With 'After Earth,' Jaden Smith is happy to follow in footsteps of his superstar father
Will Smith's son tells New York magazine he's just 'working in my family business'
Will and Jaden Smith have working together down to a science.
“You know how Johnny Depp and Tim Burton always do movies together, Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio? We’ll have a relationship like that,” Jaden, 14, tells New York magazine in this week’s issue.
“It’s kind of like father and son, except that we’re both going to work together. Like you worked in your family business with your dad. I’m just working in my family business with my dad.
“With the first movie (‘Pursuit of Happyness’), he was teaching me along the way. This is how the camera works. You do several takes. Like, literally everything you need to know about movies. And then, in ‘Karate Kid,’ he was kind of holding my hand and watching me distill those rules. And then on ‘After Earth,’ he was like, all right, you’re an actor, I’m an actor, let’s make a movie together.”
The sci-fi thriller comes out this week.
“I probably had a couple of poor parenting moments on this movie,” Will Smith tells the magazine. “Do you know what a fer-de-lance is?”
“It’s one of the most poisonous snakes in all of Costa Rica,” says Jaden. “I was doing a scene, going through some tall grasses, and they said, ‘Hey, we caught some fer-de-lances around there, and there seems to be a lot more, and I think we should move the scene.’ I was like, ‘How many fer-de-lances did you catch?’ He’s like, ‘Eight.’”
“I said, ‘Well, you got them all, so it’s fine. Let’s just shoot it.’” says Will. “Yeah, if Mommy was there, that wouldn’t have gone down.”
Of course, Jaden gets the acting bug from both sides of the family — his mom is actress Jada Pinkett-Smith. His parents have made sure he knows poisonous snakes aren’t the only dangers of the entertainment industry.
“It may seem like we have pushed our kids into the business, but that is absolutely insane,” says the proud dad, who was a popular rapper when his career skyrocketed as he became NBC’s “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” in 1990.
“I would never, ever, push somebody to have their face on a poster that’s going be everywhere in the world. He is making a choice from the informed. It’s less scary to me than if he wanted to be a dentist in that I couldn’t help with what he’d chosen. I have relationships with some of the biggest filmmakers and actors and producers on Earth. So I can be a huge help,” Smith tells New York.
“Willow (Smith’s 12-year-old daughter) chose singing and then un-chose it. She said, ‘Daddy, I want to go to school with my friends during the week, and I want to hang out with them on the weekends.’
“At the peak of ‘Whip My Hair,’ she’s like, ‘Daddy, I’m done.’ I was like, ‘Wow, wow, wow. No, baby, I got Annie (the upcoming movie remake, co-produced by Jay-Z), you know. It’ll be New York, you’ll be with Beyoncé. You can bring your friends.’ And she said, ‘Daddy, I got a better idea. How about I just be 12?’ At the end of the day, it has to be their choice.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv-movies/family-business-jaden-smith-article-1.1354542?localLinksEnabled=false
