Will Smith is worried.
Yes, Mr. Self-Confidence himself: The movie star who could credibly brag through the late 1990s that he owned the Fourth of July release weekend; the star whose films for more than a decade have almost all earned nine-figure box-office grosses (Independence Day, both Men in Blacks, Enemy of the State, Bad Boys II, Shark Tale, I Robot, Hitch, even – yes – Wild Wild West), or earned him an Oscar nomination (Ali) or both (The Pursuit of Happyness).
The hip-hop star who also claims one of Hollywood's happiest home lives with his wife of 10 years, Jada Pinkett Smith, their acting son and daughter, Jaden and Willow, and his son Trey from a previous marriage. The guy whom everybody seems to at least like, and whom legions of fans love. He's worried that, maybe this time, he's giving them more Will Smith than they can handle.
“I'm in an extremely vulnerable emotional space with this film because it's such a departure,” Smith, buff in a silky white T-shirt and his head shaved almost clean, says of his latest science-fiction spectacular, I Am Legend.
“Like, I know how to give people what they want. I know what people want because I'm that person, I'm a mainstream consumer. But with this film, it's really the first time ever in my career that I've imposed this amount of my artistic desire on the process. There's a level of performance that I wanted to give, a level of authenticity that I wanted to bring to this idea.”
The third film version of Richard Matheson's 1954 novel and the first to use its original title – The Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price (1964) and The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston (1971) were the others – Legend features Smith as perhaps the only human survivor of a mutated virus.
His Robert Neville has certainly been the only uninfected person for years in a nature-reclaimed New York, which he prowls by day with a German shepherd before barricading himself against diseased vampires at night.
Which means lots of scenes of Smith just by himself, talking to the dog or not at all. There are abundant scares and action as well, but by Smith's populist way of thinking, this is very avant-garde business indeed.
“We posed the question: Why do the big movies come out in the summer and the good movies come out in the fall?” Smith, 39, explains. “And what we determined is that the framework of a big movie is structured around the delivery of an idea and the so-called ‘good' movies are about people. And what happens is, if you follow the line of a person, you actually break the structure of the idea. So to try to create the small art film in the big blockbuster package is terrifying for me because I so know how to do the other thing. Y'know?
“But I just so want to do something else,” he continues, eschewing the cheerful laughter that accompanies most of his statements. “We had a line we kept saying to ourselves over and over again, though: ‘You don't want to be so smart that you're stupid.' We've seen that happen with movies that are so intellectually and artistically sound that they actually don't work as a movie! So we tried not to be in that space.”
