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Will Smith is Legend
By Fred Topel | Images property of Warner Bros Pictures.
I Am Legend
Will Smith is the only actor in I Am Legend. He's the biggest star in the world with one of the most universally likeable personalities. Still, he is being upstaged by his costar, Abbey the dog. That's okay with him though.
Will Smith on I Am Legend
"You say a smart dog," Smith recalled. "It got to the point with Abbey that she would be playing, playing, playing, and she would hear, ‘Rolling!’ so she would run over to her mark and get ready. I was like, ‘What in the hell?’ It’s like she would know when I wasn’t doing my lines right. If I would get lost in the scene she would just go silent."
Even his daughter, Willow, set a high bar for Smith's professional commitment. In a flashback scene, she plays Smith's daughter evacuating New York. "We were shooting the bridge sequence. There is a building that had a temperature gauge on it and we watched it. You started at sunset, and it was probably twenty-nine degrees or something. Then we watched it go down to one, 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.’"
The end of the world thriller seems to be up Smith's alley in terms of blockbusters. Based on Richard Matheson's story, Smith plays scientist Robert Neville, somehow immune to the virus of his own creation that wiped out the rest of the world.
I Am Legend
I Am Legend
I Am Legend
I Am Legend
"I think with movies I am really connecting to the Joseph Campbell idea of the collective unconscious. There are things that we all dream, there are things that each one of us has thought, that connect to life, death, and sex. There are things that are beyond language. To me, this is one of those concepts. I think it’s a primal idea. Carl Jung talked about the collective unconscious and how we dream similar things, even though we have no contact with one another. If you map the dreams of an Aboriginal tribe in Australia that has no contact with Tibetan Monks, but if you monitor the dreams, they dream similar things. I think that this is one of those concepts. We have all had a piece of that collective unconscious idea. We have all dreamed about, or had nightmares about being alone, being by ourselves. It’s the representative dark of the unknown and what that would be. The fear and the converse of the fear is the hope, the hope that you connect to those concepts."
Studying these concepts also helped Smith pick films like Independence Day and Men in Black. He knows the ideas. Now the challenge is to make sure they're all good. "Can you get into that artistic place where you’re advancing an idea? Advancing a genre? And you can spend your energy in the most difficult area rather than bumping your head around ideas that have already been proven or disproven."
I Am Legend opens to theatres on December 14th.
For the trailers, posters and more movie info, go to the I Am Legend
Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Images property of Warner Bros Pictures.
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