He was mostly amazed that Kubrick was confiding in him at all.
It was the first time that Kubrick, the eccentric, reclusive auteur of A Clockwork Orange and Dr. Strangelove, trusted Spielberg.
"I felt that was a break-through in our relation-ship," says the director. "The story wasn’t as important to me as was the fact that for the first time since we had met in 1979, he was actually telling me a story he was considering for himself as a filmmaker."
Sixteen years later, Kubrick is dead, and the future he described in his landmark work 2001: A Space Odyssey is upon us, looking nothing like what he envisioned. Yet A.I, a different fairy tale of the future, arrives in theaters courtesy of Spielberg, a filmmaker whose visceral, uplifting aesthetic is the polar opposite of Kubrick’s chilly, magisterial vision of mankind as an unrepentant animalistic beast.
The $90-million film is based on Brian Aldiss’ short story Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, with an elaborate treatment and storyboards supervised by Kubrick in the early ’90s, and a script written by Spielberg himself. The short story takes place in the future, where obesity and malnutrition have been banished, and the rich can change the view from their windows at whim. Because of tight population controls, a proper corporate wife (whose husband not incidentally manufactures robots) has not been permitted to bear a child and must make do with an android boy, who is constantly asking his teddy bear–also an android–if he’s real.
Although Spielberg knew Kubrick for almost 20 years, they’d met a scant dozen times. Kubrick was afraid of flying, and scarcely left his home in the English countryside. Their friendship, initiated by Spielberg when he was in England making Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1979, evolved through marathon transatlantic phone calls. It wasn’t initially "a two-way street," Spielberg says. "It was sort of a one-way street. I’d tell Stanley everything I was doing and Stanley would never tell me anything he was doing. Stanley was a benevolent inquisitor. He’d absolutely pump you dry of any knowledge you might have that he might find compelling."
Kubrick picked his brains about all aspects of the movie business, from distribution to lenses. (He constantly chastised Spielberg’s choices in the latter department.) Mostly he was mesmerized by Spielberg’s irrepressible commerciality, an instinct that alternately entrances and dismays other filmmakers.
"Every time I had a movie that made a lot of money, or somebody else had a movie that made a lot of money, Stanley would call and say ‘Gee, did you see the grosses of that–wow!’ He would ask you questions about why I thought a nerve might have been hit in America. I would say, ‘Darn if I know.’ And I don’t," says the director, although he later admits he superstitiously avoids trying to know. "That’s the witchcraft of movies. You have to not ask those questions."
Spielberg religiously sent Kubrick all his films before release, and Kubrick was unfailingly complimentary, to the point that Spielberg "kept pushing him to be more critical and he never would be. "He was saying, ‘Gee, how did you get that kid to cry that way? Did you have to threaten to kill his dog?’ He’d talk that way and I would become self-critical and say, ‘I think you’re wrong.’"
Spielberg was desperate to know what made Kubrick tick creatively–a subject on which the director was distinctly unforthcoming.
"I asked him a lot of questions about why he did that, and sometimes his answers were, ‘You know why, because you make pictures.’ And I would say, ‘But I’d love to talk about the choices you make.’ And then, he’d sort of change the subject."
The first time Kubrick broached the subject of A.I. was one instance when he didn’t change the subject. He told Spielberg, "Gee, this is sort of like some of the stuff you’ve made, huh?" Kubrick waxed on about the special effects it would need, effects that he wasn’t sure were even possible (although he was sure Spielberg could help). He worried about the probable price tag of $65 million, which, in 1985, would have made it one of the most expensive movies ever made.
After four hours of conversation, Kubrick suggested they each fix themselves a sandwich and continue talking. "We’re eating, and I hear him choking," recalls Spielberg, who loves this part of the story. "He gets his breath back and he starts to cough again and he said, ‘Steven, write this number down.’ He gives me a very long number and he also puts the dialing prefix, 011-44-1, and then the number in England. I said, ‘What is this for?’ He said, ‘Well, I’m choking on my sandwich, and if the line suddenly goes dead, that’s (his wife) Christiane’s line, and she’s downstairs. Call her and tell her I’ve blacked out in my office.’"
If the tale of an entertainer who yearns to be an artist sounds a bit like the story of a puppet–or an android–who yearns to be a boy, it’s not surprising that Pinocchio is one of Spielberg’s favorite fairy tales. Jiminy Cricket’s song When You Wish Upon a Star is "my favorite song in the universe! I even had a little kind of Pinocchio music box," he says, adding that at one point he put the song under the end-credits of Close Encounters, as the spaceship bearing Richard Dreyfuss ascends to the sky. (It was excised reluctantly after preview audiences found it too cornball.)
