From Oscar winning filmmaker Ang Lee, and with a screenplay by David Benioff and Billy Ray and Darren Lemke, the action-thriller Gemini Man follows Henry Brogan (Will Smith), an elite assassin who becomes the target of a mysterious operative who can seemingly predict his every move. To his horror, he soon learns that the man who’s trying to kill him is a younger, faster, cloned version of himself.
During a conference at the film’s Los Angeles press day, we sat down with mega movie star Will Smith as he spoke about what interested him in this project and some of the the challenges in bringing the younger version of himself to life. He also gives us his thoughts on his career at this stage of his life, and whether he’d give any advice to his own 23-year-old self.
Q: What was it like for you when you read this the first time that made you just go, “I’m in”?
Will Smith: I loved the philosophical idea that we all plant the seeds of our own destruction like we are our own worst enemy. We make choices and we make decisions in our lives that set things in motion that we can’t blame other people for and the battle with trying to overcome our karma. I just thought it was a really clever and creative way to say that we are the architects of our ultimate rise or fall and to be able to do that in this way. It’s a big part of why I love science fiction, because you can put those things on really wild visual landscapes.
Q: What do you think about the computer-generated younger version of yourself?
WS: I think people don’t completely understand the depth of what (the visual effects people) attempted and accomplished here. Junior is not de-aging, right? So it’s not my face and they smoothed out my face to make it look younger. It’s a 100% digital human in the same way that the tiger in The Life of Pi. They used a real tiger to understand the movement, but in the movie when you are seeing the tiger you are seeing a 100% digital recreation of a tiger. This is not me de-aged, it’s a 100% digital interpretation of me。It’s a digital character. It’s the first digital human. So it is actually a spectacular thing to be able to make people feel emotion in that way, capturing the youthful eyes. That’s the one thing for me that was so amazing. It was the hardest part that me and Ang (Lee, director) were talking about, you can’t fake innocence. I was trying to explain in an interview the other day that as a young actor it is easier to play older but older, it’s difficult to impossible to play younger. Once you know some stuff, it’s in your eyes. It’s in your cells once you know some stuff. So, to try to have eyes that unknow like sex, once you’ve had sex, you walk different, it’s in your back, you know [laughs]. So their job in creating a digital human was to be able to sell that innocence and that youth and be able to sell a digital human in that way. I think (they) have done spectacular work.
Q: How did you play yourself both as a youth and older?
WS: Well, what was really great that Ang did even before we even met, he had gone through my filmography and grabbed things. He grabbed Fresh Prince, he grabbed Six Degrees of Separation and Bad Boys, Independence Day, Men in Black. He grabbed the scenes and he was sort of walking me though moments. He would look and say “I like very much what you have done in this moment here in Six Degrees of Separation. In Bad Boys, this one was good, but don’t ever do this in my movie” [laughs]. So we sort of created a language from my old characters and the moments what he was trying to capture. It’s funny. There’s a thing before you learn how to act. There’s a powerful thing you have from not knowing and it’s really difficult to recapture that not knowing. We found these moments, we found these really honest moments in some of my early work. But I would say of all the things that was the most difficult part. It almost felt like learning how to do some bad acting, like go back to bad acting. Because there is an honesty before you actually learn where the light is and you learn how to stand and you learn that makes people clap for movie stars in the theater. Letting go of all of that stuff was really difficult.
Q: Scenes like the motorcycle chase scene has both Henry and Junior in them. What was the particular challenge of having both you as a younger man and as yourself in a scene like that?
WS: Because everyone is looking at the Junior character they don’t realize there are full digital old Henry shots in the film also. So there are moments when full-frame close-up shots are old, it’s hard to say old Will, young Will, young me, old me! [laughs] There are full digital shots of old Will, old Henry in the film also. That’s when you can really tell that it works when people are not thinking about it.
Q: The movie was shot at 120 frames per second. Does that make everything crystal clear?
