ABOUT THE PRODUCTION

Producers Kathleen Kennedy and Bonnie Curtis, who had not yet worked together as producers despite their extensive experience with Spielberg, assembled a top notch crew that would thrive amid the frenzied production schedule filled with complex special effects and processes (some of which were destined to be groundbreaking in their fields) as well as the heightened secrecy factor.

Editor Michael Kahn, composer John Williams, special effects creators Stan Winston and Michael Lantieri and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski have all won Academy Awards for their work with Spielberg. Production designer Rick Carter created sets for “Jurassic Park” and “Amistad,” among other films. Wardrobe designer Bob Ringwood had worked with the filmmaker on “Empire of the Sun,” while ILM senior visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren’s experience with Spielberg dates back to “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

Advances in “virtual set design” would allow whole cities to be built in a blue screen environment. Robotics innovations would bring a teddy bear to life and give him a voice. But the most critical hurdle still lay before them: casting.

“The reason we could all take this bizarre journey, in my opinion, rested on the shoulders of Haley Joel Osment,” Curtis observes. “His performance makes it all possible. He has such a style at such an early age. His transformation within the film is so complete.” At 12-years-old during filming, Haley Joel Osment had already made his mark in a performance that earned the young actor an Oscar nomination in M. Night Shyamalan’s box-office phenomenon “The Sixth Sense.” In “A.I.,” he plays another kind of remarkable boy – this one built from silicon and synthetics. “I talked with Steven about to what extent I would make David robotic,” Osment says. “We decided that, as we progressed and I learned more as a robot about the world, my experiences would make me more and more human and less mechanical. As David learns, many of the physical characteristics fade, but some of the subtler ones never go away.” Haley’s father, Eugene Osment, is also an actor, as is Haley’s younger sister, Emily.

The elder Osment accompanied his son to set every day, preparing him for the day’s work and communicating what the day’s technical demands would be.

“I think Haley is the most extraordinary child actor to come along in a long, long time,” Kennedy says. “And I hesitate to use the word ‘child,’ as Haley is every bit the consummate professional trained actor that any adult would be. He’s quite amazing.” Jude Law, an Academy Award nominee for his work in “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” was cast to play the difficult role of Gigolo Joe, a “love mecha,” or “mechanical.” Heavy, intricate makeup was utilized in realizing Gigolo Joe, and Law studied mime and peacock movements to prepare to play a character who sings, dances and transforms himself physically at the drop of a hat. “Joe is a gigolo,” says Law. “He has various clients, some he just talks to, some he massages. Some he presumably takes a bit further. He is able to change the way in which he seduces.”

Australian actress Frances O’Connor (“Mansfield Park”) and American actor Sam Robards (“American Beauty”) were chosen for the roles of Monica and Henry Swinton, while young actor Jake Thomas (TV’s “Lizzie McGuire”) won the role of their flesh and blood son, Martin. Veteran actor Brendan Gleeson (“The General”) portrays robot hunter Lord Johnson-Johnson, and Academy Award winner William Hurt plays the role of Professor Hobby. Veteran announcer, voiceover artist and actor Jack Angel was selected as the mature, assuring and worldly wise voice of Teddy, David’s supertoy teddy bear, protector and companion.

With the cast in place, the filmmakers’ focus turned to the creation of groundbreaking special effects and technical wizardry inherent in a design of a future that, in many ways, had never been attempted before in a motion picture. With such a tight production schedule, each proposed day of shooting “A.I.” would be a challenge of technology meeting artistry – with intricate makeups, elaborate mechanical special effects, and a cutting-edge “virtual set.” Actors would need to focus on creating something rarely attempted in their craft: embodying or reacting to synthetic life forms.

Though the production was limited in prep and production time, the fact that Spielberg penned the script helped streamline the technical demands. “Steven was enormously helpful in articulating what he needed,” says Kennedy. “He spent from four to six hours a day with the art department going over storyboards and working with models. Everything, in a sense, had to be designed, fabricated and invented by Steven. Then, communicating that to all departments is really what the challenge of producing is all about.” Spielberg first gathered with key personnel such as visual effects supervisors Dennis Muren and Scott Farrar from ILM, and production designer Rick Carter. Hours were spent meticulously pouring over Chris Baker’s early storyboards, structuring the look of a newly devised future.

“Steven showed me over a thousand pieces of art that Stanley had been working with since he began his work on the project,” Dennis Muren remembers. “Steven had the same sensibility as Stanley visually and he wanted to carry through with his view of the future. Steven felt he should be true to that, because Stanley was so right on in his concept of the future. It became a wonderful marriage of ideas.”

Soon, ILM was constructing over 100 practical models as well as another 100 computer models to synchronize and bring the worlds of “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” to life. Conceptual artist Baker relocated to the United States and spent several weeks at ILM’s facilities in northern California collaborating on the realization of his designs.

In Los Angeles, production designer Rick Carter broke the film down into three segments in order to create a smooth technical flow. “I thought of this film as a sort of evolution of movies,” Carter explains. “It starts as a straight ahead domestic drama, switches to a sort of road picture that incorporates both real and digital images, then expands into an almost entirely digital world. But they are all part of one journey that forms the basis of David’s experience in this movie.”

