a beard".

Kubrick had experimented with an actual robot covered in plastic skin that he hoped could star in the film. But the robot looked lifeless and he gave up on the idea. After Jurassic Park, however, Kubrick began picking Spielberg's brain about the latest developments in computer-generated effects. The secretive film-maker began sharing story details and drawings of his futuristic world, and soon the directors would send each other information on all the latest in technology and exchange little gadgets and the latest toys.

Then one day in 1994, Kubrick suggested that maybe Spielberg should direct A.I.... "When he asked me if I would direct, I said, 'You've got to be kidding,'" recalls Spielberg. "I was shocked. I thought he was out of his mind. He was giving up one of the best stories he had ever told. I said, 'Why would you want to do that Stanley?' He just said 'Well, you know, I think this movie is closer to your sensibility than mine.' He was very adamant, arguing this was something I would do well because of ET and other films I'd made involving children. I thought it was more in line with what he had done in 2001: A Space Odyssey."

But Spielberg was intrigued by the project. "I don't know what he was going through in his own mind and life that got him to ask me to fly to London and meet him at his home in St. Albans. He asked me to come out, and I jumped on the next plane."

After a couple of days back in Los Angeles, Spielberg called Kubrick and said he would love to do the film. "What attracted me to the story was the strong bond between mother and son, which was also what attracted Stanley to it. If he were here to say it, that's exactly what he would tell you. More than the intellectual aspect of the future of artificial intelligence, it was the mother-and-son bond that attracted him."

Kubrick's family actually contradicts this, stating that Kubrick was most interested in the question concerning what responsibilities would humans have toward a machine programmed with feelings of loyalty and affection? The progress of A.I. did not go as planned. "After three months of daily phone calls and hourly faxes," recalls Spielberg, "I realized that Stanley was so invested in it that it would not be right for me to do this. I sent him back a very contrite five-page fax explaining why I couldn't and he had to, because it was his passion. I could certainly make it mine but it began with him. I couldn't understand why he wasn't running out to Industrial Light & Magic and collaborating with all the technical wizards."

Shortly after, Kubrick began to collaborate with one such wizard. Still, Eyes Wide Shut would come first, and then the director sadly died at the age of 70, shortly after completing the film.

Spielberg's second chance at directing A.I. came when Kubrick's widow, Christiane, and her brother, Jan Harlan, who was Kubrick's producer for 30 years, asked him if he would, in Stanley's memory, make the film.

"I said, 'Absolutely,' without hesitation," says Spielberg, who was given all Kubrick's material, including "hundreds and hundreds of drawings and bits of script and story."

Spielberg believed that the story had a weak middle and Kubrick had not finished it, but Spielberg got more insights into the late film-maker by reading through his material than he ever had over the phone.

"I was amazed at how well I got to know him," says Spielberg of reading Kubrick's hand-written notes. "Stanley left me many different iterations and different versions what A.I. could be. I had to sort through all the clues to be able to achieve something that I could identify with and something I hoped Stanley would be proud of."

Spielberg wrote the screenplay, his first since Poltergeist, in a record four months and fast-tracked the project into production. "I'm always rewriting on my own-directed movies, but I don't write scripts anymore. I only do some fiddling when the writer's not available to implement everything I want him to."

Working on Kubrick's idea, he felt like "an archaeologist, picking up the pieces of a civilization and putting Stanley's picture back together again. I felt that Stanley really hadn't died, that he was with me when I was writing the screenplay and shooting the movie."

Spielberg passed on directing Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone and put both his upcoming Tom Cruise-starrer Minority Report and Memoirs of a Geisha on hold. Seemingly obsessed about filming A.I. to honour a man he considered a friend and mentor, he gave a talk to the crew on the first day of filming, explaining why he was making A.I.

"I first said, 'I'm making A.I. because it's a wonderful story.' The only reason a film-maker should say yes to any project is to tell a wonderful story. My second motivation was not to try to imitate Stanley Kubrick, but to honour the moments he had highlighted to me that he was anxious to tell in his story."

