He’s played his personal legend and become a bona-fide Hollywood legend, so it comes as little to surprise to find that Will Smith is a bit of a, well, legend.
Braving a freezing cold December night to plug his upcoming flick, you guessed it, I Am Legend, the one-time Fresh Prince Of Bel Air made sure to say a big thank you to the assembled throng of supporters, even if it meant his time with the huddled hacks was all-too brief.
The clock was ticking but the former Bad Boy turned family man did manage to explain the tone of the movie - “There’s quite a few scary elements to the film but it’s more of a psychological thriller than a horror though” – and wax lyrical on the virtues of working with his offspring (his youngest, Willow, stars as his on-screen kid). “It was beautiful working with my daughter,” he says. “She’s very into acting and performing and when your child wants to do what you do, well that’s a great experience as a parent.”
Those able to have a bit more of a chat (mostly because they’re not megastars with people screaming out their name), were the producer Akiva Goldsman and director Francis Lawrence – a dream team that will soon see them working together on the mooted Eddie Dickens adaptation, a kid-lit favourite, and Goldsman getting his leading man to play a down-and-out superhero in Hancock.
“I’m a great believer in film-making as teamwork and a lot of people sort of get a good thing going and then break it. We do very well together, says Goldsman. “As for Eddie Dickens, well, that’s long-haul but me and Francis are trying to revive it. We wanted to make a really dark motion-capture movie but the studio said ‘For who?’ and we said ‘Well, us!’ They said ‘No!’
Until that one does get the greenlight, it’s all about slapping themselves on the back for finally getting I Am Legend made – particularly as it’s a project that has laboured in development hell since James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger were attached to the project in the early Nineties.
“This is a lot of people’s work over a lot of years but it’s very nice to have the opportunity to move this thing forward,” Says Goldsman. “I’m really very proud of it.”
“Yeah, it feels really good,” says Lawrence. “Especially now that people are going to see it. It’s a lot different from what they were trying to make in the Nineties.”
As it’s based on Richard Matheson’s much-loved sci-fi/horror novella (it’s about the last man on Earth trying to survive nightly attacks from plague-ridden, sunlight-shunning nasties), what did the author make of the finished product?
“He was very happy with it,” says Lawrence. “I spoke to him after he saw it and he was very happy and very excited about it. It’s not exactly as he wrote it, we modernised some things and changed some things but he’s very happy with it. So that’s good.”
The film is clearly doing something right with US audiences going crazy for the post-apocalyptic yarn and Lawrence puts that success down to one man and his dog – to be clearer, Smith’s versatility and the acting talents of his co-star, a German Shepherd who plays Sam.
“The reason this film works is because of Will’s versatility,” says Lawrence. “He does so many different performances in the same film, usually you need an entire cast to get those emotions across but he managed it all on his own.
"As for Sam, well the dog who plays her is fantastic in this movie. She’s two-years-old, her name is Abbey and she had barely any training. We had two back-up dogs but she did 98% of the movie. So the dog you know in the movie is Abbey.”
I Am Legend goes on general release from Boxing Day.