As real sets were being planned and constructed, robotic and creature effects creator Stan Winston, Dennis Muren and Scott Farrar and their ILM team, along with special effects master Michael Lantieri huddled with Spielberg to brainstorm and create an all-new world of robots. Winston and Lantieri also collaborated this way on another groundbreaking film: “Jurassic Park.” With “Jurassic Park,” they had created a realm of dinosaurs that used an expert fusion of practical and computerized effects that had never been seen before. Audiences were stunned by the realism achieved in that film.

“A.I. was probably the most confidential, under wraps project of my career,” says Winston, who kept the “Jurassic Park” creatures under top secret protection during production of that film. “We were designing the world of robots, and I knew very little about the script at the beginning. But I don’t need to know any more from Steven Spielberg than that he wants me involved. I’m there with him.” “One great thing about working with Steven,” echoes Michael Lantieri, “is that I always feel like all my efforts go on to the screen. In ‘A.I.,’ there is not one effect that isn’t cutting edge. It takes someone brave enough like Steven who believes he can make it all work.”

One immediate hurdle would be the creation of Teddy, David’s supertoy bear who acts as his voice of reason and guide through the many perilous adventures the robot boy faces on his quest. A major character in the film, Teddy’s complex combination of puppetry and digitizing presented its own set of problems for the design crew. Accommodating Teddy meant designing practical sets that could house several operating technicians who required moveable flooring and special lighting. In instances where practical operation was impossible, such as seeing Teddy run or jump, ILM’s computer division had to find a way to match the real Teddy exactly. “The combination of the amount of screen time, the range of performance needed, his importance to the story and the time crunch we were under made Teddy one of the most difficult challenges we’ve ever faced,” Winston says. “We wanted to do as much as we could on stage to lessen the CGI burden while attaining a seamless blend of live action and computer imaging.”

Teddy is portrayed by, in essence, a group of Teddies. The ‘hero,’ or main practical bear used in close-ups and with actors, played the principal role. The hero bear houses 50 servo motors in his small body. 24 are located in the head alone, many controlling his intricate facial movements. After all, this is a teddy that talks. “He is a wise old bear,” says veteran actor Jack Angel (“Toy Story 2,” “A Bug’s Life,” “The Iron Giant”), who was chosen by Spielberg to voice Teddy. “He tries to keep David straight in this mean cruel world he’s tossed into. He’s a very sophisticated robot and he reacts like a human does. I had a great time watching other people react to him.”

“Teddy is not only animatronic; he can think,” explains producer Bonnie Curtis. “He’s your protector, the ultimate plaything. He’s totally loyal, he’s not going to fight with you. For a kid, he’s the best kind of sidekick. He’s sarcastic, he’s funny and he’s smart.” For actors such as Frances O’Connor, working with such a high tech teddy bear demanded a whole new dimension of performance, especially for an actress who was used to working in period dramas such as “Mansfield Park” and “Madame Bovary.” “I’ve never done anything like acting with him before,” says O’Connor. “I mean, he reacts like a live performer. It was surreal. And, it was somewhat difficult to incorporate him into scenes at times because of the physical problems involved, such as sitting around the dinner table. Because wherever Teddy went, several technicians were present as well to operate him.”

The Stan Winston Studios created six versions of Teddy, some with specialized functions. One was created to be lifted and carried by members of the cast. There was a “stealth Teddy,” a “stunt Teddy,” as well as some half-Teddies. Several of the Teddy faces were designed to create a singular expression, such as a smile or frown.

One of Haley Joel Osment’s challenges was carrying the heavy bear in many scenes. Teddy weighs over thirty pounds, much of it attributed to the radio-controlled servo motors housed in his body. “He really was a supertoy,” says Osment. “Because he had so much machinery inside, he could do so many things. He could curl up, wiggle his nose and ears, even grab things. I just completely forgot he wasn’t real.”

For the staff at ILM, creating a seamless Teddy presented unique challenges. For one thing, the bear used for computer modeling was pristine, while the hero bear used on stage was beginning to show a bit of wear and tear. The practical and computer-generated Teddys had to match completely, hair for hair, so ILM was constantly refining their ‘Teddy technique.’

“One of my key CG supervisors, Barry Armour, was assigned to match the actual look of the Stan Winston bear,” explains visual effects supervisor Scott Farrar. “Another, Tom Martinek, supervised the lighting and rendering. But matching the hair is always a challenge. The giant ape in ‘Mighty Joe Young’ only had an average of 700,000 hairs, and they were a foot long. This little pipsqueak teddy bear has a million and a half little hairs, and each of those has eight curve segments to it. That’s 12 million manipulations to worry about!”

But Teddy is just one robot in a film populated with many versions of them. From the vision of a near future that integrates robots into our daily lives came endless possibilities from which to create fantastic new robotic forms. This again necessitated several departments working in tandem. Some robots were rendered by human actors with minimal make-up or prosthetics, like the characters played by Haley Joel Osment and Jude Law. Others were portrayed by physically-challenged actors operating limb attachments and other mechanisms. Finally, a few robots were entirely mechanical.

