When the call came in March 1995, Sara Maitland thought it was a prank. The voice on the other end of the line introduced himself as film director Stanley Kubrick, and asked, "Would you like to write a film script for me?"
"He rang me, no warning," the British author recalls. "I called up my agent and said, 'What do you mean giving up my private phone?' "
But the call and offer were both genuine. The next day a contract arrived, beginning Maitland's yearlong adventure as the screenwriter for "A.I." (Artificial Intelligence), the legendary film director's planned return to science fiction.
It was an intense, sometimes frustrating experience that would end abruptly when Kubrick died this spring while "A.I." was still in pre-production. But Maitland's recollections of her work with Kubrick offer an intimate glimpse of the iconoclastic filmmaker near the end of his career.
Every two weeks she would drive an hour from her home in Kettering, England, to Childwickbury Manor, Kubrick's palatial 172-acre estate near St. Albans in Hertfordshire.
She would pass through a series of electronic gates before Kubrick would receive her, always dressed in a blue "boiler suit," (workman's coveralls) and ratty running shoes.
The pair would retire to a billiards room where they would brainstorm. He would show her video footage of his films and other people's films and yell at her about the script.
"He was just driven," says Maitland, 49, speaking on the telephone from Kettering. "He wanted it now, he wanted it yesterday."
But she also describes Kubrick as a great conversationalist, an energetic man, physically and intellectually, with a very clear wit. "He was interested in what you knew and curious in everything. He could be very charming, very funny in an ironic way."
Two weeks into their project, Kubrick handed her a paperback copy of "Pinocchio," an English translation of "Avventure di Pinocchio" (1883) by Italian Carlo Collodi, and a script with the same title. Kubrick told her to build on that foundation.
The script read like a futuristic version of the old fairy tale. The hero was a robot named David who yearns to be a little boy, goes on a quest to win the affections of a parent -- his mother -- and enlists the aid of other robots to this end.
The script, Maitland recalls, was "ragged, [a shambles], emotionally uncertain and peopled with no characters." There was no indication of the author. Four British science fiction writers hired by Kubrick had worked on the screenplay before Maitland's involvement, the last being Ian Watson.
