The Pursuit of Happyness
Interview: Chris Gardner on The Pursuit of Happyness
Actually, in real life his son was an infant, which made him less picky about living arrangements than the toddler portrayed in the film. “You've got to accept you only have so many frames on a reel of film,” Gardner said. “That goes back to the reason why I feel so good that I got a chance to [write] the book. It's all out there. The movie, as good as it is, focuses on the darkest year of my life. I don't know how many of you have children, but if see yourself on the street with a baby tied around your back, that's deep enough. You've got to give these guys some license. My son was two years old when we were going through this. Did we have dialogue? Yeah. But there's obviously more you can do when the child is a little older. Give them some license. But I gotta tell you, I saw one scene last night where my son says something to me that is probably the most important thing he's ever said to me in his life when he says, ‘Papa, you're a good papa.’ In the book, I had a chance to talk about where I was emotionally, how frightened I was. To have this boy at two years old stand up and say, ‘You're a good papa,’ and have that incorporated into the script and the movie, that was the big thing for me.”
Now 25, the younger Gardner is experiencing much of this for the first time in his memory. “You know what he remembers, and I'm so thankful because maybe I did that thing right, he remembers that we were together every day. That's what he remembers. He remembers a lot of moving, he'll admit that but he remembers we were together every day. As I've said many times, there are folks who live in multimillion-dollar houses with their children and their children can't say that.”
Though he endured many hardships to finally achieve success, Gardner takes his traumas like the badges of honor they are. “One of my favorite people in the whole world, Dr. Maya Angelou, once said to a similar question, ‘I wouldn't take nothing from my journey now.’ No. I honest to God believe that if you change one thing, it changes everything that happens afterwards. No, I wouldn't change anything.”
In today’s era of slackers, it may be hard to imagine anyone sacrificing so much for a dream, but Gardner’s advice is simple. “I don't know if there's a way to teach passion. I got lucky, man. I found something I absolutely love. That's something I talk to people about all the time: forget about money. Find something that gets you so jazzed up that you can't wait ‘til the sun comes up because you want to go do your thing. You can't wait ‘til the sun comes up because you want to go do it. Forget about money. The work ethic is directly connected to the passion.”
There are still people today in the situation Gardner rose from, and he hopes the film can be a vehicle for helping them as well. “The truth is the situation might be worse than anyone in this room realizes. Twelve percent of all the homeless people in this country have jobs and go to work every day. Some communities, that number is as high as 30 percent, and that number ain't all black. They've got jobs and go to work every day. A couple of things I gotta share: Will and I went for a series of walks prior to filming and I took him late at night, no security, just he and I, and I showed him all the places where we used to have to sleep. I took him to the bathrooms, the train stations and the parks. One of the first things he said to me was, ‘You know, a lot of these people are dressed to go someplace.’ A lot of them were dressed to go to work. One of the coolest things happened on filming of Pursuit. This was a big-budget film. I don't know what the final number was. But one day we hired 250 homeless people to be themselves for scenes at Glide [a homeless shelter]. A day's work for a day's pay. Two days. A couple comes up to me on the set and said, ‘We're both working. We've been trying to get off the streets for six months. We've saved everything. All we needed was another $500 to get a house, and we made that $500 working on this movie. That for me was the coolest thing in the world. What do you think: $50-60 million gets spent and $500 gets a family off the street. That's a big deal.”
The Pursuit of Happyness opens this Friday, December 15th.
For the trailers, more interviews, stills and additional info, go to The Pursuit of Happyness Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
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