A.I. ALL IMAGINATIONS SPIELBERG ADDS HIS HEART OF 'E.T.' TO KUBRICK'S BRAINCHILD.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

Film Writer Steven Spielberg and the late Stanley Kubrick not only share credit for the new movie ``A.I. Artificial Intelligence,'' they share a universe in common as filmmakers.

Excepting, rather crucially, how each of them views the universe.

``Steven does, very comfortably, go to the heart,'' observes Spielberg's longtime producer Kathleen Kennedy. ``He's somebody that looks at the good side of humanity; I don't think that Steven looks at the world with a lot of cynicism. He manages to retain a kind of innocence, which I think is why he tells a lot of his best stories through children. What's interesting is that Stanley Kubrick's work has so often been described as cold and detached and Steven is just the opposite.''

Kubrick's brother-in-law and executive producer Jan Harlan concurs, to a point.

``There is a thread going through all of Stanley's films, and that is human nature, the frailty of it,'' Harlan observes. ``One thing he always said was that we are all governed by our emotions. We fancy ourselves, sometimes, that we are governed by our intellect or analytical thinking, but it's not true. When the s--- hits the fan, if you'll forgive my expression, our emotions kick in. We know that from relationships, our children ... Whenever there is a crucial thing in our lives, it's the emotions.''

It's no wonder that ``A.I.'' - which Kubrick spent decades developing from Brian Aldiss' short science-fiction story ``Super-Toys Last All Summer Long'' and Spielberg scripted and directed following the older filmmaker's death in March 1999 - fascinated both men. On a near-future Earth where global warming has melted the polar ice caps, humans and very sophisticated androids (called, respectively, orgas and mechas) interact in intimate, confusing and startling ways.

Haley Joel Osment (``The Sixth Sense'') plays David, an advanced-model boy mecha whom an unhappy couple (Sam Robards and Frances O'Connor) try out while their real son lies in a cryogenic coma. David bonds closely, as he is programmed to, with his mother; but when her real son is miraculously cured and returns home, David is squeezed out of the family and into a frightening world of ``flesh fairs'' (where threatened humans watch mechas being destroyed in violent ways), techno-hedonism (Gigolo Joe, a ``love mecha'' played by Jude Law, guides the sheltered David through a maze of virtual pleasures and terrors) and submerged cities, where experiments in advancing artificial intelligence even further are conducted.

And through it all, David only wants to be loved.

The material's appeal to both Kubrick's analytical interest in the nature of emotion and Spielberg's unparalleled gift for manipulating feelings on screen is evident. And the resulting film's most intriguing aspect is the way it seesaws between their two very different approaches to matters that stirred their deepest creative passions.

Both technical geniuses, special effects pioneers and the rare directors who were bigger stars than most of the actors in their movies, Kubrick and Spielberg enjoyed their greatest popular successes with science fiction films that changed the course of the movie industry - and forever imprinted their artistic signature in most people's minds.

For Kubrick, it was ``2001: A Space Odyssey'' in 1968; for Spielberg, the 1982 ``E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.'' Kubrick's clinical, sweeping vision of alien-informed evolution opened cinema up to intellectual speculation and formal abstraction that Hollywood had not come within parsecs of addressing previously. Spielberg's warm, reassuring parable of connection between a lonely suburban kid and a wrinkly but relatable castaway from outer space exposed exciting new vistas - to studio executives, anyway - of profitable audience massaging (for years, ``E.T.'' was far and away the highest-grossing film ever released).

But something else happened as Spielberg matured; the artist in him ascended to the same prominence that the master craftsman and showman occupied, evidenced by such serious-minded projects as ``Empire of the Sun,'' ``Schindler's List,'' ``Amistad'' and his last picture, the 1998 ``Saving Private Ryan.'' And by 1994, when Kubrick first asked Spielberg to direct ``A.I.,'' that most independent and accomplished of film artists was clearly in decline (Kubrick completed only four problematic works - ``Barry Lyndon,'' ``The Shining,'' ``Full Metal Jacket'' and ``Eyes Wide Shut'' - in the last quarter century of his life).

Though he'd always longed to tackle the technical challenges of bringing ``A.I.'' - which opens Friday - to the screen, Kubrick ultimately realized that Spielberg was temperamentally better-suited to the material.

``Kubrick couldn't have made 'A.I.' in the '80s, when he first told me about the story,'' Spielberg put it, carefully, in a New York Times interview. ``He sent me his first treatment then, and I said, 'How are you going to do some of this stuff?' And he said, 'I don't know if we can yet. But we will be able to, soon.' Now, he's right, anything is possible. With the computer, you can do anything, you can show anything. The only limit is your own imagination.''

But Spielberg evidently couldn't imagine directing his admired friend's pet project while Kubrick was still around to potentially do it himself.

``I would have been happy to shoot whatever Stanley gave me,'' Spielberg continued. ``And I would have, until I realized this was an idea and a subject that really was something Stanley needed to see through to the end. So diplomatically and very carefully, I extracted myself from the project about two months after he got me to say yes to directing it.''

