The on-again, off-again story of Stanley Kubrick's new vision of thinking machines.
Some are born to greatness, others have it thrust upon them, and still others have it programmed into their operating systems. Such was the case with HAL, the iconoclastic digital antagonist of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Debuting in a science fiction cinema whose conception of artificial intelligence amounted to clunky chunks of rolling metal like Robby and Gort, the sophisticated, subtly neurotic HAL redefined Hollywood's portrayal of thinking machines. It should surprise no one that Kubrick - who has applied his skills to a variety of material, from pulp to period drama - now appears ready to turn his attention back to the themes of man and automation. True, he's currently directing the conventionally fabulous Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut, but it's another, more enigmatic project that has his fans on the Net checking in regularly to alt.movies.kubrick.
For almost a decade, Kubrick has been developing a film project known as AI (as in artificial intelligence), which promises to graduate from computers to an android who thinks, is self-aware, and ages. Inspired by "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long," the short story by British author Brian Aldiss (see page 134), AI is set in a future when scientists have, as Aldiss writes, "at last found a way to link computer circuitry with synthetic flesh."
"One of the fascinating questions that arises in envisioning computers more intelligent than men is at what point machine intelligence deserves the same consideration as biological intelligence," Kubrick mused in a 1971 interview for the book Stanley Kubrick Directs.
"Once a computer learns by experience as well as by its original programming, and once it has access to much more information than any number of human geniuses might possess, the first thing that happens is that you don't really understand it anymore, and you don't know what it's doing or thinking about. 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."
Kubrick followers will recall that for all the imaginative spark of Arthur C. Clarke's The Sentinel - the story that inspired 2001 - it contains no HAL, no Jupiter mission, no enlightened, club-wielding apes. There's no telling how Kubrick's imagination will transform "Super-Toys." Aldiss says that in the early '90s, he and the director made two collaborative attempts to turn his story into a script. "I can't tell you how many directions we went. My favorite was when David and Teddy got exiled to Tin City, a place where the old model robots, like old cars, were living out their days. Stanley definitely had the ambition to make another big science fiction movie, but in the end, we didn't get anywhere. Stanley called in Arthur Clarke and asked him to provide a scenario, but he didn't like that, either."
Kubrick, meanwhile, is as secretive as ever about his plans and insisted that powerful Warner Bros. co-CEO Terry Semel and Kubrick's then-agent, Michael Ovitz, fly to England to read the AI material under his personal supervision. The notion inspired awe and amusement in Hollywood, where the proud tradition of kicking "geniuses" around begins with D. W. Griffith and continues up through von Stroheim and Welles. Kubrick, who was born in the Bronx, has for the last 35 years lived a secluded existence in a palatial British estate in Hertfordshire.
Ovitz says there was a method to the madness. "It's true; he doesn't feel comfortable sending his scripts out, but we also wanted to have everyone in the same room, and you know Stanley doesn't fly. By the next day, Terry and I had a deal for Stanley to make the movie."
Of course, some information always leaks out - in this case, news that Kubrick has set AI in a future in which the polar ice caps have melted, drowning some well-known coastal cities such as New York. After having a special effects epiphany while watching Jurassic Park in the summer of 1993, he contacted the movie's digital effects supervisor, Dennis Muren of Industrial Light & Magic. Kubrick wanted animatics depicting computer-generated fly-throughs of a submerged Manhattan, its skyscrapers rising totemically from the tidal stew. Muren obliged (and flew to England to present the work).
Though it was reportedly well received, Kubrick was keeping his options open. In the summer of 1994, James Cameron flew to England when Kubrick asked the younger filmmaker to show him True Lies. "I was really honored, 'Oooh, Stanley Kubrick wants to see my movie!'" remembers Cameron. "But it turns out that he does this with everybody. He's like a brain vampire. He likes to get people and suck what they're doing out of their heads." The two viewed the film on an editing machine at Kubrick's home and talked about the effects shot by shot.
As for AI, Cameron reports that "Kubrick was interested in Digital Domain, passingly, to do some visual effects, and he showed me some of the artwork for AI. There was a lot of water interaction stuff - very difficult." But beyond that, Cameron is as tight-lipped as Kubrick. "It's his movie," says Cameron. "He can talk about it if he wants to."
But apparently he doesn't. Word began circulating that Kubrick planned to do all the AI effects himself, in his home workshop. The filmmaker has been known to operate his own handheld camera, and his hands-on enthusiasm is legendary. Kubrick will call up a given technology company - the manufacturer of a sound system, a film stock, or a piece of camera equipment - have the thing delivered, test it exhaustively, and notably not pay for it, explained one industry observer. Then Kubrick will send back extensive notes on what the machine can and can't do. Though this R&D ethic causes some grumbles in the industry, it works - companies develop new technology specifically for him.
In this case, Kubrick got the local boys from Quantel to set him up with a demo of the Domino, a computer graphics workstation known for its ease of use and real-time playback. Although the machine was said to have enthralled the filmmaker, his plan to do the special effects himself seems to have been scrapped; Kubrick put in another call to ILM this fall, this time requesting that Muren fly to England to read the script he had written himself. Muren, well under way with Steven Spielberg on The Lost World (aka Jurassic Park part two), declined. "Stanley's been having conversations with Dennis for years," says an ILM staffer. "It's hard to feel like the train's about to leave the station."
Will the 68-year-old Kubrick ever realize this high tech opus? According to some of the more out-there speculation, he's already begun. One rumor - popular on the Net - holds that he's filmed two short segments of AI since the project began almost a decade ago to incorporate the natural aging of his young star, said to be Jurassic Park's Joseph Mazzello. While a spokesperson for Mazzello confirmed that in 1993 there was a deal brokered between the actor and director, she said it was for another stalled Kubrick project, The Aryan Papers, and had nothing to do with AI.
A more plausible scenario, circulating not on the Net but in Hollywood, is that Warner Bros. - gun-shy after lackluster returns on Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket - balked at the big-budget bucks it would take to film AI and convinced Kubrick to first tackle the commercially bankable Eyes Wide Shut. Then they'd set him loose in the toy shop.
One hopes, when all is said and done, that Kubrick still has the desire to play. "I have a feeling, having worked with him, that he hasn't got the dashing confidence of youth," says Aldiss. "But of course, with age, you acquire a different sort of confidence." The director's creative vision, meanwhile, is clearer than ever. "Stanley embraces android technology," Aldiss notes, "and thinks it might eventually take over - and be an improvement over the human race."
