Hey, it’s #ThrowbackThursday and each week we look to the past and highlight something in cinema history that’s fascinating, amusing, perhaps something you never knew or have seen, you name it.
For this week’s #ThrowbackThursday, we bring you this diamond-in-the-rough interview with the great Steven Spielberg, in which he discusses his relationship with master filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. Very much a maestro-studente relationship, it would lead to Spielberg taking the reigns of Kubrick’s final project, “A.I.,” after the legendary director’s untimely death.
Spielberg and Kubrick met years ago at Elstree Studios when Spielberg was scouting locations for “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Kubrick was shooting a little-known film titled “The Shining.” Touring the grandiose set pieces of the Overlook Hotel with the maestro was like receiving the ultimate tutorial. Fast forward 19 years and Kubrick and Spielberg are close friends, discussing Kubrick’s latest project, “A.I. Artificial Intelligence.”
“Stanley said, ‘Ok, get a fax machine with a dedicated line that nobody can read,” Spielberg said in the interview about Kubrick’s bizarre strategy of sharing a script. “‘Where in your house is the safest, most secure room? You must have a secure room somewhere in your house. You must live in a mansion, don’t you, Steven? You must live in this huge mansion with safe rooms. With telephones and steel walls.’…And I said, ‘well the only real safe room I have is my bedroom.’ He said, ‘fine, you put the machine in your bedroom. Don’t let anybody read what I write to you. And when I’m done writing, and you’re done reading it, and you’ve memorized it, I want you to tear it up, or better yet, shred it. Do you have a shredder? If you don’t have a shredder, just burn it. And I did this. I got into this CIA bubble with Stanley.”
In the interview, Spielberg goes into depth about an eight-hour telephone conversation about AI, highlights Kubrick’s technical mastery, his groundbreaking narrative style of storytelling, goes into the devastating news of his death and his eternal legacy, as well as much more.
Spielberg let slip that Kubrick wrote the script for a biopic about Napoleon in 1961, which he is currently developing into a miniseries. A release date is not yet known for this project, which is still in its early stages. For more fascinating tidbits on Kubrick, check out the clip below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBEC_NMTFhg
