Michael Parkinson

[theriverjordan]

Hey everyone :)

This is my first post and Im a huge huge Will Smith fan. Today I was watching Michael Parkinson (for those who dont know, it's a British interview show) and I saw that Will Smith was in the beginning of it as the intro, showing all the people who Parkie has interviewed in the past... and I was just wondering if anyone has a video of it on mpg or something. I've looked through youtube ... Parkinson always does fantastic, funny and interesting interviews so I'm very interested to see what he and Will talked about -- sooooo if someone has it, how would you feel about sharing?

Otherwise, hello to everyone :D and I'm I hope I'll post here more. I'm from Australia and really wish Will could come over here.... I only became a HUGE fan after I bought "Lost and found" during my trip to California last year, but have always liked him since his Fresh Prince days (And in fact am always watching reruns of FPof Belair in my spare time).

Anyhoo.

I hope someone can help!

Jess

[viber_91]

Well I don't know were you could find video... but i have the transcript from the Will Smith and Julie Walters episode:

Michael: Now being a Hollywood superstar would be enough for most people, but not for my final guest. He conquered television, he's a best selling rap artist, he produces his own movies, he's voted the sexiest as well as the coolest and the most handsome of them all. It makes you sick doesn't it? (Laughter) His latest film is about a modern-day cupid whose business is telling men how to date girls. Here he is demonstrating a polished technique.(Excerpt from Hitch)

Michael: Ladies and gentlemen, Will Smith. (Applause)

Will: How you feeling man?

Michael: That was some entrance!

Will: (to Julie) I saw the scrotum man! (Laughter)

Julie: You didn't!

Will: I was on the train in New York and I said, 'Oh my god, that guy looks like balls!' (Laughter) I know that guy, he seemed a nice guy though.

Julie: It can't have been the same one then. There was two balls! (Laughter)

Will: Oh twins!

Michael: Let's talk about this movie of yours, a nice romantic comedy. You play the part of a date doctor, a modern-day cupid.

Will: Yes and actually we're not calling it a romantic comedy. We're calling it a comedy romance. (Laughter)

Michael: You've got off on the wrong foot there.

Will: Think about it, think about it. If it's a romantic comedy right and then we're not going to go out and have a beer and go, 'hey let's go check out that romantic comedy tonight eh?' So they call it a comedy romance so guys can feel comfortable about going to see it without their girlfriend. You know, big Hollywood stuff. You know, deep psychology of movie going! (Laughter)

Michael: I know, it's too big for me but I take your point. Anyway it's both comedy and romantic?

Will: Yes.

Michael: Anyway, you look to me like you relish the part?

Will: Oh yeah, I just relish, ketchup, mustard everything on this part! (Laughter) This is the character that I've played that is most like me. I study male/female interaction and let me get that for you (he replaces Michael's microphone which is falling off). I have that affect on men too, I walk on set and things just start falling off. (Laughter)

Michael: I'm beginning to think I can't live without you.

Will: This character is so like me, always with my friends I'm trying to help them to create Valentines Day for their wife or their girlfriend, or both! (Laughter) And I am that guy, that whatever is the number one book that women are reading, I wanna read it, you know? I want to understand why.

Michael: Why?

Will: Well I was hurt when I was younger, it's true. She broke my heart.

Michael: Who is this?

Will: (pretends to cry) I told myself I wasn't gonna go here on your show! (Laughter) No, but it's very similar to the guy in the film. He was hurt, there was a girl, my first girlfriend and she cheated on me. (Ahh from audience) You can send money to www.will...! (Laughter) But that's what's great about the film, we all have that same story, someone broke our hearts and made it really difficult for us to deal with everyone who came after that person. But for me the way that I responded, similar to the way the character responded, I just wanted to be better in order that would never happen again. I wanted to be the best lover, the best friend, I wanted to the best at everything in order that a woman would never have a reason to hurt me that way again.

Michael: Did you succeed?

Will: (deep voice) Well I've got to say that in the love department, I'm quite the stud! (Laughter) Well you never can totally succeed at something but you just have to commit to it and every day I want to be better and that's really where me and my wife connect because every day we wanna be better than we were yesterday.

Michael: In practical terms, your wife, how do you romance her? Like her birthday recently for instance?

