The writing of A.I. involved collaborators and documents of different kinds. An original story, a narrative treatment, and the screenplay for the 2001 film are not equivalent versions of the same text.
Expanding a brief source requires creating a new structure
Supertoys Last All Summer Long gave Kubrick a premise about an artificial boy and his desire for emotional recognition. Its brevity left the construction of a feature-length film narrative open. The work was not simply a matter of deciding what to cut. It required finding events, relationships, and transitions that could sustain a film without losing the conflict that had sparked interest in the source.
Brian Aldiss took part in developing this material. The UAL archive groups his proposals with texts by other writers in section SK/18/3/1. This grouping documents a collaborative process, but it does not turn all of these documents into pages of the final screenplay. Each contribution must be identified by the kind of work preserved and the stage to which it belongs.
In Plumbing Stanley Kubrick, Ian Watson described a period of intensive collaboration from May 1990 to January 1991. He recalled writing material that he later discussed with the director. His account offers a glimpse of a process of proposals and responses, closer to ongoing revision than to submitting a story that was accepted unchanged. It is a participant’s recollection, not a complete record of every conversation.
Among the works Watson associated with this process were Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio and Hans Moravec’s Mind Children. The references served different purposes: one offered a journey of transformation and desire; the other raised questions about machines and intelligence. Their presence does not mean that A.I. adapted both books in the same way, or that every idea in the finished film can automatically be attributed to one of them.
Treatments are not the same as a shooting-ready screenplay
A treatment can organize a story without determining every line of dialogue or specific action. This flexibility makes it possible to discuss major decisions before locking in a scene. It also means that successive versions may retain incompatible elements. Writing screenplays and treatments requires attention to this provisional state: a document shows that something was considered, not necessarily that it remained approved at the end of the process.
Sara Maitland’s materials provide concrete examples of this in-between stage of writing. File SK/18/3/1/1 preserves treatments and correspondence. A submission dated February 15, 1995, includes chapters titled Heavy Flesh Festival, Lalitha, and Zero Zone. These titles help identify a working document; they should not be treated as an exact index of the film released six years later.
Some items also have uncertain attributions in the catalog. When a description suggests a possible author, that qualification is part of the record. It is not right to turn it into certainty to complete a lineage of scenes. Collaborative writing can leave unsigned notes, overlapping revisions, and materials that were later rearranged; a reliable account acknowledges when the archive does not make it possible to separate every contributor’s work.
The development history also cannot be reduced to a competition among writers. One proposal may raise a problem that another treatment addresses differently. The absence of a passage from the final film does not prove that its author had no influence on the project’s questions. Likewise, thematic similarity alone is not enough to attribute a specific scene without an identifiable documentary comparison.
Pinocchio, Affection, and Authorship: Questions Across the Versions
The reference to Pinocchio changes the scale of the conflict. A need for affection can become a quest driven by the expectation of transformation. This raises a distinction between changing physically and being recognized by someone else. The dramatic interest emerges when the character believes that changing his condition will resolve a relationship whose outcome also depends on other people’s choices.
This reading does not require taking a position on artificial consciousness. The story can make David’s desire visible while leaving questions about how he was made. Adapting literary sources makes it possible to examine this combination without reducing it to a technical debate about real-world artificial intelligence systems. A reference’s function within a work of fiction does not depend on its acting as a scientific prediction.
The 2001 film establishes its credits: Steven Spielberg is listed as director and screenwriter; Ian Watson, for the story for the screen; and Brian Aldiss, for the original story. These are more reliable facts for identifying the finished work than an intuitive assignment of passages to collaborators. The credits do not explain the entire history of the project, but they cannot be ignored when presenting the film as a final Kubrick screenplay filmed without intervention.
The project’s transition to Spielberg distinguishes narrative continuity from the actual filmmaking. Keeping a premise developed earlier does not mean keeping all its dialogue, duration, or visual form. The same premise can produce different effects when the performance, music, or relationships between scenes change. That is why the origins of an idea and the authorship of its staging should be examined separately.
A.I.’s development is best described as a documented series of narrative experiments. Aldiss contributed the source and took part in expanding it; Watson and Maitland worked at different stages; Spielberg wrote the screenplay that went before the cameras. There are documents that can be compared across these contributors, as well as areas that cannot be attributed precisely. This distinction recognizes the collaboration without inventing a list of exclusive owners for every emotion in the film.
References: University of the Arts London, Stanley Kubrick Archive, development of A.I., SK/18/3/1; Sara Maitland materials, SK/18/3/1/1 and SK/18/3/1/1/3. Ian Watson, Plumbing Stanley Kubrick. Amblin, credits for A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001).
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