will smith article

[Hero1]

[url="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7943-1188963,00.html"]http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7943-1188963,00.html[/url]


Film



July 25, 2004

Will Smith
By David Eimer


Will Smith does not look like a man with worries. He is sitting in a private room at his favourite Japanese restaurant in downtown New York. His bodyguards are outside, there’s a constant flow of sushi and the streets of Manhattan are lined with billboards advertising I, Robot, his latest and most ambitious attempt yet at a summer blockbuster. But behind the wide smile, the 6ft 2in Smith is not as confident as he appears to be.
“I’m more nervous than I’ve ever been about any movie,” he admits in his deep voice. “I, Robot is almost like a small art film wrapped up as a big summer movie. That’s how we approached it. So I’m definitely nervous.

“But I love the film. I think Ali is the best performance I’ve ever given, and I think Enemy of the State is the best all-round movie I’ve made — but I like I, Robot more than both of those. It’s the movie I’ve been threatening to make my whole career.”

Perhaps his reluctance to commit himself to a different, less commercial path stems from the fact that he regards making films as second best to being a rapper. “Performing music is still my first love,” stresses Smith. “I enjoy acting, and it is creatively satisfying, but it doesn’t remotely come close to being on stage in a stadium full of people waiting to hear your latest hit record.”

It’s been a while since Smith had one of those. His record company dropped him last year after his third solo album flopped. He’s not giving up, though. “I’ve got a single coming out in a few weeks, and there’ll be an album out around Christmas.”



He believes that music offers him the chance to be himself in a way that acting doesn’t. “When I listen to Outkast, it’s almost emotional, because they’re so free — that’s what being artistic is about. Whereas my success in the movies has confined me somewhat as an actor. Just being able to say and do what you want, that’s beautiful.”


Whether he can revive his music career is doubtful, but he’s too driven a character to be underestimated. “It goes back to Sunday school and my grandmother. She was a devout Christian, and we always had to perform at church. I played the piano, did Bible recitals. And the look on my grandmother’s face as I performed ... I’ve searched for that in every woman’s eyes that I’ve ever had contact with. I live for that look. It’s not about money or success; it’s about the way Jada looks at me when I come home. I can’t live without that look, and I’ll die before I allow myself not to work to maintain that look.”

They live outside LA, in a sprawling complex that has its own golf course. His devotion to his wife is genuine, and Smith isn’t the sort of rapper who refers to women as “bitches” or “hos” on his records.

“The women in my life really gave me the desire to be great, to be the best that I could,” he says. “I love the time I spend with women. It’s not even sexual. I just love diving into women, intellectually and spiritually. I need that.”

I, Robot doesn’t make the future look too attractive, but Smith isn’t losing any sleep over what might happen.

“I rarely think about the future,” he says. “I look at what’s in front of me, so I feel strongly that it’ll be great if I do a really great interview now. If I say something that isn’t exactly what I meant to say, I’ll stay up for hours thinking about it. But I’m not really a perfectionist. I’m just someone who has to give 100%. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be the best that I could do.”




Smith always talks a good film, but there’s no question that it is time that he delivered one. Since his Oscar-nominated title performance in 2001’s Ali, he’s been seen only in two lacklustre, if profitable, sequels, Men in Black II and Bad Boys II. They did nothing to alter the perception that he is more interested in maintaining his high profile and reported $20m-a-movie salary than he is in applying his undoubted talent to more substantial roles. After all, this is the man who turned down the chance to play Neo in The Matrix.

“I didn’t get it when I read it,” shrugs Smith. “It’s a hard movie to pitch. You know: ‘Everybody lives inside a computer.’ It was only when I saw it that I really got it.

“But every so often you see a performance you know you couldn’t have given — and Keanu was brilliant as Neo. It was his role. I would have ruined the movie. I would have been trying to force every moment.”