Spielberg tried to evoke Kubrick's style and wove references to past Kubrick films into A.I.. Some were obvious, such as the milk bars from A Clockwork Orange in Rouge City, while others were more subtle, like staging a family's dinner table like the war room conference in Dr. Strangelove. Since Spielberg works fast, he decided to hire a a real child to play the robot boy, Haley Joel Osment , the 12-year old Oscar-nominated actor from The Sixth Sense. The filming itself was shrouded in secrecy, partly to honour Kubrick's wishes and covert style of film-making, and also because Spielberg has come to have his own passion for privacy.

"On Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List, I was always very careful not to be too vocal until the movie came out. We live in a age of communications. Our whole world has become a raging communal pool. That information gets out there so quickly that either you have to correct the distortions or sit back and enjoy how crazy rumour can be."

He came up with elaborate measures to steer the press away from information about the film, putting out fake call sheets every single day about what scenes were to be filmed.

"We put some pretty crazy cockamamie descriptions about what we were shooting, filled with our own humorous misinformation," Spielberg laughs. "One day we said there was going to be a big shootout between aliens and cowboys. The next hour it was on the Internet."

His main concern making A.I. was balancing his markedly different film-making style with Kubrick's. ("I tried to make my movie and Stanley's movie without creating a hybrid without a soul.") Many critics feel that his sentimentality doesn't mix well with Kubrick's cool in the futuristic retelling of the Pinocchio story but Spielberg insists that many of the film's so-called Spielberg touches came in fact from Kubrick, including David crying out repeatedly about wanting to be 'a real boy'. "That was in Stanley's original bag of possibilities," he claims.

Indeed, A.I. retains most of Kubrick's details, such as the 'pleasure' robot Gigolo Joe played by Jude Law, a robot-hunting balloon shaped like the moon and the hyper-erotic metropolis Rouge City. In Kubrick's script, however, says Law, "Joe was much more aggressive, more twisted." Now Joe is, in Spielberg's word, David's 'scoutmaster'. This was the section Kubrick could not solve and which Spielberg, in developing it, has softened.

While some assume that all the darkness of A.I. comes from Kubrick, it may be that Spielberg has put more of his own dark side on screen than he usually does.

"The world is a very cruel place, and I can say that without being cynical about it," he reflects. "I just think it's a reality, and we just work around it. We surf the Internet, watch the news and listen to the lessons of history. And then we think about what direction we are taking ouselves 50, 100, 200 years from today. I'd like to be hopeful about that and optimistic, but it also scares me."

As for the final product, Stanley Kubrick producer Jan Harlan says of A.I., "This will be a repeat of 2001. Some people will hate it. Never mind."

The producer claims that the legendary director would certainly have applauded the Spielberg version.

"I saw Stanley's handwriting over every single frame. What A.I. has become is a true amalgamation of the minds of these two genius film-makers. Stanley and Steven's tastes were so diverse. Stanley's sense of humour is so much darker than Steven's. I'm pretty certain Stanley would be battling with a restricted rating if he'd made the film because of his perceptions of Rouge City and Gigolo Joe. But this is Stanley's story told through Steven's sensibilities."

Had he been alive to produce the film, Kubrick would never have interfered with Spielberg's vision. "No committee," he always said, "has ever written a good book or a symphony or painted a great painting. And no committee has ever made a great film."

Concludes Harlan, "Stanley would have applauded what Steven has done with David because he always felt Steven's sensibilities were closer to the spirit of the child robot's journey. I am so convinced Stanley would love this A.I. that I told Steven I'm waiting for a psychic message from my dear, dear Stanley saying: 'I told you so, Jan. I told you Steven was the man to make my A.I.'."

Best viewed at 1024 by 768 screen resolution

© 2006 by Fair . Website designed by Daniel Chia © www.comeawayohumanchild.net