Interview: Will Smith

By Fred Topel: 2006-12-11 00:00:00

Will Smith isn’t saving the world this time. He’s just trying to save his own family in The Pursuit of Happyness. He plays real life stock broker prodigy Chris Gardner, who struggled through homelessness while completing his internship at Dean Witter, caring for his son the whole time. Smith’s real son, Jaden, plays Gardner’s son in the film, and Smith determined to open himself up to a more intimate style of acting on the film.

“I’m at such a different place in my life right now,” he said. “Michael Mann opened my mind to a completely different way of working and creating and it’s grown through this process now with Gabriele Muccino and the last little spark coming from Jaden. I connected with Chris Gardner and we looked in one another’s eyes. I said, ‘I’m going to learn your story and I’m going to tell your story.’ And he said, ‘Just tell the truth.’ And I went and found the truth and I have so many roadblocks, emotional roadblocks to the truth of characters because I know what a character needs to do to be likeable. And my son has just developed me to a space where I’m starting to understand and starting to be more comfortable with the idea that the things that you don’t do well are the things that are really going to help people. So it’s new for me and I haven’t completely figured out how to articulate all the things that are in my mind but I’m excited right now about the connection between the things that I believe and now being able to find a way to illustrate those beliefs in my artistry.”

Many of Smith’s successful tricks come from rehearsal and preparation. He hits his marks the same way every take and turns on the charm for his blockbuster roles. He got out of his comfort zone for Pursuit.

“I’ve always considered myself to be just average talent and what I have is a ridiculous insane obsessiveness for practice and preparation. My father used to say all the time, ‘Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.’ So if you stay ready, you ain’t gotta get ready. That is how I run my life. Just stay ready. Stay in shape and then you don’t have to rush to train before the movie starts. And I’ll show you my abs later because I’m in shape. But that idea, if you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready. So I had this preparation, I had this performance, I’ve seen it in my mind and I know I’m going to go out there and deliver this performance that way that I want to do it. Gabriele told me one day, he said, ‘Don’t pose for my camera.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘You’re posing for my camera. I don’t want you to pose for my camera.’ He said, ‘You’re making faces like you are hurt. We will shut down, you go away, you come back when you hurt for real.’ I was like wow. He and Michael Mann are the two directors that I’ve worked with that know all my tricks. They can see right through me and all of the Willisms and the things that I know how to do to make the audience laugh or smile or cry, I know all of those things and they beat those things out of me. It’s interesting, it’s scary for me right now because I’m moving into a space where I just have no idea what’s going to happen when I’m going into these scenes. I’m living in the moments.”

It wasn’t always easy for Smith to give himself over to Muccino’s direction. “Gabriele Muccino did a brilliant job of beating me away from my go to moves. It’s like I felt like I’m thinking I’m Allen Iverson in the acting world. How you gonna not let me do my crossover? He was like, ‘Nope, that’s not in this movie. You’re going to find other things. You’re Chris Gardner. So you're going to create in a different way, you’re going to find different things and however long we have to shoot until you discover it, that’s how long we’re going to shoot. But what we’re not going to do is the same face you made with K at the end of Men in Black.’”

Smith had a few more benefits in his struggle for stardom. Certainly he never slept in a bathroom. But even the wealthy megastar Smith could take a lesson from such struggles.

“I’ve been referring to a film called What the Bleep [Do We Know?]. It’s about quantum physics. The idea is that you have command over what your future, what your situation is, that you internally and with your spirit or however you want to put it, the tao or muslim Allah or Jesus, whatever that universal force is that you connect to, you in sync with that force have command to will your future. And in What the Bleep it talks about the idea that objects exist if you acknowledge they exist. And that was something that Chris and I seriously connected on. In the film, there’s no hint to any racism. And that was something specifically that Chris spoke about. He said, ‘Well, sure, there may have been racism but the belief that if you acknowledge it, you give it power over you. And your you cal it arrogance, you call it naivete, you call it whatever you want but I truly believe in a situation where you are hoping to create something, it is a much more powerful space to know that you will not be denied. Whatever’s out there, you’re running over it. So we’re not even going to spend no time talking about the white man or they don’t have no spots left in this college so I’m going to apply somewhere. We’re not acknowledging none of that. I’m going to that college, period.’ And there’s, I’ve always called it naivete with me that a few years ago I said that I honestly, truly believed that I could be the president of the United States. Now, there were probably political experts that laughed, but put me on a lie detector test right now and I absolutely, positively believe that I could be the president of the United States. I absolutely, positively believe I could fly the space shuttle. Period. And that’s where it starts. Chris Gardner laid down in a bathroom with his only child, seemingly the ultimate parental failure. The next morning, he woke up, he bathed his son in the sink and he went to work. You can’t do that if there’s a possibility this might not work out. You can’t do that. You have got to believe that it’s already a done deal. It’s just a matter of time before you get what you’re designing. To me, Barack Obama called it the audacity of hope. That’s designed into the fiber of this country. This country’s the only place that Chris Gardner could exist. I’m getting excited but to me, that is the essence of the power of this film.”

The Pursuit of Happyness opens December 15.

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