Many of the innovations came from using blue field masking of some parts of the robots that were later enhanced by computer imagery. With this technique, the audience will experience the sensation of looking inside a living, working being and seeing the whirring mechanisms below the synthetic flesh.

“One of the advantages of this style of working together was being able to create these shocking images,” says Dennis Muren. “You see what looks like a perfect face, but as it turns you see it’s hollow and full of machinery. Some are translucent, with some form of life force within them. We used our computer imagery to augment the fine work the Stan Winston crew had designed with Steven.”

Many of the robots were created to perform specific functions: as nannies, gardeners, road workers, welders, butlers, security guards, etc. Like automobiles, many fall into disrepair and are junked. But the film’s designers decided that in the world of “A.I.,” each would come with a survival drive built in. Therefore, discarded robots would forever be searching for a new arm to replace a damaged one, much like people pick over a junkyard for old parts for their machines today.

To bring this illusion to life, several actors with missing limbs were employed to play “damaged” robots. They were fitted with special prosthetic limbs and armatures, giving them the ability to fully embody their roles.

“It was such a pleasure to work with these actors with special abilities,” says Stan Winston. “What some saw as disadvantages physically became advantages for the roles they played. One amputee, Dave Smith, is a friend of mine. He played the Welder Robot, where one of his arms can actually become a welding tool. These were some of the most inspiring actors on the set and it was a joy to work with them.”

Make-up designer Ve Neill collaborated with Winston on the makeup design for these “damaged” robots. Once wardrobe and prosthetics were in place, the robot actors would sit in the chairs of Neill’s “Robot World” makeup area for several hours as makeup technicians added intricate touches to each.

“My relationship with Stan Winston is really great,” says Neill. “We’ve done several films together and he’s always so much fun. He hires the best people, who are always incredible technicians. This makes my job easier, to say the least. When we filmed the scenes with all the robots working, we would have as many as 30 makeup technicians working at once to prepare them and keep them touched up. Some of the robots took as long as three hours to make up.”

Spielberg, Winston and Neill wanted much subtler makeup designs for Gigolo Joe and David. “We did several tests on Gigolo Joe, some with full-face prosthetic devices,” Neill explains. “But it looked too surrealistic. It didn’t reflect Jude’s warmth and friendliness, which Steven felt was very important to the role. We came up with a simple prosthetic jaw piece and a plasticized facial makeup flexible enough so that it wouldn’t crack or melt during filming.”

For production designer Rick Carter, the film’s three distinct segments offered different complexities in the set building process. The first third of the film takes place in the subtly futuristic, circular Swinton home. The second phase involves David and Gigolo Joe’s odyssey that brings them through dark forests and shantytowns to the brutal carnival atmosphere of Flesh Fair and finally to the decadent brilliance of Rouge City. In the film’s final third, many digital enhancements were employed to create the underwater and ice sequences in a world drowning in sea water thanks to melted ice caps due to global warming.

Among the many challenges faced by Carter and his crew, Rouge City proved to be one of the most complex sets to design and build. Some of the City’s buildings were built to scale. Others were created digitally and filmed on a special virtual blue screen stage. The main set was constructed to hide a pulley system that Michael Lantieri’s special mechanical effects crew utilized to create the chaos of an “amphibicopter” gone amok in one crucial scene.

“Originally, we had a bigger stage,” Carter reveals. “We were going to spend a million dollars more to create Rouge City. But it became clear that this money would be better used by ILM to digitally create a more expansive city than we could ever build. We would re-dress the set often, so that you really never knew where you would be in it. ILM came up with a virtual digital space on a blue screen stage to further the illusion of a vast city, which was quite groundbreaking technically.”

The blue screen set was unique in that it was designed as a virtual digital environment in which actors could walk through a set and be seen 360 degrees on a monitor which housed all the surrounding scenery in sync. This was achieved by mounting a series of hundreds of unique bar-coded targets on the ceiling of the soundstage that acted as monitors of points in space. When a camera moved about the set, the monitor showed the entire “dressed” set on special software that integrated the actors with their programmed environment. “We had about 800 targets on the ceiling,” says Muren. “Each one had its own separate identity. A video camera scanned them while its software identified them. This way, we could generate the buildings around the actors digitally, giving Steven more choices for shooting. It’s really never been done this way. The technology was there, but we just needed a reason to use it.”

Rouge City was constructed on a large soundstage under the direction of Carter and set designer Jim Teegarden, using many of Chris Baker’s more erotic and outlandish designs for buildings. A few sly references to Stanley Kubrick’s films were woven into the set as well, including a milk bar like the one found in “A Clockwork Orange.” Also located in Rouge City is Dr. Know’s information boutique, a unique futuristic store in which a hologram resembling Albert Einstein appears to customers to distribute snippets of knowledge for the right price.

“The character of ‘Dr. Know’ I always saw as the information equivalent of ‘Ronald McDonald’ and you would find the franchise almost anywhere – instead of fast food, you could get fast information and be entertained at the same time.”