The two-time Oscar-winning director is going to pick up where his late pal Stanley Kubrick left off on a sci-fi project called A.I., it was announced today.
Spielberg will write and direct the film for Warners Bros., with production slated to begin July 10.
"Stanley had a vision for this project that was evolving over 18 years," Spielberg says in a statement. "I am intent on bringing to the screen as much of that vision as possible along with elements of my own."
Kubrick bought the rights to A.I. (short for Artificial Intelligence), a short story by author Brian Aldiss, in 1982. Kubrick had planned the film--which revolves around a childless woman who adopts an android that resembles a five-year-old boy--as his follow-up to Eyes Wide Shut, even going so far as to commission Industrial Light and Magic to do some tests with robots and shoot some footage with a child actor. The film reportedly had a $100 million-plus budget. However, the project was shelved after the director died last March.
It was Kubrick himself that thought Spielberg should helm the project. "During preparations for A.I., Stanley came to realize that Steven would actually be the ideal director for the project, and I know they talked extensively about a collaboration," says Jan Harlan, Kubrick's brother-in-law. Harlan, who produced all of Kubrick's films since Barry Lyndon, will serve as coexecutive producer on A.I..
Spielberg, who is on the mend after his recent kidney surgery, confirmed last September that he read "the very long treatment" and had "seen the storyboards" for the picture but was too busy with other projects (a big-screen versions of Harry Potter and Memoirs of a Geisha and his long-awaited Tom Cruise collaboration, Minority Report) to get involved.
But Spielberg's slate cleared off considerably in February when he announced he wasn't going to do Potter.
Until today's announcement, most Hollywood watchers figured Minority Report would be Spielberg's first post-Saving Private Ryan project (Saving earned Spielberg the 1998 Best Director Oscar). However, Cruise tells E! Online's movie columnist Anderson Jones that Minority Report has been bumped back to April 2001.