‘Sentimental’ Spielberg versus ‘chilly’ Kubrick: why A.I. is a misunderstood sci-fi masterpiece
It is an unavoidable facet of the filmmaking process that leading directors are often unable to make their dream projects. Sometimes, this is because they are fired or replaced halfway through filming - as with Gone with the Wind, where George Cukor was supplanted by Victor Fleming. Yet there are other instances where a director’s long-cherished story ends up being made by a completely different auteur.
Perhaps the most famous example of this is A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a dark science-fiction parable revolving around David, a ‘Mecha’ or robot child who desperately wishes to become human. Drawing heavily upon The Adventures of Pinocchio, it combined whimsicality with horror in a striking and original fashion. It featured a starry cast including Jude Law, Frances O’Connor, Brendan Gleeson, and, fresh from The Sixth Sense, Haley Joel Osment as David. It was developed over the course of decades by Stanley Kubrick, but only filmed after his death by Steven Spielberg, as an homage to his friend and fellow director.
Upon its release in 2001, it was received respectfully but not warmly by critics, who labelled it an uneasy mixture of Kubrickian chilliness and Spielbergian sentiment. It was a reasonable success at the box office, but Spielberg’s subsequent science-fiction thriller Minority Report received much greater critical and financial acclaim. Yet now, two decades later, is it time to reassess A.I.?
The project had its genesis in 1976. Author Brian Aldiss had been impressed by Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey and described him as “the great science fiction writer of our age” in his book Billion Years Spree. A pleased Kubrick invited Aldiss to lunch to discuss working together, which intensified after the vast success of Star Wars in 1977. Aldiss remembered Kubrick asking him, “How can I make a movie that would gross as much as Star Wars and yet allow me to retain my reputation for social responsibility?”
A.I. sprung from Aldiss’s 1969 short story Super-Toys Last All Summer Long. Kubrick, impressed by the success of Spielberg’s E.T., bought the rights to Aldiss’s story and commissioned him to write a new plot around it. However, the result, which the Kubrick scholar and biographer Filippo Ulivieri now describes as “an espionage-cum-prison-break type of story that, in retrospect, feels like a typical action movie from the Eighties”, was not satisfactory.
Kubrick replaced Aldiss with sci-fi writer Ian Watson. The new pair were much more simpatico, not least because Kubrick gave him carte blanche to pursue his ideas. “Stanley knew that he wanted something, but he did not know what it was," Watson tells me. "It was my job to discover what it was that he wanted, and then he would recognise it.”
Ulivieri believes that Watson’s fertile imagination “elevated Aldiss’s vignette into a monumental story that encompassed three millennia and combined Arthurian legends, the ultimate forms of intelligence and a Robo-Christ.” Kubrick called it “one of the greatest stories of the world.”
Nevertheless, he asked his 2001 collaborator Arthur C Clarke to rework Watson’s material. But Clarke produced a new script, with the working title Child of the Sun, which entirely discarded Watson’s ideas. An unimpressed Kubrick commented: “I fear you have not only thrown out the baby with the bath water, but the bathtub, the bathroom, indeed, the house itself.
It was around June 1993 that Kubrick first discussed with the project with Spielberg, who was then riding high on the extraordinary success of both Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List. Ulivieri thinks it significant that he sent the script to someone who wasn’t a writer. “It indicated that he felt he needed some sort of assistance with this particular story, more than with any other he had considered or worked on in the past.”
Kubrick rewrote the screenplay himself, with input by writers Sara Maitland and Bob Shaw, and renamed it A.I. Artificial Intelligence. It was announced as his next project by Warner Bros on November 1 1993. And Kubrick continued to discuss it with Spielberg, who returned a version of the script with his own notes and annotations.
But after developing A.I. for two decades, Kubrick began to lose interest in it, and suggested to Spielberg that he direct it instead. As Spielberg explained to the BBC in 2006, “Kubrick said, ‘This is more you than me,’ and he began to produce it for me to direct. And it was great, it was going to be a great relationship.”
