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Mum on the Details

Spielberg Explains Background of A.I. But Keeps Plot Private

T O K Y O, June 20 - Film director Steven Spielberg took off his hat to Stanley Kubrick Tuesday, describing his new movie, A.I., as a collaboration with the late legendary director.

Speaking to reporters in Tokyo via satellite, Spielberg gave few hints about the film, which has been shrouded in secrecy, stressing his debt to Kubrick.

He had "worked hard to achieve a cinematic collaboration by bringing a vision of Stanley Kubrick's to the screen," Spielberg said.

The filmmaker rarely speaks to the media, and organizers said it was the first time in 19 years he had given a news conference to reporters in Japan - the world's second-biggest movie market.

Following Kubrick's Notes

A.I., to be released simultaneously in Japan and the United States June 30, was an idea conceived by Kubrick more than 20 years ago and picked up by Spielberg after Kubrick died in 1999.

"I would speculate that Stanley would have made and told much the same story I told because I based my screenplay on a 90-page treatment [concept] Stanley had prepared from all of his own ideas," the 53-year-old filmmaker said when asked what he thought Kubrick would have done differently.

Kubrick made classics such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange during his career. "If Mr. Kubrick were alive today, I'd be sending him a fax about how much I loved the movie he just directed called A.I. and that I felt lucky to be in the audience experiencing his movie," Spielberg said.

Technology vs. Humanity

Throughout the movie's production, the set was closed. About the only thing moviegoers know about the Warner Brothers/DreamWorks production is that Haley Joel Osment portrays a young robot who longs to be human.

Spielberg sounded a note of caution on humanity's technological progress as he spoke about a film whose intrigue has already prompted thousands of cybersurfers to take part in a game inspired by the movie.

"On one hand, we are making tremendous leaps forward in science, medicine, and technology, but at the same time, it is possible that technology could sometimes be the masters of the humans that created it," Spielberg said.

"We have to be very careful what we dream about and what we create because we are so powerful in our creating, and we should be very careful not to attempt to compete with God all the time," Spielberg said.

But the maker of blockbusters such as E.T. and Saving Private Ryan said he felt good would win in the end - as it does in most of his Hollywood films.

"Based on the films I've made and the films that you know I've made, I believe in my heart we do more good than evil. And that we will ultimately succeed and the goodness will win over the evil," Spielberg said.

Spielberg was in Virginia, where he is shooting his next film, Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise. Copyright 2001 Reuters. All rights reserved.

-- (New@movie.s), June 25, 2001

Answers

Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?

-- (HAL@2001.com), June 25, 2001.

Sorry Hal, you're taking me over my baseline.

-- Gov. Davis (out@of.juice), June 25, 2001.

Spielberg is so profound, I can barely stand it.

-- David L (bumpkin@dnet.net), June 25, 2001.

http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010627/re/leisure_spielberg_dc.html< /a>

Wednesday June 27 5:23 PM ET

E.T. And HAL the Crazy Computer Bond in New Movie

By Arthur Spiegelman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - What happens when you take the cold, clinical vision of one of cinema's great directors and mix it with the warm humanism of another major director? Or, to put it another way, what if cute little E.T. calls home and HAL the evil computer answers?

The result is you get Steven Spielberg's new movie ``A.I. Artificial Intelligence'' which opens on Friday possibly followed by one of film criticism's biggest brouhahas in years.

Depending on which critic you read or listen to in it the next few days, you will either love or hate the movie. Members of one preview audience walked out of a screening on the Warner Brothers lot in a dazed, ``what gives'' state only to read a few days later in Daily Variety that they had witnessed a masterwork.

Based on a project begun and sketched out in detail by Spielberg's good friend and sometime mentor, the late Stanley Kubrick, the film will either be hailed for blending the best of both men -- Kubrick's ``cool,'' Spielberg's sentiment -- or denounced as a tepid stew combining the worst of both.