But after Kubrick's death, Harlan offered Spielberg a wealth of preliminary materials, including close to 1,000 conceptual drawings, if he'd agree to make the film. Once he decided he could write the screenplay - his first such effort since ``Close Encounters of the Third Kind'' back in the late 1970s - Spielberg chose to make ``A.I.'' his first film in three years.

And by most accounts, he was highly attuned to his departed pal's sensibilities throughout the shoot.

``There was a lot of discussion on the set about Stanley Kubrick, and you can see the style of his movies in certain dark shots of this film,'' observes young Osment. ``Steven would say, 'Stanley would have shot it like this,' and then do it that way. The connection Stanley had with this film is one of the things that makes it different from anything anyone's ever seen.''

Law agreed.

``There's a feel to the film, a look to it and questions posed in it that I think fit very cleanly in with the questions and worlds that Kubrick was fascinated with,'' adds Law, whose Gigolo Joe was toned down from the graphically efficient sex machine of Kubrick's 90-page story treatment to a more PG-13-friendly fellow in Spielberg's script. ``How far is technology going to take us? How far are we going to allow ourselves to go with the technology we create? And how much responsibility are we going to claim for that technology?''

Neither actor, however, has any doubt that ``A.I.'' primarily reflects the sensibility of the man who physically made it.

``This film is about the love between a mother and a son,'' notes Osment, identifying a fundamental Spielberg theme - and then another. ``But it's set against a very complex future world that makes us think the things it shows us could possibly happen.''

It's also a film about cherishing the time you have with loved ones.

``If anything, this is a film that encourages you to grab your time with your loved ones and embrace it,'' adds Law, essentially summing up the overriding Spielberg credo.

Perhaps the film's most sublime blending of a Kubrick/Spielberg vision occurs in the Rouge City sequence. Joe takes David to the futuristic, Vegas-like pleasure center in search of the mythical Blue Fairy, which the boybot has fixated on from the Pinocchio story that he hopes to emulate.

Besides marrying Kubrickian decadence (``A Clockwork Orange'' references abound) to a clean, Spielbergish theme park ambience, Rouge City was created with the aid of a brand-new, virtual visualization system that enabled director and crew to watch, on monitors in 360 degrees, the entire cityscape as it would ultimately be rendered by computer-generated images.

Talk about artificial intelligence; you can just picture both filmmakers gleefully exploring every possibility of this new tool.

``Steven termed it pie-in-the-sky,'' Kennedy says of the system, which worked in coordination with practical facades built on a soundstage. ``It had 800 marks that literally looked like targets all over the ceiling of the stage. What the camera was able to do, through a system very much like a global positioning satellite system, was send a beam that would read these targets, then send information back to a computer that told it where the camera was in three-dimensional space.

``What it means is that the real opportunity to creatively work within a digital environment is now here. You can now make small adjustments within a digital environment just like you can within a real room and know what that will look like, instead of what we've had to do with a handful of guys like Steven who could truly, abstractly see what it is they may see in their heads.''

Harlan reveals that, had the ever-painstaking Kubrick gotten around to directing ``A.I'' himself, he'd have wanted to take the digital magic audaciously further.

``He wanted to wait until computer graphics exploded enough to enable him to create David digitally,'' Harlan explains. ``He wouldn't use the option that Steven used - namely, using a real boy - because he took so long to shoot a film. He joked that by the time he would be finished, the kid would have a beard.''

Joked on the square; Kubrick did take more than two years to shoot ``Eyes Wide Shut.'' Time, eventually, ran out altogether, and while close associate Harlan is certain an all-Kubrick ``A.I.'' would have been a very different creature, he is pleased to see much of his friend in the cinematic love child Spielberg's delivered.

``I would say it's a true amalgamation of these two people,'' Harlan says. ``When I saw the film for the first time, I was just totally gobsmacked, because I recognized the whole stream of the Kubrick story, as it was, and it had Steven's handwriting over every single frame. I know that Stanley would have really applauded it.

``But although I can't speak for him, obviously, had Stanley made it it would have been a very different film. He would now be battling with the ratings board for an R rating! But the concept, the fundamental ideas, are still the same.''

Kennedy agreed that the heart of the film is still very simple.

``The hybrid nature of this movie is fascinating in its kind of intellectual approach to a lot of these big concepts, but at the same time the heart of the story is very simple and very specific,'' Kennedy says. ``The combination of the two has made the film very accessible. This is not to say that, had Stanley made the movie, it wouldn't have been accessible. But I don't think that it would have quite gone in the direction that Steven took it, and I hope that that makes it something more people will want to go experience.''

CAPTION(S):

4 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) Haley Joel Osment, left, and Jude Law in ``A.I.''

(2 -- 3 -- color) Steven Spielberg, left, chats with Haley Joel Osment on the set of ``A.I. Artificial Intelligence,'' scheduled to open Friday. Below, Jude Law, left, plays Gigolo Joe, a ``love mecha,'' who guides the sheltered David (Haley Joel Osment) through a maze of virtual pleasures and terrors in ``A.I. Artificial Intelligence.''

(4) The late Stanley Kubrick spent decades developing ``A.I.'' from a short science-fiction story.