His wife, the actor and singer Jada Pinkett Smith, did appear in the second and third instalments of The Matrix, and a typically genial Smith hung around Sydney, searching in vain for a barber who knew how to cut his hair, while she was working on them.

Perhaps the fact that he passed on The Matrix contributed to his decision to take I, Robot, for which he is also an executive producer.

Loosely based on a series of Isaac Asimov short stories, I, Robot is set in Chicago in 2035. Robots are nannies, and deliver pizza and the post far more efficiently than humans can. Smith plays a technophobe detective who loathes them and suspects that a rogue robot has started killing humans. “My character is essentially a racist,” says Smith, who’s dressed all in black, with diamond studs in his ears. “When you go back and watch the performance from that point of view, you’ll see so many little things we put in to emphasise that.”

The film is more complex than most big summer movies, despite some outrageous product placement and the necessary reliance on computer-generated images. There are a few jabs at George W Bush-speak, and there’s a Bill Gates-esque character whose corporation seems to run the world. The biggest risk, though, is that it gives us few of Smith’s trademark one-liners and little of his easy charm. It’s as downbeat a performance as he’s given.

“He’s miserable and he’s a luddite,” notes Smith of his character. “That’s a big gamble for a movie like this.”

Not only that, but science fiction isn’t a genre that black actors are associated with. “It’s weird, isn’t it? No sci-fi, no horror. I think that, artistically, black people in America tend to gravitate to more realistic movies, or comedies.”

Of course, Smith, like Denzel Washington, is that rare black actor who can induce colour blindness in American audiences. His biggest hits, Independence Day and Men in Black, made more than $1 billion worldwide, while most of his contemporaries’ films — Ice Cube’s Barbershop series, for example — rarely cross over to white audiences anywhere.

“Well, a lot of that is marketing,” claims Smith. “My wife made a movie a few years ago with Queen Latifah, Set It Off. It was like Thelma and Louise; it had a really powerful emotional base and a point to it.

I was screaming, ‘Please don’t call it Set It Off and don’t just market it to black audiences.’ A 79-year-old white woman in the Midwest could relate to what those characters were going through. The film was marginalised by the marketing, not by the content. It’s a studio thing.”

Nevertheless, he acknowledges that there is a problem with the material that many black actors have to work with. “I think we’ve excelled beyond our writers and directors. The white community isn’t going to write brilliant, authentic stories about a black family; they have to be generated by our community. Look at City of God (the Brazilian film set in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas): it could be urban, black America. I was like, ‘Where the hell are our writers and directors to deliver us that story?’” He must be agitated to say “hell”. The 35-year-old Smith is scrupulous in his use of language, a legacy of his mother’s nagging when he was growing up in west Philadelphia, and rarely swears in public. His dad, an air-force sergeant turned electrician, was equally forceful, and ran the house on quasi-military lines. It seems to have worked, because Smith is a model father to his three kids, two with Pinkett Smith and one with his ex-wife Sheree Zampino, and there has never been a sniff of controversy around him.

Nor has he been shy about using his clean-cut image. His first taste of fame came as a family-friendly rapper in the late 1980s, when other rap acts, such as Public Enemy, were specialising in angry, incendiary rhymes that scared parents and US law-makers. Smith was canny enough to set himself up as the acceptable face of hip-hop. When he came to Hollywood in 1990, it was to star in the innocuous television show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

Never one to set his sights low, Smith aspires now to the everyman roles that Tom Hanks is the first choice for. “ Forrest Gump is where I want to be,” he says. “I need to make movies where there’s a big idea at the centre of the movie. Gladiator was another one like that. So was Jerry Maguire.

“You know, it’s rare when the lead actor wins an Oscar and the movie makes a whole lot of money,” he adds.

