The Pursuit of Happyness is a family affair. Will Smith stars with his real life son, Jaden Smith, in the story of Chris Gardner, a homeless single father who became a stock broker through Dean Witter’s internship program. The drama challenged Smith beyond his lovable, wise cracking action hero persona, and the greatest acting tip of all may have come from Jaden.
Interview: Will Smith Talks The Pursuit of Happyness
“With that particularly difficult scene I was struggling and Jaden said to me, ‘Psh, you just do the same thing every take, Daddy,’” Smith recalled. “I was a little offended by that, but what he was saying was that innately he couldn’t understand how I was reading everything exactly the same way every time. He was feeling like ‘Well, that’s not real. I thought we were supposed to be trying to make this real.’”
Leave it to the next generation to cut through all of an actor’s pretense. “I started watching him and you know how kids are. If he decides he wants to get up and walk, he’ll get up and walk. The cameraman will just follow him. But I had my blocking, I knew my left leg was forward, I knew that I was saying it with my left hand every time, so in order for them to make the edit, I would do it with my left hand every time. He broke me out of a mechanical space.”
Chris Gardner may not be as famous as Muhammed Ali, but Smith still felt a responsibility to portray him just as accurately. “He was extremely helpful all through the process. We would do takes. If something’s not feeling right, I would go away with Chris for an hour, just have him talk me through it. Try to get me mentally into the space of the moment, what he connected to. He’s extremely thoughtful. He’s a lot like I felt like when I met Nelson Mandela. To have survived the things that he’s survived and still have a big belly laugh, there’s always going to be the scar tissue of traumatic experiences but he’s so peaceful walking through it. It was an extremely valuable resource to have him there and have him walking me through the scenes and taking me through San Francisco and Oakland.”
The Pursuit of Happyness
The Pursuit of Happyness
The Pursuit of Happyness
The Pursuit of Happyness
The Pursuit of Happyness
Answering to Gardner after the movie was another story. “When he watched the movie, I sat behind him when he watched the movie, which is the most gut wrenching thing you could ever do is make a story about somebody’s life and then sit in the theater with him while they’re watching it. With Chris and with Ali, I’m not doing that anymore. Someone trusted you with their life story. It’s their family, it’s their experiences and it’s not like there’s going to be a second shot at it. It’s one time and you’ll find that most people don’t even want to put the stuff out. It’s hard enough for them to even talk about it, let alone hand it to somebody to do what they want to do with it on the screen. So they have to love it. It’s a complete failure, if the movie makes X amount of 100s of millions of dollars and awards and all of that, and Chris doesn’t like it, it’s a failure. And he turned around after the film and I’m sitting there and my heart is jumping and he looked and he said, ‘I can’t even talk to you right now.’ And he got up and walked out and I was like, ‘Well, what the hell does that mean?’ But then we really went outside and he was crying. He just thanked me for the service to his family and he’s forever indebted for bringing his story and for me, it was a win from that point, so all of this is gravy time now.”
The Pursuit of Happyness opens this Friday, December 15th.
For the trailers, poster, synopsis and additional info, go to The Pursuit of Happyness Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
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