Real Intelligence
Jess Cagle: What did he (Stanley Kubrick) say he wanted this film to be?
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Spielberg: At the very beginning of it, he said to me — you have to understand, Stanley was an amazing kind of individual because he was able to wheedle out of you more information than I was ever to coax out of him. He spent most of the time tapping into my brain asking the kinds of questions you're asked by a journalist. And so it was a kind of a shock, in my relationship to Stanley, that Stanley was giving up something that he was interested in directing. In 1984 is when he first talked to me about this. I was kind of surprised that Stanley had turned to me to offer something that he was interested in directing, as opposed to just asking me questions about what I do and how I do it. He told me he was going to take a further step beyond the sentient relationship between HAL 9000 and Bowman and Poole and he was going to tell a kind of future fairy tale about the state of the art in artificial intelligence at some unspecified future time.
The movie works because of the casting of the boy. Did you ever say to Stanley you're nuts if you want to make this main character computer-generated or a robot.
At first, back in the '80s, he said he was going to construct a robotic child the way I constructed a robotic alien for "ET". Over the next decade, Stanley had started attempting to create a robot child. Stanley admitted to me it was completely beyond the ken of physical science. Later in the '90s when we talked about this again, when he asked me to direct it, he explored for a little while the same technology we used for the dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park" to put in David in "A.I.", but Stanley and I both realized that digital human faces would stand out as a digital effect in a sea of virtual humans. That would not work at all. Stanley and I realized we had to find an actor. This was in 1994
How did you feel when he asked you to direct the film in 1994?
I thought he was out of his mind. I felt he was giving up one of the best stories that I felt he had ever told. I immediately began talking him back into directing it, but he was adamant that I do it. He said this story is closer to your sensibilities than my own. He never gave me any other reason.
You had so much documentation — 1000 Chris Baker drawings — of his vision. Was that a burden?
Not when I was making the film. But when I was developing the screenplay after Stanley's death and Christiane and Jan came and asked me to direct it, I certainly had a brilliant template that Stanely had guided through a writer named Ian Watson, a 90 page treatment that basically had a beaautiful first act and a beautiful kind of coda. I had to take the story boards that he had done with Chris Baker and put together a kind of creative crime scene. I felt in a way those guys in CSI trying to put together, trying to flesh out a face from a skull, just based on the notes and the physical writings of Stanley, longhand, as well as over 1000 individual drawings that Stanley had supervised through the artist Chris Baker.
The difficulty was piecing it together, rather than worrying that you were departing too far from his vision?
I did depart certainly when there was nothing to guide me. But when there was dialogue in the first act and relationship to guide me, I structured that in complete [adherence to Kubrick's treatment], not only to honor Stanley, because I knew that I couldn't do better than Stanley. I used what he gave me as much as I could until it stopped making sense in telling the story. Then I had to invent things on my own.
I felt that Stanley really hadn't died, that he was with me for the three and a half months it took me to write the screenplay and then the three and a half months it took me to shoot the movie. I felt Stanley with me every moment.
When did you actually first meet him?
When I was looking at soundstages in England to build our sets for "Raiders of the Lost Ark" in 1979. Stanley was just finishing construction on the sets of "The Shining" and we were about to move onto those stages the second Stanley wrapped photography on his film. In touring the lot and looking at the stages, I was told that Stanley Kubrick was on one of the stages. I asked if it would be okay if I met him. He knew who I was from "Jaws" and "Close Encounters." He met me at the soundstage door and invited me to his home for dinner that night and we were friends ever since.
I was surprised at how gregarious and funny he was. I was surprised at his wit and how kind of shy he actually was. I didn't expect any of those things. I expected a kind of MIT intellectual, a man who gets into the molecular structure of cinema. He was also a gifted storyteller.
Is there a particular shot in the movie that you see as an homage to him, or very Kubrickian...
In terms of homage to Stanley, there's a lot of homages inside the movie. In Rouge City, there are little milk bars from "A Clockwork Orange" that are sort of, these little milk bar stands, floating in the center of Rouge City as Joe takes David onto the concourse of Rouge. There's a sign that says Strangelove's. The bottom of the cage at Flesh Fair opens up inward, in the same way that the moon base opened up like large artichoke leaves folding upwards toward the center. Whenever I could I acknowledged Stanley on the camera, expecting people later when it comes to DVD, to pour over the film to find even more — there's a lot of Stanley in this movie. Let alone, the vision and the concept of Stanley, I felt like I had to tell my own story and express my own vision too. But whenever there was an idea that was so resonant and resilient, I never let my ego stand in the way of using a great idea. And Stanley Kubrick provided me with enough great ideas to get me to say yes to making this movie.
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