There’s a suspicion, though, that he’s more interested in the financial rewards that come from being a film star than the artistic side of the business. How else can you explain the sequels, or lame, would-be blockbusters such as Wild Wild West? It’s not as if Smith can’t act. Even when he was still appearing on television, he gave one of his finest performances as a gay hustler in 1993’s Six Degrees of Separation, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else making such an impressive job of playing Muhammad Ali. So why doesn’t he tackle complex parts more often? “They’re hard to find, and the bottom line is that people don’t go to see those movies. Everybody says, ‘I want to see Will Smith in a meaty, dramatic role like Ali’ — and it is probably the performance of my life — but 1/25th of the people who went to see Independence Day went to see Ali. The thing is to find a balance.” He sees I, Robot as an acceptable compromise between art and commerce. “I love the ideas in the film, and there’s a well thought-out character with an emotional story at the centre.”

[DevilsJim89]

GREAT ARTICLE THANKS!

[WildWildWillennium]

I feel his take on his character in I,Robot...but he definitely doesn't need 2 be nervous about it...he did a brilliant job and look how much damn money it made on that opening weekend alone! :eek4:

[Hero1]

[quote=WildWildWillennium,Jul 25 2004, 12:56 AM]I feel his take on his character in I,Robot...but he definitely doesn't need 2 be nervous about it...he did a brilliant job and look how much damn money it made on that opening weekend alone! :eek4:[/quote]
its not gonna have a good 2nd weekend though :ohnoes: may only make 20 million down from 52 :eek4: a lot of people must have been expectin just a str8 will summer blockbuster..and they just cant get with the extra stuff in the movie :oops: which i love :dunno:

[Guest Prince]

Thanks for the article!

[Jonny 5]

cool article, thanks - this was my fave part...

[quote]Smith hung around Sydney, searching in vain for a barber who knew how to cut his hair[/quote] lol

[WildWildWillennium]

[quote=Hero1,Jul 25 2004, 03:24 AM][quote=WildWildWillennium,Jul 25 2004, 12:56 AM] I feel his take on his character in I,Robot...but he definitely doesn't need 2 be nervous about it...he did a brilliant job and look how much damn money it made on that opening weekend alone!  :eek4:[/quote]
its not gonna have a good 2nd weekend though :ohnoes: may only make 20 million down from 52 :eek4: a lot of people must have been expectin just a str8 will summer blockbuster..and they just cant get with the extra stuff in the movie :oops: which i love :dunno:[/quote]
Damn...all those extras is what makes the movie so special and shows off the art of the film...anyways, I appreciate the movie 4 what it is...Will did great and everything in it is just amazing. If people can't see that and enjoy it, it's their loss.

[WildWildWillennium]

[b]BOX Office report on I, Robot[/b]
Second spot does not go to Catwoman this weekend; instead we get I, Robot in the runner-up spot after finishing in the top dog’s seat last weekend. I, Robot got crushed by The Bourne Supremacy as it dropped a huge 58% this weekend. The Will Smith starrer grossed $22.1 million from 3,494 venues, up 76 from last weekend. The best news for the futuristic Fox tale is that its current gross sits at $95.4 million, and it will cross the $100 million mark in the next couple of days. While Will Smith is a consistent $50 million earner in July, he’s also becoming an instant 50%+ drop-off man. Five of his last six films have plunged over 50% and the one that didn’t, The Legend of Bagger Vance, was a flop anyway. Wild Wild West dropped 53.8% in its second weekend, Ali dropped 52% in its second weekend, MiB2 dropped 53%, Bad Boys II fell 52.6% and now I, Robot dropped 58%. Yes, I, Robot will be a $150 million plus earner and an even bigger hit worldwide, but there is a trend here for Will Smith.
credit:Box Office Prophets

[DevilsJim89]

Thats good and bad news....as long as its a major hit, thats really all that counts....even if the movie did bad, Wills check is still comin on a flatbed. lol.

[sexywshgirl]

GREAT article!! I love reading stuff like that about Will! :thumb: I still think I,Robot will bring in some more big bucks$$!! :dancingcool: :dancingcool: