Steven Spielberg

by Joseph McBride

  One day in 1985, Spielberg was surprised when Kubrick asked his advice about a film project. Kubrick had been developing a story about a future society that has mastered the tools of artificial intelligence and creates robot children and servants to satisfy people’s physical and emotional needs. Based on Brian Aldiss’s 1969 short story “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” the project had been in the works since 1982, and, after an abortive attempt to work on the screenplay with Aldiss, Kubrick developed a ninety-page treatment with Ian Watson and 1,500 scene illustrations with comic-book artist Chris Baker (aka Fangoria); other writers who worked with Kubrick on the project included Bob Shaw, Arthur C. Clarke, and Sara Maitland. Kubrick added elements from Carlo Collodi’s 1883 book The Adventures of Pinocchio, helping turn the sci-fi story into a modern fairy tale, much to Aldiss’s dismay (Pinocchio is referenced explicitly in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which quotes the music “When You Wish Upon a Star” from the Disney animated classic, and it is also a pervasive influence in E.T). The parallel with the fairy tale about a puppet-maker bringing to life a wooden boy who seeks love and transformation into a real boy from the maternal figure of a blue fairy (the Disney film’s name for Collodi’s Fairy with Turquoise Hair) became central to the harsh and heartbreaking examination of desperately sentimental over-attachment to mother figures in A.I. After an initial conversation with Kubrick, Aldiss wrote on a copy of his original story, “I know Stanley K has Pinocchio in mind. He wants David to become a real boy! How could that be!?” The author later recognized that there “was something in there about the little boy’s inability to please his mother that touched Stanley’s heart”—as it does Spielberg’s. Sara Maitland said that Kubrick “never referred to the film as A.I.; he always called it Pinocchio.”

  But Kubrick found himself stymied by the technical limitations of cinema in the early 1990s, especially by the difficulties involved in bringing a robot boy to life onscreen. For a while he considered casting Joseph Mazzello from Jurassic Park, but realized that a child actor would grow too much during his always-slow filming process. Kubrick went so far as to have a full-scale mechanical boy built, using one of his nephews as a model, but that experiment was “a disaster,” reported his brother-in-law and producer, Jan Harlan, an executive producer on A.I. The use of CGI to animate dinosaurs believably in Jurassic Park made Kubrick think he might be able to create his young protagonist the same way, and he brainstormed with Dennis Muren and other technicians who had worked on Spielberg’s film at George Lucas’s special-effects house, International Light and Magic. But then, when Kubrick summoned Spielberg over to talk in person in 1994, he suggested that he should produce the film for Spielberg to direct, telling him, “This is much closer to your sensibilities than my own.”

  The remark was ambiguous, containing a suggestion of criticism as well as praise. Did Kubrick, whose work is often criticized for its supposed coldness and misanthropy, regard Spielberg as a filmmaker of greater warmth and a more generous view of humanity? Or did he consider Spielberg’s sentimental tendencies what the work required, a dimension simply outside Kubrick’s own taste and temperament? These questions would haunt the critical commentary on the masterpiece Spielberg made from Kubrick’s abortive work, A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). Much would be made of the supposed binary opposition between the two artists and how that influenced the disparate blend of elements that make up this extraordinary film. But that critical discussion, which tended to be unfavorable to Spielberg, was based on simplistic assumptions that blurred complementary traits shared by the two filmmakers. As Spielberg said, “People pretend to think they know Stanley Kubrick, and think they know me, when most of them don’t know either of us. And what’s really funny about that is, all the parts of A.I. that people assume were Stanley’s were mine. And all the parts of A.I. that people accuse me of sweetening and softening and sentimentalizing were all Stanley’s.”

  In 2009, Harlan edited (with Jane M. Struthers) a book about the film’s lengthy gestation process, a subject which, at the time of the film’s release, had been left largely for Spielberg to describe from his own vantage point. Harlan’s comments in the book offer a different perspective on the partnership: “‘What would Kubrick have said about Spielberg’s version?’ He would have been proud of it. Stanley’s version was too black and cynical for an expensive film that had to appeal to a broad family audience. Steven had the ability to lighten the tone without changing the substance.” Nevertheless, as the book demonstrates with reproductions of many of Baker’s conceptual drawings and notes from Kubrick and his writers, much of the film stems directly from Kubrick’s plans, and Spielberg’s version is hardly light in tone. So much darkness remains that A.I. has little appeal to a broad family audience.