WS: I was going to say, it’s so clear. So it responds the way really responds to your eye, and that was the attempt to make it a much more realistic experience so much so. It’s so crystal clear that the actors couldn’t wear makeup because when the camera moves in, you could see makeup on our faces. So I had to drink a lot of water. Couldn’t afford a breakout.
Q: What went through your mind when you first saw the movie with Junior on screen?
WS: It was really crazy. The first time I saw it was chilling almost. It was a little scary. Because the first one I saw was one of my favorite shots in the whole movie when Henry flips Junior over in the catacombs then puts the light up onto Junior’s face. That was one of the first completed shots that I saw. It was a little bit surreal, a little bit weird. Then I started getting excited about all of the possibilities. The young Will Smith, young Marlon Brando movie that could get made. They could get made while I’m at home which would be great. It’s a full 23-year-old digital version of myself and my mind just started to go wild about what you’d be able to do. Even how the action sequences were done. Normally, in an action sequence you can’t just punch somebody in the face so you take a shot and you go behind the actor and the actor goes “Ugh!” And you go “No, no, you missed” So you move the camera and keep going. Now, what they were able to do with this technology, you do the scene, you do the swing then they take the fist and actually put it on the face of the digital character and bend the face and throw the sweat and all of that. So, when you’re seeing those shots now, whereas we are used to seeing misses with sound and blur, now you’re seeing full shots in the same way in MMA. So, it was really a great new way to do the action. You do all these different variations and the stunt men can do full takes and we can do full takes and they will be able to make the most visceral version of it when they get all of those assets in to post production. So, in terms of action, I’m really excited about the use of this technology in the future.
Q: Now I want to know if the Fresh Prince of Bel Air episode where his father comes to visit was one of Ang Lee’s references.
WS: [laugh] No. He didn’t pull that down. With the Fresh Prince, I think Ang found it more interesting to show me what not to do.
Q: While in this climate today, is a movie like Gemini Man the underdog?
WS: Absolutely, definitely in the new world, it’s a whole lot safer from a financial standpoint to make a Part 3 of something than it is to do something brand new from the ground up. But that’s what we were all excited about with this, why to push the envelope is to get people a new reason to go to movie theaters to see something that you can’t see at home.
Q: You like science fiction so what was the Sci-Fi movie that really hooked you?
WS: Star Wars was the movie when I was growing up that I was stunned sitting after Star Wars ended. I couldn’t believe that they could make me feel like that with a story and with these characters. I think career-wise, the things that I’ve been chasing are Star Wars and “Thriller” (Michael Jacksons) are the two pieces of entertainment that I’ve always been hoping to make something that matches for others how I felt when I experienced those.
Q: Can you talk about the way they were raised Junior and Henry, made the men they became?
WS: That was one of the major discussions we were having in terms of nature vs. nurture and how, if you are genetically identical, how much does your life experience affect the things that you say and do and feel? We were trying to draw as big a difference as possible between the characters. Henry grew up in a brutal household and had a tougher upbringing whereas Junior had the perfect upbringing with Clive’s (Owen, played Junior’s dad, Clay) character. In Clive’s character’s pursuit of the perfect human, he was trying to lay out the perfect experience for young Junior. So, it was all of the right schools and he was only allowed to read the right books and he was only allowed to experience the best of what the nurturing aspects of a home should be. So, in drawing those distinctions, it was still interesting that it still came down to two men who had taken these gifts that they had and turn them into things that were still going to create nightmares and that were going to create a horrible end to this experience.
Q: You mentioned that you and Ang watched old videos of you together. How was that experience like? Was it like fun or embarrassing?
WS: We watched all of my original work and was that fun? No. Not with Ang Lee up on the edge of his chair watching everything you’ve ever done and every moment and breaking it down and describing. So I wouldn’t say that was fun. But in terms of being in a film school environment, it was fantastic. I grew as an actor and as a human for the time I was able to spend with such an incredible artist as Ang Lee.
