When you're the biggest superstar in Hollywood, commanding eight figure salaries for films that inevitably gross in the hundreds of millions, the holidays can come with a lot of pressure. How does one teach his children not to ask for material gifts for Christmas when major newspapers report daddy's massive salaries every year? Will Smith tells Dish how he has managed to teach his kids what's really important in this season of giving, despite his visible success.
"It’s funny, it’s really simple," said Smith. "Jaden (9) and Trey (7) are very simple. Jaden just wants his family around. Anything that causes the whole family to be together, that is what he wants. Willow just wants clothes. She loves it. She’s dressed herself since she was about four years old. She is very specific about her style. She is very specific about how she wants to look, how she wants to present herself, the sizes and all that."
Even with her fashion obsessions, little Willow does not go on shopping sprees at the mall. "It’s funny, she doesn’t like shopping. She doesn’t like going out and shopping. She wants you to think about her and she loves the idea that she gets things by surprise. Christmas really isn’t big for her. If she knows its coming, it’s not as big of a deal."
Christmas is also a season of compromise, as Will sacrifices his own desires for the good of his family. "We like to go to snow, and by ‘we’ I mean Jada likes to go to snow. I’d much rather be in Jamaica but Jada has wonderful childhood memories of snow, so we try to find wherever there’s the most snow. She actually spends weeks on-line figuring out where the most snow is, and that’s where we end up going. Jada needs four seasons. She can’t function if it’s warm all the time, it’s light and fun all the time, and she needs the hibernation. She needs the time where nothing is moving, it’s quiet, you aren’t hearing cars and horns, because they are muffled by the wonderful snow. Still, if I never, ever, see snow again for the rest of my life, that’s great."
The Smiths, Will and his wife Jada Pinkett Smith, have also instilled a healthy worldview in their children. "We live in La-la-land out here. Los Angeles and New York are cut off from the rest of the country and the rest of the world. For us, traveling is hugely important, for our kids to really see other things, and experience other things. We have taken them to South Africa. We try to get them to experience how other people live.”
Smith continues, “Keeping them grounded is more of a concept about how you relate to your service of mankind. That is what we try to impart to our children. You are a part of a whole, and you have a responsibility to uplift and be a positive influence on the whole."
Still, the big cities are home to the Smiths. The world is a nice place to visit, but Will wouldn't want to live there. "To me, Los Angeles and Miami, I just can’t imagine topping those places for where I would love to live. I have a theory that cities and towns have, essentially, emotional patterns. There are cities that each and every one of us could live in, that match our emotional pattern, that we would just be better people if we lived in this place. I think that my emotional pattern is like the weather patterns of Los Angeles and Miami. Its warm all the time, it rains a little bit, but when it does its fun because it cools it off. The traffic might get a little bad but it’s not like being in four inches of snow in traffic.”
Isolation in the big city happens to be the subject of Smith's latest film. In I am Legend, Smith plays the last known human survivor of a deadly virus. His character, Robert Neville, helped design the virus as a cure for cancer, only to find it mutate and wipe out over five billion people, turning the rest into monsters that stalk him by night. Somehow, he is immune, and dedicates his lonely days to trying to cure the remaining humanoids.
"Shooting in New York, especially something on this level, is difficult," said Smith. "I would say that percentage wise it’s the most amounts of middle fingers I’ve ever received in my career. I was starting to think F-You was my name. I’m used to people liking me when I come to town. We shut down six blocks of Fifth Avenue on a Monday morning. That was probably poor planning. You realize that you have never actually seen an empty shot of New York. When we were doing it - it’s chilling to walk down the middle of Fifth Avenue. There is never an opportunity to walk down the middle of Fifth Avenue. At two o’clock in the morning on Sunday you can’t walk down the middle of Fifth Avenue.”
“What happened was that it just created a creepy energy. There are iconic buildings, there is a shot in the movie with the UN, there is Broadway, and it puts such an eerie, icky, kind of feeling on the movie when you see those shots. Logistically, it was a nightmare, but it absolutely created something that you can’t do with green screen, and you can’t do shooting any other city instead of New York."
As the only actor for most of the film, Smith spends most of his scenes bonding with a dog named Samantha. Occasionally he will also chat with mannequins he has set up to restore a sense of population in deserted Manhattan. Mostly, it was a solitary performance.
"It was such a wonderful exploration of myself. What happens is that you get in a situation where you don’t have people to create the stimulus for you to respond to. What happens is that you start creating the stimulus and the response. There is a connection with yourself, where your mind starts to drift to in those types of situations, that you learn about yourself things you would never even imagination. In order to prepare for that we sat with former POWs and we sat with people who had been in solitary confinement. That was the framework for creating the idea. They said, ‘The first thing is a schedule. You will not survive in solitary if you don’t schedule everything.’"
