Now, with the Christmas season fast approaching, Will Smith walks alone in the futuristic thriller I Am Legend and luckily we made our way to L.A. to get his thoughts on being alone for the entire movie, the film's PG-13 rating, his attitude toward life, his friendship with David and Victoria Beckham, and the status of Empire with director Michael Mann.

Will Smith on dealing with being alone for most of the movie:

"That was the terrifying part of even taking part in this film, the idea that there is probably eighty pages of just me and a dog. I was like, 'Okay, there’s good times I’ve had on camera and people have enjoyed me in a movie theater, but that might be a little too much for anybody.' I looked at it and worked with Akiva Goldsman, the writers, and we studied POWs and we found a guy who had been in isolation in prison, and we found the things that create the texture of what that truly means to be by yourself. And the one thing that came across was schedule, Geronimo Pratt said that you would schedule things like cleaning your nails. You would have two hours to clean your nails, that was the only way to maintain sanity is that you had to have a regimen, a schedule. You had to do things that you trained your mind that would have to be done this day at that time. That was the basis of how we tried to create the schedule. And then it’s the idea of the internal monologue.

"When you have no external stimulus, no one is talking to you, [and] you lose the stimulus response concept with your thoughts and feelings. A guy told us, he said you forget the names of simple things. He says he remembers sitting in his cell one time and for about four hours he was trying to remember what these things were called, and he couldn’t remember what they were called. And he said, 'Damn fingers,' and it just dawned on him that’s what happens when you don’t have the stimulus response your mind really loses basic simple concepts. We really worked in that area with the internal monologue. Rather than having someone saying it’s a beautiful day today, you say, 'Yes, it is,' but you have to say both to yourself. So, in a scene, I’ll be sitting there looking and thinking it’s a beautiful day, [and] did I clean my nails today? And the extensive internal monologue you have to create, it does a weird thing on camera because when you see it, it looks full. There is a lot of stuff going on even when it’s just a dude sitting there with a dude. That was way too much time for a question, I swear I’m going to go faster than that. That was a Tommy Lee Jones right there."

Smith on the discipline of losing twenty pounds for the role:

"For me, the important part of that, and what we determined from our research, is that eating becomes something you do because you have to. There is no pleasure, there is no desire to eat, you just know your brain won’t function if you don’t. So losing weight and then the working out being part of the regimen you have to do - but for me I have a much easier time losing weight than putting weight on. Ali was fifty times harder trying to put weight on than to drop. If you run thirty miles a week and do five miles six days a week, your body will look like whatever you want it to look like."

On the film being released over the holidays and the PG-13 rating:

"Fortunately, the MPAA gets to make that decision. You show them the movie and they decide what the rating is. This film was a difficult decision-making process for me creatively. Akiva Goldsman, we met during the Oscar run when he won for A Beautiful Mind and I was nominated for Ali. We met, we talked, and we posed a question to one another: 'why do the big movies come out in the summer and the good movies come out in the fall? Why are they separated? Is there a possibility you could take both and marry them?' You could take the one with big ideas and the big concept, yet put a person at the in the center of it and follow the character of whatever that situation is. It’s difficult for me because there are genre concepts - for example, you never have a realistic situation with a dog in a summer movie the way we do in this film. You just wouldn’t do the realistic version of it, because the movie cost too much to risk it. So we truly tried to commit to the small art-house artistic truthful version that stayed to the source material and that energy, but stay with that big blockbuster package. We’re hoping that people will respond to it. We know when people are going to go into the theater that people will be a little shocked by it, but hopefully that will turn out to be a good thing."

Smith on the comfort items he'd need if he were alone:

"A pistol, because I’m out of here. [laughs] I’m going to the nearest bridge. That’s another thing I realized. It’s such a primal childlike idea: ‘I just wish everyone was gone, I wish I was by myself.’ No you don’t. As much as people get on your nerves on the freeway, as much as people irritate you through your daily life, if you took every one away and you had it exactly the way you wanted it, it would be the most miserable existence that you could experience. I walked down the middle of 5th Avenue, we had it cleared for six blocks and as cool as it is, it’s only cool because as soon as we yell cut there’s ten thousand people on the other side. Human connection and the groups we form, and being a part of something that moves and changes the world, is such a basic and human and simple idea. There was absolutely no pleasure for me at all in experiencing that amount of loneliness and solitude."

Will Smith on whether he has a positive attitude towards life:

"Yes, absolutely. I feel very, very confident that the keys to life for me are reading and running. The idea that there are millions and billions of people who have lived before us, and they had problems and they solved them and they wrote it in a book somewhere - there is no new problem that we can have that we have to figure out by ourselves. There’s no relationship issue, there is no issue with your parents or your brother or your government, there is no issue we can have that somebody didn’t already write a thousand years ago in a book. So, for me, that concept of reading is bittersweet because you know it’s in a book somewhere but you’ve got to find the right one that is going to give you the proper information. I said reading and running and the running aspect is how can you connect with your weakness. When you get on the treadmill you deprive yourself of oxygen. What kind of person you are will come out very, very quickly. You’re either the type of person who will say you’re going to run three miles or you stop the treadmill at 2.94 and you hit it and you call 2.94 3 miles, or you get off after a mile, or you’re the type of person that runs hard through the finish line and when you get to 3.0 you realize, ‘God, I could really do 5,’ and you go ahead and do two more. And that little person talks to you and says, 'Man, do you feel our knee? We should stop. I feel we should stop ourselves right now. This is not healthy anymore.’ When you learn to get command over that person on that treadmill, you learn to get command over that person in your life. That’s the same person that tells you, 'Man, that girl’s got some big breasts. Listen, we don’t have to do nothing, let’s just go the hotel room together.' That’s the same person. Getting command of that person has been really important."

Will Smith Interview Page 2