Will: Well February 19th is kind of our anniversary, that was the day she said she fell in love with me so it was kind of our first date and she said she knew that day. So we celebrate February 19th as our anniversary. And this February 19th that just passed, you know I was out of town, so I had a bunch of roses on the floors of the house. I said I didn't want there to be an empty place where she could walk where there wasn't rose petals. So I had rose petals all over the house and she was awoken by a violin serenade.

Michael: Isn't that lovely eh? Wouldn't that do it for you? It'd do it for me?

Julie: It's lovely isn't it? How long have you been married?

Will: We've been married for seven years, together for ten years. But I did find myself uncontrollably attracted to you! (Laughter)

Julie: I felt it, it was watching that video, wasn't it? (Laughter)

Will: Yes! The dance video, the stockings!

Michael: Just clear one thing for me. Because I was reading this week in the papers about your marriage and it said you favour an open marriage. Is that true?

Will: Well you see, you can't believe everything you read in the papers. What I said was that our relationship is based on 100 per cent truth so I said, hypothetically if I was in a situation where I wanted to sleep with another woman, like for example Julie (laughter). What I said was, that I would call my wife and I would say, 'honey, Jules and I are one hundred per cent attracted to each other and would it be something you'd be ok with?' Now, not that she would say yes but I wouldn't cheat. I'm not the kind of guy that she would find out in The Enquirer that I was gonna cheat. I was just saying that hypothetically, the level of honesty in our relationship is such that if it were that serious that either one of us would just do and destroy our relationship because we're gonna be together, period.

Michael: So you're not contemplating it.

Will: No, I said hypothetically.

Julie: You said you were! (Laughter)

Will: Now listen, Jules, there is a thing called discretion! (Laughter) We're on TV, we're not gonna tell everybody. Settle down baby! (Kisses her hand) (Laughter)

Michael: Let's have a look at a clip from the film because part of your instruction to these guys who don't know how to date a woman is dance. You actually say that women fall in love while dancing.

Will: Well women, equate the dance to your sensuality. So it's very important that they don't see you (does silly dance) 'Come and baby can you handle all this man?' (Laughter)

Michael: Well this is the theme of the clip actually, let's take a look.(Excerpt from Hitch) (Applause)

Michael: That's a great scene, a lovely scene. That makes me feel very old watching that because the kind of dancing they do nowadays bears no relation to the kind of dancing I used to do.

Will: Well yeah, it's a little different!

Michael: Well it's very different and thing basic difference is that when I was learning how to dance the worst thing was crossing the dance floor to ask the girl to dance.

Will: Oh no, that's still the worst thing.

Michael: Is it and when you say, 'Can I have this dance?' They say, 'No, I'm with me mate.' But then you take her in your arms you see.

Will: Show me, show me. (They both stand and dance together) (Laughter) (They dance cheek to cheek)

Michael: By the pressure and the cheek to cheek you could get some notion of whether you were into it or not.

Julie: You could get a notion if that put their tongue down your throat. (Laughter)

Michael: Well what I can't understand is how you do it when you stand up and you're doing this sort of thing. (Stands and dances alone) (Will gets up and gets band to play modern beat)

Will: So I come and ask you to dance and we're dancing like this. (Michael tries to copy him) That's like saying, 'Baby, what you want?'(Laughter) (They sit down)

Will: We should go out.

Michael: More chat from Julie Walters and Will Smith in just a moment, see you then.(Commercial Break)

Michael: You're a world record holder of course because this week you broke the world record for attending three premiers in one day, you did Birmingham, Manchester and London.

Will: Yeah, we did the Manchester premier at 1.30, Birmingham at 4 o'clock and then we did London at 7 and then, you know, I went to sleep! (Laughter) And the Guinness Book gave me a certificate and it's like a world record. (Applause) And I'm like, (confused face) yeah, more than premiers than anybody, yeah!

Michael: Let's talk a little about the film career because it's interesting, you've got an Academy Award nomination for portraying a character that I had a couple of run ins with in my career, and that was Mohammed Ali. It as an extraordinary portrayal, in many ways you must have imagined yourself that it was an impossible job.

