Ministry recall their comical experience on the set of Steven Spielberg movie ‘A.I.’
When industry pioneers Ministry were first asked to feature in A.I. Artificial Intelligence by the auteur Stanley Kubrick, the band’s frontman and creative director Al Jourgensen – a man known for his cynicism – believed someone was having a joke at his expense. After all, why would one of the greatest directors of all time be interested in a group famed for its punishing music? It’s not as if mainstream Hollywood and avant-garde boundary-pushing come hand in hand.
However, it was not a prank call. Kubrick was a self-professed fan of the group. Unfortunately, all Ministry would receive from him would be an early version of the script, as Kubrick would pass away whilst A.I. was still in the early stages of production.
As is well-known, Steven Spielberg had already signed on as the film’s director at this point, and after Kubrick’s death, he took the helm to honour his old friend and bring his vision to life. In a tale as old as time, his version of the movie would be much less challenging than the one Kubrick set out in his early scripts.
Ministry frontman Al Jourgensen remembered working with Spielberg during a 2012 interview with Songfacts. After noting Kubrick’s death after the band signed on for the film, he recalled one comical hitch the production kept experiencing. He said: “So it got turned over to Spielberg, and then I wound up getting stuck with this fucking electronic teddy bear that was on the set the whole time that was breaking down. So it took us like three weeks to film our part because the bear broke down every fucking day.”
The Ministry man continued: “We’d be sitting there on stage, and you hear walkie-talkies going on all over the place going, ‘The bear is down! The bear is down!’ So then we’d hit the commissary and just drink beers and get drunk and wait for the bear to get back up. And then you’d hear walkie-talkies going, ‘The bear is up! The bear is up! Everyone back on set!’ So we’d have to run back on set in our costumes. And this fucking bear… seriously, I would like to buy it at auction just so I could put it in my firepot and burn it once and for all. This thing was a nightmare, that bear. I hated that bear.”
However, his experience, on the whole, surpassed his hatred of the bear. “It was just ultimately cool,” he recalled. “By the time we were done filming that scene in A.I., I was really good friends with Spielberg, too. It took us a while, but we got on the same point, and yeah, it was all good. I mean, the whole thing worked out great.”
Of the differences between Spielberg’s final product and Kubrick’s original screenplay, Jourgensen concluded: “The only thing is that the original screenplay I got had so much more of the Jude Law character as a male prostitute, like a robo-prostitute in Sin City. Kubrick really dwelled on that in the original screenplay, where Spielberg decided to go with a more E.T. approach with kids and bears and things like that. (Laughter) it became really Disney-ised because the original screenplay that I read was insane.”
