One of Spielberg’s best movies is also his most controversial due to the fact that it wasn’t initially perceived by him.

Stanley Kubrick had been working on the project since the 1970s, eventually handing it off to his friend a few years before his death in 1999.

The misunderstanding was overblown, Spielberg once telling “People pretend to think they know Kubrick, and think they know me, when most of them don’t know either of us. And what’s really funny about that is, all the parts of ‘A.I.’ that people assume were Stanley’s were mine. And all the parts of ‘A.I.’ that people accuse me of sweetening and softening and sentimentalizing were all Stanley’s.”

The emotional tenor of “A.I.” would have been different had Kubrick directed it, but there’s also no denying the emotional impact of Spielberg’s vision.