Steven Spielberg (95 page)

T
HEN
Stanley Kubrick died in 1999, the Directors Guild of America held a memorial for its members in Hollywood. Spielberg reminisced about his long friendship with the reclusive director. Their relationship came as a surprise to most of the audience; respecting Kubrick’s secretiveness, Spielberg had never talked about it publicly before.

They met in 1979 at Thorn-EMI Studios in Borehamwood, England, when Spielberg was inspecting a sound stage he planned to use for
Raiders of the Lost Ark
. Sets were being built then for Kubrick’s film
The Shining
, and as
Spielberg
recalled, “there was a schlumpy little man with a thick beard and pants that didn’t fit and a sweater that was at least two sizes too big for him scuffling around in house shoes. He had in his hands a little periscope viewfinder, something he had just invented, and he just walked over to me and said, ‘Hey, you want to see what I just built?’ and it was Stanley. He knew who I was because he had seen my movies, but we didn’t shake hands formally. He immediately got me into looking through the viewfinder and showing me how to discover his angles and he had little cut-out cardboard figures on the models and he said, ‘This is how I plan my shots.’ Then he invited me to
dinner
the next night at his house.”

Over the next twenty years, they met only eleven other times, always at Kubrick’s secluded home in the English countryside, but they had many
telephone
conversations (Kubrick always called collect) in which the older director pumped Spielberg for technical information and they shared thoughts about all aspects of filmmaking. Kubrick would want to discuss other people’s movies and why some were box-office successes (Spielberg would say, “Stanley, I don’t have the answer why a film succeeds and why other films didn’t”).
Kubrick
would kid around and pull Spielberg’s leg, and they would talk about their children and other aspects of their personal lives, but for many years, Kubrick would never discuss his own film projects with Spielberg. “It was sort of a one-way street,” Spielberg acknowledged. “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 offered advice about how to avoid public scrutiny while filming and, as Spielberg recalled, told him “never to give the definitive thematic statement or meaning of a film because that will become the only meaning that will go down in the record books, so I would defer to him on that one!” Over the years, Kubrick became another of Spielberg’s surrogate father figures, “the greatest master I ever served.” To the amusement of the audience at the DGA memorial, Spielberg related that Kubrick had even asked him to set up a fax machine in his bedroom for secret off-hours communication, until Kate finally objected to sharing their private time with the maker of
Dr. Strangelove
.

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!”

S
PIELBERG’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 in
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.”