Humanoid Nature

Frances O'Connor expected questions about what it was like to work with Steven Spielberg. And perhaps queries about exactly how Spielberg managed to take over his good friend Stanley Kubrick's dream project, A.I. Artificial Intelligence -- writing and shooting in less than two years a dark, futuristic fairy tale that Kubrick had not been able to pull together in two decades.

What the 31-year-old Australian actress didn't expect were tirades from reporters about the way her A.I. character, Monica Swinton, discards her robotic surrogate son, David (Haley Joel Osment). Monica can't handle David's intense form of programmed love -- and she'd rather abandon him to wander a cruel future world than see him destroyed by his manufacturer, the fate of all returned robot merchandise in A.I.'s harsh universe.

The resulting Sophie's Choice/Medea dilemma all but short-circuited one female TV journalist, who appeared before O'Connor trembling with indignation. ''I could feel the anger in this woman's body,'' says the actress, her eyes widening. ''She said, 'How could you do that? How could you leave a child like that?' She was so upset....I started thinking, people are gonna hate me.''

All through an A.I. promotional junket weekend in June, O'Connor did her best to cope with reporters caught off guard by one of the biggest surprises of the summer-movie season: that A.I. is much less a roller-coaster ride than an angst-

ridden psychological spin cycle. Meanwhile, 13-year-old Osment found himself peppered with questions about the elaborate web of A.I. Internet sites that for months have woven a vast back story which, it turns out, has only a tangential relationship to the movie's main plot.

''I actually don't know too much about the Internet stuff,'' says Osment, whose low-key, average-kid mannerisms -- he plays with a soda cap as he talks -- belie his savant-level acting gifts. ''I think it's a great job of publicity. Getting people all excited about this story, then they go to the movie and it's completely different.''

Of all the leads, British-born, 28-year-old Jude Law seems to groove the most on the picaresque future world laid out in A.I. He plays Gigolo Joe, a ''love mecha'' -- or mechanical prostitute -- who befriends Osment's David and acts as his guide in a quest to find the Blue Fairy, whom David fixates on as a savior after his mom reads him Pinocchio. Law believes it's crucial to remember that A.I. is a meeting of minds between two extremely disparate master filmmakers -- a sort of gene-splicing experiment.

''I think maybe Stanley threw a gauntlet down to Steven,'' says Law, his current close-cropped 'do a startling contrast to Gigolo Joe's plastic coif. ''Which was saying 'Perhaps you need to come a little [more] into the adult world, or come into a seedier world, to do this properly.'''

Did Spielberg go seedy enough to satisfy Kubrick's ghost? ''I think Steven found a perfect middle ground,'' says Law. ''[Kubrick's ideas were] much more extreme. More overtly sexual. Huge phallic skyscrapers, buildings with their legs wide open.'' Law also discovered after he was cast that Kubrick ''couldn't get'' Joe. The character was originally ''much more aggressive, sinister,'' and far from Spielberg's revised conception as ''an innocent who's abused. He's a hooker who ultimately comes round to learning to love in a different way.''