Advance reviews are pretty much following that pattern, save for near- universal praise for the film's 12-year-old star Haley Joel Osment, who made his name as the boy who saw dead people in ``The Sixth Sense'' Now as his own father tells it, he has gone from seeing dead people to ``seeing fake people.'

A science fiction version of the Pinocchio fairy tale, ''A.I.'' tells the story of an artificial boy -- a robot that is built with the ability to feel and need love. As played by Osment, the boy robot never blinks or has a bodily function but pines away for a mother's love and to be ``a real boy.''

THREE ACTS

The films breaks neatly into three acts.

In the first, filmed in the brightly lit and eerily sinister manner of a Kubrick movie, the robot boy, David, is given to a couple whose real son has been cryogenically frozen because he is suffering from a deadly disease. David is a creepy substitute but as he and the mother of the family bond, the couple's human child is cured and returns to the family to seek jealous vengeance on the robot boy.

Soon the mother tearfully abandons her robot child in a New Jersey woods where he has to fend off marauding bands of humans out to destroy mechanical life -- the way the Nazis hunted down Jews in the Holocaust. The second part of the film moves into scenes inspired by Kubrick's ``Clockwork Orange,'' Frances Ford Coppola's ``Apocalypse Now'' and Spielberg's ``Schindler's List,'' not to mention some scenes straight out of the scarier moments of Walt Disney's ``Pinocchio'' with British actor Jude Law playing an X-rated version of Jiminy Cricket, Gigolo Joe, the robot that loves women.

Then in a third act, set in a New York whose skyscrapers have been engulfed by an ocean, David the robot boy confronts his destiny as a mechanical Pinocchio yearning to become real. Whole images drift into this section from Kubrick's masterpiece ''2001'' and Spielberg's ``Close Encounters of the Third Kind.''

Daily Variety's reviewer Todd McCarthy praised the movie, saying: ``The fruit of the unique spectral artistic convergence of two cinematic titans, Spielberg and Kubrick.

OEDIPAL ROBOT

This deeply thoughtful and thoroughly fascinating film about a mechanical boy who yearns to be real contains strong traces of both directors' sensibilities: the intimate childhood connection and the gentleness of spirit often associated with the former, the conceptual boldness and scientifically/philosophically oriented probing of the latter.''

McCarthy also called the movie ``an unusually ambitious'' film that hits on such themes as what it means to be human, the definition of family and the notion of creation and added: ''Viewers predisposed against highfalutin films that take themselves seriously no doubt will turn off and ask what happened to the old Spielberg. But those gagging on the glut of cinematic junk food should welcome this brilliantly made visionary work that's bursting with provocative ideas.''

New Yorker critic David Denby was far less impressed, saying that ``'A.I.' might have worked if it had been faster and lighter .... But this is a ponderous, death-of-the-world fantasy which leaves us nothing but an Oedipal robot ...''

He added, ``That Kubrick gave up on the human race will come as no surprise but Spielberg is a different story. 'A.I.' has every kind of special effect in it but this one: a deceased director rises from the crypt and drains the vitality out of a living one.''

Spielberg, in a telephone interview with Japanese journalists, declared himself pleased with the result of his collaboration with Kubrick. The two men had worked together on the idea in the early 1990s and Kubrick had suggested that Spielberg direct it. After Kubrick died in 1999, his family asked Spielberg to finish the project which he did, even writing the script himself.

Said Spielberg: ``I would speculate that Stanley would have made and told much the same story I told because I based my screenplay on a 90- page treatment (concept) Stanley had prepared from all of his own ideas.

``If Mr. Kubrick were alive today, I'd be sending him a fax about how much I loved the movie he just directed called 'A.I.' and that I felt lucky to be in the audience experiencing his movie.''

-- (New@movie.s), June 28, 2001.

So Kubrick was Spielbergian? How ahead of his time.

-- (PatriciaS@lasvegas.com), June 28, 2001.