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Fernando
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« Reply #85 on: August 31, 2005, 10:07:01 AM » |
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Found another old article in my pc, you must take into account that this one was published before Spielberg took the project, it's a good read I think.
Kubrick's unfinished return to the future.
A scriptwriter endured a stress odyssey collaborating on the driven director's re-entry into the sci-fi realm.
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By John Coffren
Special to The Sun
When the call came in March 1995, Sara Maitland thought it was a prank. he voice on the other end of the line introduced himself as film director Stanley Kubrick, and asked, "Would you like to write a film script for me?"
"He rang me, no warning," the British author recalls. "I called up my agent and said, 'What do you mean giving up my private phone?' "
But the call and offer were both genuine. The next day a contract arrived, beginning Maitland's yearlong adventure as the screenwriter for "A.I." (Artificial Intelligence), the legendary film director's planned return to science fiction.
It was an intense, sometimes frustrating experience that would end abruptly when Kubrick died this spring while "A.I." was still in pre-production. But Maitland's recollections of her work with Kubrick offer an intimate glimpse of the iconoclastic filmmaker near the end of his career.
Every two weeks she would drive an hour from her home in Kettering, England, to Childwickbury Manor, Kubrick's palatial 172-acre estate near St. Albans in Hertfordshire.
She would pass through a series of electronic gates before Kubrick would receive her, always dressed in a blue "boiler suit," (workman's coveralls) and ratty running shoes.
The pair would retire to a billiards room where they would brainstorm. He would show her video footage of his films and other people's films and yell at her about the script.
"He was just driven," says Maitland, 49, speaking on the telephone from Kettering. "He wanted it now, he wanted it yesterday."
But she also describes Kubrick as a great conversationalist, an energetic man, physically and intellectually, with a very clear wit. "He was interested in what you knew and curious in everything. He could be very charming, very funny in an ironic way."
Two weeks into their project, Kubrick handed her a paperback copy of "Pinocchio," an English translation of "Avventure di Pinocchio" (1883) by Italian Carlo Collodi, and a script with the same title. Kubrick told her to build on that foundation.
The script read like a futuristic version of the old fairy tale. The hero was a robot named David who yearns to be a little boy, goes on a quest to win the affections of a parent -- his mother -- and enlists the aid of other robots to this end.
The script, Maitland recalls, was "ragged, [a shambles], emotionally uncertain and peopled with no characters." There was no indication of the author. Four British science fiction writers hired by Kubrick had worked on the screenplay before Maitland's involvement, the last being Ian Watson.
Kubrick had worked on "A.I.," at least in an exploratory sense, since the late 1970s or early '80s. In 1991, he set it aside, citing the visuals as "beyond the then-state-of-the art in special effects." Two years later, advances made in computer animation, like those in Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park" (1993), convinced him that special effects had finally caught up to his vision.
Although the subjects of Kubrick's films ranged from pulp fiction ("The Killing," 1956) to social satire ("Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb," 1964), it was his science fiction movie, "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968), that was perhaps his most notable -- and for many his signature -- work.
"2001" was Kubrick's expansion of the Arthur C. Clarke short story, "The Sentinel" (1951). Clarke's "cosmic burglar alarm" story was distilled into a single scene in the motion picture. Similarly, "A.I." was Kubrick's expansion of another short science fiction story, Brian Aldiss' "Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" (1969).
Kubrick felt "A.I." needed a fairy-tale quality, and wanted a storyteller to help him create a new myth. He called Maitland after reading a couple of her short stories, "The Eighth Planet" and "True North." At the time, Maitland, 49, had published more than 30 books concerning theology and fables.
Kubrick told her that "True North" was the kind of self-contained, magical world where nothing is explained that he wanted instilled into the "A.I." script. "True North" involves three characters, named simply "old woman," "young woman" and "man." The two women enjoy an isolated, idyllic, mutually dependent lifestyle in the barren North until the appearance of "man" upsets the balance and drives the women to passionate extremes of love and violence.
The real Kubrick
Maitland had heard rumors that Kubrick was a recluse, an obsessive-compulsive paranoid, but he never appeared "mad" to her. "If I were rich," she said, "I might live that way as well."
She found him professional and humane. He would always greet her with a hello but never a handshake. Lunch always consisted of tuna sandwiches served in the kitchen around a giant, central island where each of Kubrick's six dogs had a recessed bed.