Will: Absolutely, I mean any aspect of that film is more than enough work for just one movie, you know, if it's just learning how to box. It was a year and a half's physical training to learn how to box and that would have been enough to have to learn for one movie but then there was the concept of the sixties in the United States and I'm a child of rap music and the nineties and essentially we're reaping the benefits of what happened in the sixties and I really couldn't understand that kind of segregation and that type of blatant racism so that was difficult to understand and then the dialect and trying to (in Ali's voice) get the man's voice right and you know it was just very, very difficult. (Applause)

Michael: And you spent time with him of course.

Will: Yeah, we spent a lot of time together.

Michael: And what kind of relationship did you have with him?

Will: You know, he personally asked me to do the film and that was a shock and an honour and I said to him, why me? And he said, 'because you're the only person that's almost as pretty as me'. (Laughter)

Michael: And actually you watched the first showing of the film with him, didn't you?

Will: Oh yeah, I was sitting next to Ali and his whole family. And so I'm sitting there in the middle of his whole family. And at one point he leans over to his wife while we're watching the wife and he says, 'Girl, why you ain't tell me I was so crazy?' (Laughter) So he was enjoying it and after the film he told me he was honoured and his family was very happy and it was emotional for them. So it was a year and a half of really hard work that paid off.

Michael: One of the things you got there, that not many of us do, was a privileged insight into the world of boxing.

Will: Absolutely.

Michael: And never mind the man himself because we've got no idea how fit these guys are, have we?

Will: Oh, I mean boxers are in the best shape of any athletes. To be able to go ten, twelve, fifteen rounds with someone punching at you. Because I had an experience when I was boxing that guaranteed my life as an actor, the boxing world was gonna be free from Will Smith, Michael Bent played Sonny Liston in the movie. And I was having a problem that I was scared so I was leaning back too much and my trainer was saying, 'lean in, lean in, you gotta get your spine angle forward'. So just at the time that I decided I was gonna get my spine angle forward was just the same time as Michael decided he was gonna throw a heavy right hand so I leaned in and I saw it coming so I put my head down and the punch hit me square on the top of my head but it didn't fly my head back, it compressed my head into my shoulders. I felt an electrical shock and it went down the back of my spine and to both elbows and I had an uncontrollable desire to find my car keys! (Laughter) I'm very certain that I did not want to be punched for a living.

Michael: I did a spar one time with Joe Frasier and had exactly the same thing.

Will: Did you get hit?

Michael: Well he playfully flicked me. (Laughter) And I had bells in my ears for days. And then I saw him in that great fight with Ali in Madison Square Gardens. I mean those two guys were made for each other, it's amazing and the damage they actually did to each other. I mean, Ali's trainer actually told me that he passed blood in his water for three weeks afterwards. That's the damage they do. And you must have found this too. Any one of those guys that you trained with, a serious blow from them and they would have killed you wouldn't they?

Will: Oh yeah, you would just die. (Collapses on floor) (Applause)

Michael: And there's another dimension too, to Ali, which you mentioned then and that's the political dimension. And he was, when all is said and done, there's a lot of stuff said about Ali but he was a very brave man. He took on all the government, for what he believed to be right. But you must have faced that as well yourself, when you were growing up. I mean you can't have been that removed from it.

Will: Oh no, I mean I've had experiences with racism and hearing a word from police and dealing with those situations but being a child of the nineties you know, we have a thing called Internal Affairs and it's essentially the police that police the police. So as a child of the nineties when we dealt with that kind of thing, we'd go right to Internal Affairs and report the officer and that kind of wasn't an option in the sixties. And I talked to Geronimo ji Jaga who was formerly Geronimo Pratt of the Black Panthers and I interviewed him for Ali and what he said that was interesting was that the perspective was that we were at war, that there was a civil war going on in the United States and that essentially gave the spark in my mind that it was more of a war scenario. Ali viewed the situation with the American Government in the same way that he viewed being in the ring. It was a fight, he was being aggressed upon and he had to win or die. And that really gave me the insight into how he was dealing with these situations and approaching the government.

Michael: But politically did he make a difference?

Will: Oh, absolutely. Well the thing that Ali did, and generally you can always tell about someone's political power by the children. By how the children of twelve and down are responding and reacting. And Ali was that guy, he was the guy the children wanted to be, they wanted to fight, they wanted to be able to stand up, they wanted to be able to make a different. And for me part of the bitter sweet concept of playing the role was that I got to sit next to and speak with and define and quantify, greatness, knowing that life will probably never deal me that cards that would enable me to determine if I'm that great. Am I that much man? What would I have done? What would I do today?

Michael: Yes and you met Mandela and it's the same thing. How would you react to that situation? Would you have had that forgiveness in your heart?

Will: Exactly and we all want it. We all think that we want it but we don't want it.

Michael: We'll talk again in just a moment.(Commercial break)

Michael: Going back to this current film you've done, this comedy romance. I'd like Julie to tell you, it's about men and women getting together. She's very experienced at this.

Julie: I beg your pardon!

Will: What do you mean? That's an awful thing to say! (Laughter)

Michael: She will explain, explain how you attracted the attention of your husband.

Julie: My husband of twenty years.

Will: Because the way that he just explained it sounded awful.

Julie: I know, like some kind of fly-by-night.

Michael: How many times have you been proposed to?

Julie: I'm not telling you, mind your own business!

Will: I will not have you insult a national treasure! (Cheers)

Julie: Thank you Will. You wanted to know how I attracted my husband, Grant?

Michael: What did you do? You accosted the poor man.

Julie: Well I sort of had a drop to drink with a friend.

Will: A drop is different in the States? How much is a drop?

Julie: Ooo it's quite a lot. (Laughter)

Will: OK.

Julie: We were in Fulham in London in a bar and I remember vaguely meeting Grant at the counter at this bar and we must have had a chat and I'd just moved house and I started telling him about the fact that my washing machine wasn't working and that my shower wasn't working. And he said that I needed a pump. Well I took that the wrong way. (Laughter) I invited him home! And the rest is history but the washing machine had not been working for three weeks and there was washing in it with water. And he said he'd have a look so he bent down, I'd had a drop to drink remember, so he was in the kitchen bending down, on the floor, looking at the filter or something. And we had a sitting room that was attached to it and I don't know why because I could see this person who I found very attractive and so I stood at one end of the room and ran and jumped on his back and held on like a limpet, well I have ever since really. (Laughter) And he must have been terrified, he sort of jumped up and tried to get me off as if I was a mad person and I suppose I was really. So that was it really, we've been together ever since, twenty years, I've let him out a couple of times.

Michael: So when you go back now in a couple of days into this house of yours which you've been seven years building.

Will: Yeah, don't ever build a house. It's a bad idea. There are enough houses that you shouldn't ever have to build one. We started building a house and we bought the land and we were just getting married and you know, you have all the hope. And then we found out it was in an environmentally protected area. So now we have to go and spend a year and carve out the place that they would say OK you can build here but not there. And then we have two or three years of designing and we're like, kind of seven years building this house.

Michael: Well I heard about these toilets.

Will: You heard about the toilets right? Listen, I'm not weird, I'm going to be as honest as I can possibly be. It was in Japan and it was the best toilets on the face of the earth. Listen, there's a sprayer in the back of the toilet and you don't need toilet paper. And you sit down on the toilet and somehow it knows when you're done. I swear and then the sprayer comes out and wherever you move it hits it perfectly and there has to be a guy downstairs aiming. And after it sprays it blows! (Laughter) And I started going to the bathroom for no reason, really it's like a shower in the middle of the day, it's like a naked run through a park or something, you feel so fresh. I'm sorry, I gotta run! (Laughter)

Michael: Will Smith and Julie Walters, thank you very much indeed. (Applause) My thanks to Will Smith, Julie Walters and Michael Bouble. From all of us here, a very good night. (Applause)

[ash trey]

Nice interview!:) Thanks for that Viber!

EDIT : Oh I almost forgot. Welcome to the board Jess!

Edited August 27, 2006 by ash trey

[Jazzy Julie]

welcome to the site! :2thumbs:

thanx for posting the interview viber, this is one of those i didnt get to tape, i really wish i had bcoz its one of the best funniest interviews i have seen.

[fresh_from_sofia]

thanks ! yeah if anybody got the video :wiggle:

[Jonny 5]

haha, cheers for that transcript!

[theriverjordan]

Thanks for the welcomes and thanks so much for the transcript! I cant wait to read!!

=)

[rcpbball30]

Thanks a lot for the interview!