Unfortunately, Kubrick’s typical perfectionism soon intruded. As Spielberg recalled, “I kept getting faxes from Stanley all night long. He’d get a thought about A.I. and my fax machine would chatter and eventually my wife said, ‘Stanley has to stop living with us,’ because the fax was in the bedroom, and it would go off at two or three in the morning.
“The amount of information he was giving me, including shots and where the camera should go, was so extraordinarily precise and detailed that I finally called him and said, ‘Stanley, I can’t direct this movie. These faxes are crying out to me to say, You have to direct it, this is your movie.’ And I withdrew from the project.”
Kubrick’s death in March 1999 initially seemed to end the project’s viability. Yet out of both loyalty to his friend and a belief that it would make for a fascinating film, Spielberg decided to make A.I., and he returned to Watson’s work in order to write his own screenplay based on the material.
At this point, it shifted from being a Kubrick film to a Spielberg project, and was billed as such upon its eventual release: it was ‘An Amblin/Stanley Kubrick Production’ but remained ‘A Steven Spielberg Film’. As Ulivieri comments: “What the critics assumed – with the information that was available at the time – was that the sentimentality was entirely Spielberg’s. Some of them even went as far as to say that Spielberg had ruined a Kubrick film with a saccharine ending.”
In fact, Spielberg had gone out of his way to be faithful to Kubrick’s vision. Watson says that “Spielberg made the film as an homage to Stanley Kubrick and basically he made it as Stanley would have wished to see it (except years faster than Stanley), heeding instructions left by Stanley. One of these was my suggestion to Stanley that the waltz from Der Rosenkavalier must be used somewhere, thus the composer John Williams was instructed to include the waltz on the soundtrack even though Williams said he had no idea why. And the camera long shots are typical of Kubrick.”
It was the concluding 20 minutes that attracted most criticism on release. The narrative revolves around David’s quest to become a ‘real boy’, and at the end of the second act, he is trapped underwater in a futuristic theme park, impotently begging a model of the Blue Fairy from Pinocchio to answer his wishes. The story then leaps forward two millennia, as futuristic robots discover the submerged David. They then use technology to resurrect his ‘mother’ Monica and allow the two to spend the day together, apparently granting his heart’s desire.
Many reviewers mistakenly believed that the addition was Spielbergian sentiment which devalued the preceding cold and unsentimental Kubrick material. However, as Watson says, “the final 20 minutes are pretty much exactly what I wrote for Stanley and exactly what Stanley wanted, filmed faithfully by Spielberg. The ending is a melancholy tragedy.” (Kubrick’s wife thought it was “unbearably sad.”)
The point is not that David has had his dreams fulfilled, but instead that he will die - or “go to that place where dreams are born,” as the narrator says - deluded. Nonetheless, as Ulivieri says, “I think it’s safe to say that the ending may be more emotional than a Kubrick version of it – but then, didn’t Kubrick think the story needed a sensibility close to Spielberg’s?”
Today, A.I. remains fascinating, a one-of-a-kind posthumous collaboration between two of the greatest film directors of all time. The Telegraph’s Robbie Collin believes it’s a misunderstood classic, and says the ending depicts “real fear and real wonder, knotted together so tightly it becomes impossible to tell the two apart.”
Although Ulivieri has regrets about the finished product, especially the excision of some of the darker and more extreme material that Watson brought into the script, he nonetheless hails it “one of Spielberg’s late period best films.”
Watson, meanwhile, who was awarded credit for the final movie as the originator of the screen story, says he’s seen it three times, and took, as a memento, the film’s all-knowing robot bear Teddy. He jokes: “I just asked Teddy for an opinion by poking him in the belly and he declared, ‘Even Supertoy Teddies get grumpy, you know.’ Over the past 20 years I have heard never-again-repeated comments from Teddy which make me feel he doesn't have a fixed repertoire. No one has yet interviewed Teddy, as far as I’m aware. He keeps watch upon me as I work, along with a Frida Kahlo doll.”
Perhaps it is Kubrick’s least-anticipated legacy that the final product which arose from his imagination, in the form of an apparently sentient teddy bear, remains as enigmatic and fascinating as any of the brilliant films that he made.