  In turning to Spielberg to direct, Kubrick ultimately bowed to practical considerations, reports Harlan: Kubrick “knew that Steven, with all his natural talent for this sort of story, would execute the shooting of the film in a fraction of the time he himself would need, and that Steven therefore could use a real boy.” Spielberg seriously considered Kubrick’s proposal for a direct collaboration, but wrote in his foreword to the book, “As honoured as I was, I encouraged [Kubrick] to direct A.I. himself despite his reservations. We worked on the film for another couple of years and continued to argue as to who should take the helm.” Spielberg eventually “chickened out,” ostensibly because he thought creating the future world would be too difficult, but more likely because this self-described “control freak” would have found working directly with his master too intimidating. The project was dormant until, after Kubrick died, Harlan and Kubrick’s widow, Christiane, approached Warner Bros. with the idea of having Spielberg direct it. This time Spielberg agreed. Although he was able to function more autonomously in Kubrick’s absence, Spielberg admitted that he felt “very inhibited to honor him” by following Kubrick’s dramatic and visual schema for the film with as much fidelity as he could muster. “I felt like I was being coached by a ghost!”

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  SPIELBERG’S relationships with older directors have sometimes manifested an Oedipal rivalry (as seen in his dealings with David Lean and Orson Welles), but no “anxiety of influence” hampers his work in A.I. On the contrary, the film is a rare fusion of two great filmmakers’ viewpoints and, at the same time, “a profoundly personal work” from Spielberg, in the words of critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. This paradox stems, as Spielberg suggests, from the overlap of common areas of concern between the two men that have been widely misunderstood.

  Spielberg’s sentimentality is not as pervasive as his detractors claim; indeed, a film such as Empire of the Sun, charting the development of a lost boy’s ferocious survival skills during wartime, should make it clear that Spielberg’s work involves honest sentiment more than sentimentality and that, far more than most contemporary directors, he does not flinch from the most painful aspects of life. Ever since Schindler’s List, that receptivity to human suffering in harrowing circumstances has become increasingly pronounced in his work. As a result, and perhaps also because he has become less anxious about popularity, his later work, such as Minority Report and War of the Worlds, shows a certain coldness of style that resembles Kubrick’s clear-eyed, mordant perspective on human failings.

  The unusually somber mood of A.I., which so surprised audiences and led to the film’s rejection by many viewers, may have been influenced by a health crisis Spielberg suffered in February 2000, during the preproduction for the film. A routine physical examination found an “irregularity” on his kidney; he had the kidney promptly removed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles by a specialist in urological oncology, Dr. Stuart Holden. It was never explained exactly what the malady was (neither Spielberg nor his doctor would say whether the kidney was cancerous), but it was a matter of grave concern for the fifty-three-year-old Spielberg. Experiencing such a memento mori is bound to influence an artist’s work. Spielberg has begun to reach what the dean i
n Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull calls “the age where life stops giving us things and starts taking them away.”

  While there is no question that Kubrick views humanity through a harsher eye than those of most other great filmmakers, it is reductive and seriously misleading to view him as a misanthrope. In fact, he is a covert humanist whose affection for humanity is masked with pessimism, irony, and outrage over human failings. His melancholy critique of the inadequacies of the human animal stems from a profound disappointment over our inability to live up to our spiritual potential. The man who made jokes about nuclear annihilation in Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is not celebrating the end of humanity but mourning its self-destructive tendencies; Kubrick’s dark humor in that and other films stems from the Jewish tradition of laughing at horrors in order to survive them. Nor should the black-comic elements surrounding the execution of three hapless military scapegoats in his World War I film Paths of Glory obscure that film’s rage over human injustice and its depiction of their military lawyer’s futility in attempting to save them from a ruthless military (in)justice system. Showing machines as more intellectually and emotionally evolved than humans in 2001: A Space Odyssey is Kubrick’s way of challenging the limitations and misdirection of human aspirations. The ending of that film, with its leap forward in space and time to show the astronaut dying and evolving into a transcendent new form as a Star Child, can be seen as one of the most hopeful conclusions of any film, even if it also implies the end of humanity as we know it before it is transformed into a higher state of consciousness. That ending finds strong echoes in A.I.

  “One of the fascinating questions that arise in envisioning computers more intelligent than men,” Kubrick observed, “is at what point machine intelligence deserves the same consideration as biological intelligence…. You could be tempted to ask yourself in what way is machine intelligence any less sacrosanct than biological intelligence, and it might be difficult to arrive at an answer flattering to biological intelligence.”

  The much-derided but brilliant ending sequence of A.I. shows the robot boy, David (marvelously played by Haley Joel Osment), fantasizing one last day with his “mother,” Monica (Frances O’Connor), and finding the love he has always sought from her. This coda, like that of 2001, has a similarly complex tone of combined wish-fulfillment and obliteration, similarly coexisting in a fantasy dimension. The sequence in A.I. appears as an epilogue to the extinction of humanity, with New York City shown submerged by flooding caused by global warming. Audiences reacted with patent outrage to the film’s conclusion, partly, no doubt, because of its bleak view of humanity’s future; the epilogue was widely attacked as both sentimental and unnecessary, and yet it is the heart of what the movie is saying. Hostile viewers either fundamentally misunderstood the even darker irony of the epilogue or perhaps recoiled from what they sensed: As Kubrick wrote in his notes for the film, “David wants to become a real boy, which is impossible, but he manages to turn Monica into an android.”

  Spielberg understood the covert humanistic impulses in Kubrick’s work and personality: “This shows a side of Stanley that people haven’t seen before, which was a very deeply emotional and lonely side.” But Spielberg also brought his own warmer emotional sensibility to this strangely moving finale. Anyone regarding it as a sentimental happy ending would have to explain how that could be when the event is clearly happening only in the imagination, and when the price of seeing the mother again, for such brief moments of happiness, is the death of both mother and son. The mother’s expressions of love are clearly projections of the resurrected robot boy’s desires, as activated on his behalf by SuperMecha robots (the sequence has a strong Oedipal component), and the sequence takes to its ultimate conclusion the film’s central paradox of showing the mechanical child as the true repository of human feeling, in contrast to the coldness of his parents and the other humans he encounters. That the robot child with artificial intelligence is the last surviving representative of (or, perhaps more precisely, emissary from) humanity is a moving and chilling irony.

  “The whole last twenty minutes of the movie was completely Stanley’s,” said Spielberg. “The whole first thirty-five, forty minutes of the film—all the stuff in the house—was word for word from Stanley’s screenplay [since Kubrick did not write a screenplay for A.I., Spielberg evidently was referring to Watson’s treatment]. This was Stanley’s vision.”

  But as unusually faithful as Spielberg tried to be to another man’s vision, A.I. nevertheless embodies many of Spielberg’s deepest personal concerns and obsessions. Spielberg took the unusual step of writing the screenplay himself from Watson’s screen story (the last time Spielberg took sole screenplay credit on one of his films was on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, although that script also was not a one-man job). Spielberg’s somewhat exaggerated protestations of fidelity to Kubrick show his frustration over people’s unwillingness to credit him with a comparably dark and mature sensibility. His comment that “in fact it was Stanley who did the sweetest parts of A.I., not me” is another way of staking the same artistic claim, although that is an odd way for Spielberg to refer to the beginning and ending of the film, in which any “sweetness” is highly qualified. Tapping into Kubrick’s vision and following the late filmmaker’s visual and dramatic plan for much of the film was not the self-effacing act it seemed but a channeling operation that enabled Spielberg to access and express his own deep-seated feelings of sorrow and anger over the limitations of the human race. A.I. is, among other things, one of the most anguished looks at parental neglect ever put onscreen. Spielberg’s familiar obsession with irresponsible father and mother figures results in the harrowing scene of Monica abandoning her child in the woods like a dog she no longer wants. This scene is so overwhelmingly painful, evoking such fairy-tale horror as the death of the mother doe in the snowy meadow in Disney’s Bambi, that Spielberg’s audiences recoiled in shock and anger.

  With the irresponsible-father theme in Spielberg’s work somewhat in eclipse following his reconciliation with his own father and the making of Saving Private Ryan, A.I. returns most forcefully to his previous concentration on the irresponsible mother, a figure seen memorably in Spielberg’s very dark early work The Sugarland Express and revisited in some other films, including Close Encounters and Empire of the Sun. But it’s important to note that the father in A.I. (Sam Robards) is even more unfeeling; it is his wish to have their troublesome robot boy scrapped that leads the mother to her desperate attempt to preserve his life, at the cost of leaving him to fend for himself in a hostile world. Perhaps it was Spielberg’s newfound understanding from his parents that both were responsible for their divorce that made it possible for him to spread the blame in A.I.

