Stanley Kubrick: Conceived AI more than 20 years ago

Kubrick had a close friendship with Steven Spielberg, and had told the director of Jaws and ET that he would be best suited to filming AI.

In a news conference to reporters in Tokyo via satellite from Virginia, Spielberg chose not to talk a great deal about his forthcoming movie.

Instead, the main subject of the conference was Spielberg's self-professed debt to Kubrick.

Short story

The director said he had "worked hard to achieve a cinematic collaboration by bringing a vision of Stanley Kubrick's to the screen".

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.

The original idea, based on Brian Aldiss' short story Super Toys Last All Summer Long, was conceived by Kubrick more than 20 years ago, and the creative reins were taken up by Spielberg after Kubrick's death in 1999.

One question from the Japanese journalists was whether Kubrick's version of AI would have differed greatly from Spielberg's.

Spielberg said: "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 Stanley had prepared from all of his own ideas."

'Lucky'

AI is the first screenplay Spielberg has written since Close Encounters of the Third Kind in 1983.

Steven Spielberg: "We have to be careful what we dream about"

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

AI's success at the box office is not guaranteed despite the star presence of Jude Law and Haley Joel Osment, because it is by no means a typical Steven Spielberg film.

The picture is a darkstory of an abandoned robotic child, the first in the world programmed to love, searching to reunite with his adoptive human mother.

Critical reception has been lukewarm.

Themes

Time magazine's film critic wrote that AI "engrosses without quite enthralling" while Newsweek describes the film as "a rich, strange problematical movie full of wild tonal shifts".

Spielberg said one of the themes of the film is that "we have to be very careful what we dream about and what we create".

He said: "We should be very careful not to attempt to compete with God all the time."

Spielberg was in Virginia, where he is shooting his next film, Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise.

AI is released in Japan on June 30 and a day earlier in the United States.