A man over 50 takes stock of his dwindling physical inventory and starts thinking not of empire building but of simple maintenance in health, family and career — the preservation, for just a few more years of the suddenly precious status quo. Growth is measured in the spreading acreage around the waist, or in that weird cyst on your neck that makes you wonder if you've been infiltrated by aliens. The people you work with, who used to be older and as stuffy as your parents, are now younger, as mysterious as your kids, and taking over.

Spielberg may be immune to all this. The fellow who makes movies everyone wants to see is not like everyone else. "People like Steven don't come along every day," says Star Wars creator George Lucas, a friend and collaborator. "And when they do, it's an amazing thing. It's like talking about Einstein or Tiger Woods. He's not in a group of filmmakers his age; he's far, far away."

Born in Cincinnati on December 18, 1946, and raised in New Jersey and Arizona, Spielberg always had a love and fascination for the movie industry. As a pre-teen, he charged admission to his home movies while his sister sold popcorn. At the age of 13, Spielberg won a prize for a 40-minute war movie he titled Escape to Nowhere. In 1963, at the young age of 16, his 140-minute production of Firelight (which would later inspire Close Encounters) was shown in a local movie theater and brought in $100 profit.

After being denied entrance into traditional film schools, Spielberg entered California State University to study English. Steven Spielberg's professional movie career began the day when he decided to jump off a tour bus at Universal Studios Hollywood and wander around. He found an abandoned closet and turned it into an office. After some time, the security guards had seen him so often that they would wave him through the gates, no questions asked.

Once inside and settled, Spielberg started production on Amblin. This movie, only 24 minutes long, led to his becoming the youngest director ever to be signed to a long-term deal with a major Hollywood studio (Universal). The movie had a $15,000 budget, provided by a friend who was also trying to achieve his big break in the industry. Amblin won several film festival awards including a showing at the Atlanta Film Festival in 1969. Spielberg was then signed to a 7-year contract under the Television division. After directing a diversity of TV shows, he directed the suspense-filled made-for-TV film Duel which received critical and audience acclaim. Spielberg's television success was soon parlayed into big screen stardom. His first feature was 1974's The Surgarland Express, and even then Spielberg was showing signs of excellence. The film won a Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Screenplay. The following year came Jaws. This very successful horror film about a man-eating shark captured the attention of the world. The movie was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, and won several Oscars for technical categories. In 1998, the film was named by the American Film Institute as one of the 100 best American films of the century.

Spielberg followed up the success of Jaws two years later with his next film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which received an academy nomination for best director. He next teamed up with George Lucas and produced an action adventure picture, Raiders of the Lost Arc. In 1982, Spielberg's next film E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial became the biggest domestic moneymaker of all time. E.T. was in fact the first movie to be produced by Amblin Entertainment, a production company formed by Spielberg in 1982 carrying the name of his first big break in the business. Amblin worked together with many other studios such as Universal Pictures, Columbia Pictures and Warner Brothers. With the Amblin name and logo prevalent, many films became immediate successes, including such films as Twister, Gremlins, Jurassic Park and Schindler's List. Using his tremendous success as a springboard, DreamWorks SKG was formed in 1994. The first new movie studio to form in Hollywood in over 75 years, DreamWorks joined the forces of Spielberg, Jeffery Katzenberg and David Geffen, along with the backing of numerous partners and investors.

This year, Spielberg came up with a new movie A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. A love story, a prophecy and a fairy tale (Pinocchio, to be exact) in the guise of a science-fiction film, A. I. represents the collaboration and collision of two master filmmakers: Stanley Kubrick, who spent parts of more than 15 years on the project; and Steven Spielberg, whom Kubrick finally asked to direct it, and who did, from his own screenplay, after Kubrick's death in 1999. The film, whose genesis and shooting have long been cocooned in secrecy, opens this summer throughout Asia.

For his first sci-fi project since 2001, Kubrick had planned, as Spielberg says, "to take a step beyond the relationship that HAL9000 has with Bowman and Poole, and tell a kind of future fairy tale about artificial intelligence." When he suggested that Spielberg direct it, "I thought he was out of his mind. He was giving up one of the best stories he had ever told. But he said, 'This story is closer to your sensibilities than my own.'" Once Spielberg began work on the film, at the behest of the director's widow Christiane and her brother, Kubrick's producer Jan Harlan, "I felt that Stanley really hadn't died, that he was with me when I was writing the screenplay and shooting the movie."

A.I. is fascinating as a wedding of two disparate auteurs. Kubrick took five, seven, a dozen years to make a movie; he optioned Brian Aldiss's short story Supertoys Last All Summer Long, on which A.I. is based, in 1983. Spielberg has shot multiple films in one year, and in his spare time he helps run the DreamWorks film studio. Spielberg has the warmest of directorial styles; Kubrick's is among the coolest. One aims to seduce the audience; the other wanted to bend movie-goers to see it his way.

In the A.I. world, robots are made to give pleasure and, in David's case, offer joy. The toy boy's sole purpose is to give and elicit affection. His obsession (in Kubrick's term) or dream (in Spielberg's term) requires him to do everything to achieve Monica's love — after she renounces him, after she abandons him, after she's gone. That's pure Spielberg: the story of a stranded or abandoned child searching for signposts to home, for the reunion of the nuclear family. This motif has been playing from his first feature, The Sugarland Express (two young marrieds struggle to rescue their child from foster parents), through a half dozen other films he has directed or produced (Poltergeist, Back to the Future, The Goonies, Empire of the Sun, Hook, Saving Private Ryan). That's a pretty full gallery of lost boys and girls.

That's an old-fashioned theme, but so is robotics. The Aldiss story (in which a couple contemplate dumping their robo-child as soon as the state allows them to have a real one of their own) was published in 1969 just a year after Kubrick's 2001 was released. These days, artificial intelligence has been overtaken, as scientific hope and ethical threat, by genetic engineering. A.I., set far in the future, conjures up popular worries 30 years in the past.

(from TIME, June, 1997)