  Spielberg claimed, “I’m the guy who did the dark center of the movie, with the Flesh Fair and everything else. That’s why [Kubrick] wanted me to make the movie in the first place.” Nevertheless, Chris Baker, who worked on the film with Spielberg after helping Kubrick envision A.I., reported, “The design of the Fair didn’t change much at all from the initial ideas with Stanley to the final film” (Baker’s drawings bear out the accuracy of that statement). That Spielberg exaggerated his role in realizing the Flesh Fair is another revealing glimpse into his self-image and defensiveness toward his critics. But Spielberg’s sensibilities are also much on view in the Flesh Fair, a metaphor for a futuristic Holocaust in which “orgas” (humans) entertain themselves by violently decimating unwanted “mechas” (robots). This appalling display of human venality expands the concept of the demolition derby into genocidal dimensions. Kubrick, who was also Jewish, had the Holocaust in mind while conceiving A.I. and had been planning his own Holocaust film, Aryan Papers, which he abandoned after seeing how well Spielberg dealt with the subject in Schindler’s List (and also, reportedly, because the subject so depressed him). But in the Flesh Fair we see how vividly Spielberg utilizes his gifts for depicting cruelty. After be
aring cinematic witness to the horrors of war and the Holocaust, he takes a similar approach to the emotional and physical horrors experienced by robots at the hands of humanity within the sci-fi context of A.I.

  One element that would have been considerably different if Kubrick had directed the film is the character of Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), the “love mecha” who becomes David’s protector. Spielberg transformed the harsher, sexier Gigolo Joe character of Kubrick’s and Watson’s conception into a kindly father figure and protector. That change influenced the Rouge City sequences, which Kubrick and Baker conceived of as blatantly lewd in their visual imagery. That part of the film was toned down due to censorship considerations, and also, no doubt, because of Spielberg’s characteristically tentative approach to eroticism, making Rouge City seem more like a somewhat risqué Oz than a futuristic Sodom and Gomorrah. The role of the boy’s conscience, A.I.’s equivalent of Jiminy Cricket from Pinocchio, is assumed by his ambulatory stuffed bear, Teddy (“The teddy bear was Stanley’s,” Spielberg said). Kubrick admittedly never managed to work out the tone of this middle section of the film showing Gigolo Joe and Teddy accompanying David in his search for the Blue Fairy. Spielberg’s warmer approach to Gigolo Joe gives the audience some hopeful relief from the surrounding bleakness and offers further vestiges of humanity in the form of another robot, this one created for the purpose of prostitution but with the proverbial heart of gold. Jude Law’s graceful performance, evoking Fred Astaire, enables him to transcend any stereotypical pitfalls to create a sophisticated commentary on the degradation he tries to surmount.

  If it is sentimental to envision robots as having superior feelings to humans, that is part of the challenge Kubrick and Spielberg offer the audience with A.I. The film asks us to consider, “What is humanity? Why do we consider ourselves superior to other creatures? What should be our attitude toward artificial intelligence? Is it a boon or a curse?” The name of the creator of the robot boy, Professor Hobby (William Hurt), is Spielberg’s in-joke tribute to Kubrick himself, who called his production company Hobby Films (Kubrick had planned to call the character Professor Nicholls). Professor Hobby is a reckless Dr. Frankenstein figure, but the creature he builds as a replica of his own dead son becomes the last vestige of human feelings. Exercising to the fullest extent his unprecedented clout as a filmmaker, earned through decades of entertaining and enlightening audiences, Spielberg was asking a lot of his summer 2001 audience in expecting it to contemplate the extermination of its own species and accusing it of heartless mistreatment of its own creations. His career-long concerns about adult cruelty toward children and family dysfunction are broadened in A.I. to encompass the entire world, and the picture he offers is not a pretty one, though not entirely despairing. In Richard Schickel’s 2007 documentary Spielberg on Spielberg, the director says that his purpose was “questioning the audience that came to see A.I. about what is the difference between sentient behavior and the behavior of a doll. And where is your moral judgment going to fall? How are you gonna judge creatures who look and act and behave just like us? And I think a lot of people were offended that that question was put to them.”