Neville's schedule is to wake up in the morning and exercise. Then he will hunt for food, either stalking the animals now roaming the streets or searching abandoned homes for canned goods. He spends lunchtime sending out a radio message and waiting for any possible survivors to find him. He takes time for entertainment, playing golf off an aircraft carrier or watching movies. Come dusk, he must return home before the monsters come out.
"We talked to Geronimo Ji-Jaga, formerly Geronimo Pratt of the Black Panthers, and he was in solitary for over three months. He said that you plan things like cleaning your nails. You take two hours, which you have to because it’s on the schedule, to just clean your nails. He said that he spent about six weeks and he trained roaches to bring him food. I’m sitting there like, ‘Oh my God.’ The idea of where your mind goes to defend itself. Either he really did train the roaches, which is huge, or his mind needed that to survive. Either way, you put that on camera and it’s genius. The only thing that mattered is what Robert Neville he saw and what he believed."
Such a subject may sound like a downer for the holidays, but Smith sees it as an opportunity to explore spirituality. A student of all religions, Smith even added Scientology to his slate of knowledge.
"I don’t necessarily believe in organized religion. I was raised in a Baptist household, went to a Catholic church, lived in a Jewish neighborhood, and had the biggest crush on the Muslim girls from one neighborhood over. Tom [Cruise] introduced me to the ideas. I’m a student of world religion, so to me, it’s hugely important to have knowledge and to understand what people are doing. What are all the big ideas? What are people talking about? I believe that my connection to my higher power, is separate from everybody else’s. I don’t believe that the Muslims have all the answers. I don’t believe the Christians have all the answers, or the Jews have all the answers - so I love my God, my higher power. It’s mine and mine alone. I create my connection and I decide how my connection is going to be."
The film was a family affair also. After working with son Jaden in The Pursuit of Happyness, he had to give Willow a role as Neville's daughter in flashback sequences.
"You kind of don’t work with Willow, you work for Willow. It’s interesting, Jada and I debate the age old debate of nature versus nurture. Is it because two actors went to Mexico and drank some tequila and made a baby? Does that make the baby an actor? Or, did she grow up in a house where that is what is in her house, that is just the life, and that’s the experience that she knows.”
“When I look at Willow, I just believe that it has to be neither one of those. There has to be something else. With Willow, she just loves it. We were shooting the bridge sequence. There was a building nearby that had a temperature gauge on it and we watched it. We started shooting at sunset, and it was probably 29° or something. Then we watched it go down to 1°, and then negative. Willow is out there, she has her stuff on, and she’s cold. She is getting a little irritable. She looks at me and says, ‘Daddy, I don’t care how low it goes, I’m going to finish.’ I was like, ‘Wow! That’s good baby, because Daddy is leaving if it go any lower than that one.’ She just wants it, she has a drive, an energy, and she just connects to human emotion."
Perhaps Willow's brother helped instill a work ethic in little sis, or at least motivation. "I think a big part of it is probably Jaden. After The Pursuit of Happyness and she saw what Jaden did, she thought, ‘I want that.’ The night we told Willow that she got the role, because we make our kids audition and all of that, we don’t do the whole nepotism thing, so Jaden was sitting where you are. Pretend I’m Willow. We always call the family in and we announce all the good things that happen with everybody in the house and everybody gets to share in it. Willow is there, Jada and I are here, and Jaden is behind her. We say, ‘Everybody, we just want to congratulate Willow. She got, I am Legend. She immediately turns around to Jaden and smiles and I went, ‘What’s that? What was that?’ Never had she talked about any feelings she was having, but it was like ‘Okay, I’m plotting on you dude.’"
Fans used to seeing Smith save the world may be in for a shock when Legend opens with the world's population dead. "I missed this time," Smith joked. In real life, however, Smith can still be everyone's hero.
"That is what is interesting about playing a character like this. You get to explore and wonder how you would react. When I look at Robert Neville, I think, ‘What was there to live for? What was there to hope for? To wake up everyday and try to restore something that is good and gone?’ I like to believe that I would put my chest up and stand forward, just march on and continue to fight for the future of humanity. I would probably find a bridge and say, ‘I’m coming to join you!’ It’s a tough question, and I guess the answer is, ‘I don’t know.’ You want to be tested to know what you would do, but you really don’t want to be tested. That is sort of the space that I have lived in with quite a few of the roles I have played."
I am Legend opens in theatres December 14