Q: What if we could really clone human beings? If someone died, you could recreate them and wouldn’t have to grieve the loss. How do you feel about that?
WS: I think we all have the human quest to overcome our pain, right? So, we’re all trying to figure out how to eliminate suffering from our lives and there was an interesting phrase I heard the other day, “poisoned honey”. We reach for poisoned honey a lot in order to overcome our pain and suffering. When I think about cloning and we talked about it a lot on this movie, it’s one of those scientific reaches that I think we’ve already gone down the road so I am sure there are absolutely things have happened in cloning that we don’t know about yet that we’re going to find out. My opining is that cloning will ultimately pan out to be poisoned honey. It will be a reach that will potentially come back and bite humanity in a way that we are probably not considering fully.
Q: You’ve been doing kick butt action movies for a long time but have you thought about what you want to do next as you get older? What kinds of films?
WS: I think more than just the transition in roles, I turned 51 last week, and I’m experiencing a transition in my life. More than ever I’m seeing my role in the world as a role of service. In my younger days, it was ambition. I wanted to win. I wanted to put points on the board. Now, I’m going to a position in my life where the main question I ask myself before I do anything is “How is this of service to the human family?” So, with that prism, I’ll be making more and more decisions in my life. I love science fiction. I love filmmaking. Even wanting to do this (press conference) here at YouTube is an outreach for me to a new generation or the next generation of artists and filmmakers. I’m just trying to figure out how everything that I do is conscious and thought out and of some justifiable service to the human family.
Q: Your co-star Clive Owen says he never regards the characters he’s played as “bad guys,” rather you’re playing flawed characters, and you try to find the best way in to express that character. He also called you the “best version of a major movie star” in terms of your acting skills, discipline and focus.
WS: In terms of playing a bad guy, what was really interesting, along with what Clive was saying, in the perception that and I learned something about this, I’ve never played a character that’s really a bad guy in that sense, but was great about Clive’s perspective is that there is no such thing as a bad guy. He was like, the bad guy’s the god guy in this story, right? In the bad guy’s mind, you are the bad guy, right? So that idea, it was a good click for me in that comprehension and Clive really pushing to get clear on the point. Everybody, when you wake up in the morning, nobody wakes up and says, “I want to be a bad guy today.” You wake up and anything you do, however we look at it and we like, that’s a bad guy. But person’s mind, they are doing good, they are doing right. Nobody wants to do bad. And that was a really interesting thing to watch, as Clive worked through the character and how found how the character was 100% right in his own mind.
Q: How did you go back and forth between Henry and Junior every day?
WS: What Ang did that was really great. What makes someone an actor’s director is when they understand how to create circumstances for you to achieve the psychological and emotional space that they are looking for. So, Ang was really good about separating Henry from Junior in the schedule. You get lathered up into Henry and if the shift is too abrupt, it’s hard to get your mind around it. He did a really job of separating the time from Henry and Junior so I could spend more time in one mindset, or the other.
Q: Do you have any advice to your 23-year-old self?
WS: That question came up a lot. My younger self was wildly and insanely aggressive. At 23-years-old, I was naïve and ambitious and aggressive. There is a power to naiveté. There is a power that I’m actually trying to get back in my life right now. I would be asking my 23-year-old self for advice more than trying to do because he made some good-ass decisions. I was like wouldn’t have done it that way but he made some good calls. So, for me, just in the last couple of years I’ve been feeling trapped by the success that I’ve had and the decisions and choices I’ve been able to make have been smaller, trying to protect Will Smith. So, on my 50th birthday, I was like fix it, and I jumped out of a helicopter over the Grand Canyon, trying to get back to that youthful, fearless space. So I would be interviewing him rather than trying to give him advice.
Gemini Man opens in theaters on October 11th (2019)
With additional reporting by I. Hasegawa/HNW