He doted on his dogs and grandchildren, the only personal history that he would discuss, she said.
"He was very intent that you shouldn't talk about the work with anyone else," she said. "He had a confidential clause printed on his soul."
He told her that he didn't like to talk to journalists because whatever he said would be misrepresented. He told her he'd read a story that said he had a helicopter fly over his house and release pesticides once a week. Pointing out a fly clinging to an inside window pane, he told her: "Look around you, that's not true."
Maitland said that working with Kubrick was like working with a stern grandfather. Kubrick had to be "persuaded by ideas very quickly before he wanted time spent on them," she said.
Kubrick's theory of screenplay writing entailed breaking down the script into scenes, each of which was polished before moving on to the next. So, each time they met in the billiards room, Maitland would pitch ideas. Once an idea passed his scrutiny, she would return home to write it up, then deliver a few pages at a time on a computer disk.
These story conferences turned into twice-monthly stress tests, she says, as the director diligently looked for plot holes and inconsistencies. Only after thoroughly mulling over an idea would Kubrick have Maitland write it down.
"I frequently left in tears, in frustration and exhaustion and sad," Maitland says.
Ultimately, she believed that some of what he wanted to do with the film wasn't doable. "It's real difficult when your central character is an 8-year-old who'll never get any older because he's a robot," Maitland said. "There's no learning process. He's not going to be 9 next year."
Furthermore, Kubrick wanted the character of David to be digitally animated, which would have made the emotional connection even more difficult. "The technology and enormous time span was overwhelming the story," she says.
Kubrick's staff had warned her not to broach the subject of the director's last foray into science fiction, "A Clockwork Orange" (1971). Kubrick was disappointed in his adaptation of the 1962 Anthony Burgess novel of the same name, which depicted a brutal, nihilistic future where young men roam London mugging, stealing, carjacking and raping.
But Maitland ignored the warning. "I asked him why he hated 'A Clockwork Orange' and he said he didn't want his grandchildren to think that was their future," she says.
"He wanted to make a good future, a big futuristic myth. '2001' had been proved wrong. He was dead disappointed that we hadn't gotten any nearer. He wanted another go at the future."
Kubrick told her he thought people were scared of scientific development. Robots, he said, were "simply the evolutionary advancement of human beings," and he saw "A.I." as a means to help to bring about a cultural change of attitude.
In March 1996, Maitland presented Kubrick with a 60,000-word "novel" with minimal dialogue. "He wanted it written like a short story, or long story," she explains, adding that he'd told her, "Once we have the story, the dialogue will be easy."
Kubrick, though, was disappointed with the result. "I could not give him what he wanted," she says. "I had the wrong size of ego. I couldn't be the reflection board for him and couldn't quite assert myself. I couldn't say, 'I know how it should work. Shut up for two weeks, and I'll show you how it's done.' "
When she suggested that he take on the task himself, she says, Kubrick replied: "I'm not a writer I'm a visual person."
'Eyes Wide Shut'
At one point during their collaboration, Maitland says, Kubrick handed her a copy of "Dream Story," a 1926 novel by Arthur Schnitzler. "You should read this," he told her. "Don't you think this would make a wonderful film?"
Kubrick, it turned out, had been juggling two screenwriters and two scripts at the same time. From November 1994 to June 1996 he also worked with screenwriter Frederic Raphael on updating and transplanting the Schnitzler drama from turn-of-the-century Vienna to modern-day New York for a movie that would be called "Eyes Wide Shut."
Kubrick began shooting "Eyes Wide Shut" with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman on Nov. 4, 1996. He finished 15 months later, a modern production record, on Jan. 31, 1998. While "Eyes Wide Shut" was filming, Warner Bros. announced that Kubrick would return to "A.I." after the psycho-sexual thriller was completed.
Of course, he would not. Kubrick died at home in his sleep of a heart attack on March 7, four months before "Eyes Wide Shut" was released.
"In the back of my mind, I kept thinking that after he made this silly little film ["Eyes Wide Shut"], the telephone would ring, and Stanley would say, 'Right Sara, why aren't you here?' " she says. "He would have come back to it. I don't know if he would have come back to me."
But with Kubrick's death, Maitland thinks that "A.I." will never be filmed.
"If he couldn't make it, nobody could," she says. "I was dead proud of having done it. Pure swank. Proud that he wanted me."
Originally published on Aug 8 1999
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