Kubrick called Spielberg after seeing the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. He was seemingly thrilled that Spielberg had pioneered technology which could now be used for A.I. A year later, the reclusive master filmmaker called again, and told Spielberg that he had something to tell him, but would only tell him in person. Two days later, Spielberg had flown from New York, and was sitting at Kubrick’s kitchen table at St. Albans, when Kubrick announced, "Why don’t you direct A.I., and I’ll produce it for you?’" recalls Spielberg. "He said, ‘The card will read great. It’ll say, "A Stanley Kubrick production of a Steven Spielberg film." Don’t you think people will come to see that?’"
Spielberg demurred. "Stanley, this is a great story for you!" he insisted. Yet Kubrick set about "seducing me," he says, bringing the younger director into his creative lair, and showing him the thousands of Baker storyboards. Kubrick gave him copies of the drawings and the 90-page treatment, and asked him to think about it. Spielberg didn’t tell him at the time that he thought it would be impossible to capture that world on film.
Kubrick made Spielberg take an oath of secrecy "under penalty of excommunication from (his) life" and asked him to install a secure fax line in his home, going so far as to make Spielberg detail the layout of his house. "You’ve got the most public house of anybody I’ve ever spoken to. Your house is just big rooms without walls. Don’t you have any small spaces with locks on the doors?" Kubrick said.
"What people don’t realize about Stanley, is that a lot of this was cut with humor," adds Spielberg. "He’s serious, but he makes you laugh."
Perhaps in an unconscious Freudian moment, Kubrick demanded that Spielberg put the secret fax in his bedroom. Kubrick then proceeded to fax him ideas day and night After the second night of hearing the fax machine go off at 3:30 in the morning, "Kate (Capshaw, Spielberg’s wife) kicked Stanley out of the bedroom, and banished him to the study downstairs," says Spielberg. "I never told Stanley."
As the pair were finalizing the deal with Warners for the movie, Spielberg "chickened out," and sent Kubrick a long, contrite fax.
"I thought this was one of the most commercial stories that Stanley had ever developed for him to direct, and I didn’t want Stanley to be robbed. Stanley wanted a hit! But he wasn’t willing to compromise his art for one He would always say, ‘I don’t know how to make those kind of movies you make.’ And maybe one of the reasons he tapped me was he was hoping that it would be commercial. I felt like I was taking something away from him. I was sort of a safety net, and if I took the net away, he would do it himself, and that’s exactly what happened."
Their relationship survived Spielberg’s backing out. Kubrick continued planning to direct the film, never progressing to an actual screenplay, but opted to do Eyes Wide Shut first.
The two directors were both so consumed with their own projects that they never even saw each other during the four months Spielberg was in England shooting Saving Private Ryan. Kubrick died suddenly of a heart attack in 1999, and Spielberg attended the funeral in England, where they buried the master director in the backyard of his St. Albans home.
For all the director’s dutifulness, there is a sense that at the end of the day, the film will be Spielberg’s. It can’t be anyone’s but Spielberg’s.
"I can’t know what Stanley knew. I can’t be who Stanley was, and I’ll never be who Stanley might have been," he says, speaking in a sense to the Kubrick devotees. "But I can tell a really great story, and it’s too good a story to let it collect dust in Stanley’s archive."
In summing up Kubrick as a benign but distant (and now dead) paterfamilias, Spielberg, perhaps unconsciously, evokes one of the themes that runs through so many of his films: The search for the absent father.
It’s that child’s loneliness that summons up the friendly alien E.T., in Spielberg’s most popular movie. There seems to be a mass tendency–perhaps a wish–to assume that A.I. is simply a version of E.T. As longtime Spielberg cohort Kathy Kennedy notes, "People see the image of a little boy and think this is like E.T. It’s not E.T. It’s a totally different story."
It is a return to that territory however, a province that one might assume that Spielberg–the father of seven, the owner of a major studio, DreamWorks, a killer businessman–has outgrown. He insists he hasn’t. "The feelings have always lasted with me. It’s not something you grow out of. I’m the same person today who made E.T. Those passions grow in me with the seven children I’m raising with Kate. When I made E.T., I was a wanna-be father. Now that I have a lot of kids, those emotions are actually in my own stories, what I tell my kids when I put them to bed at night."
One of the first discussions he had with Kubrick was over the name of the android’s teddy bear, which is called "Teddy" in the short story. Spielberg wanted to give the bear a new name, and Stanley said, "Well, what was your bear’s name?" recalls the director. "And I said, ‘My bear’s name was Jingle Bells.’ And he said, ‘You call that a good name?’ Stanley was very insistent the bear be called Teddy."
"A.I." opens in Metro Manila theaters on Sept. 5.