Will Smith is appearing on his friend Kevin Hart’s show called Hart to Heart on Peacock, where they talk about his most significant roles in movies.
Smith credits film producer James Lassiter as the “arbiter of taste,” who convinced him in his “heyday” to make “the 10 movies I made at the top of my career.”
“He just had an eye. I didn’t want to make Pursuit of Happyness, I didn’t want to make Ali,” Smith recalls. Both film has gotten him Best Actor Oscar nominations.
“[Lassiter] picked Men in Black,” Smith continues. “I kinda understood Men in Black like a little bit, but I didn’t want to make Men in Black that was the next year after Independence Day. So I didn’t want to make two alien movies back to back.”
Hart, like all of us, wonders why Smith changed his mind. Turns out, it didn’t take much, just a little intervention from one of the movie’s producers.
He continued: “Steven Spielberg sent a helicopter for me,” Smith answers a dumbstruck Hart. “To talk. It landed at his house. And he had me at ‘Hello.'”
Right from the start and with the first sip of fizzy lemonade.
“And it was the first time I ever had lemonade with carbonated water,” Smith continues. “Yeah, you can’t say no to that,” Hart concedes. “And you had to act like you had it before.”
Reflecting on Men in Black, the protectors of the galaxy, Smith shares that Spielberg bluntly asked, “Tell me why you don’t want to make my movie”
Smith playfully emphasizes the significance of the ellipses in Spielberg’s statement, teasingly wondering what the famous director was thinking at that moment.
“He put the ellipses at the end…if he had continued, he woulda said, ‘Joker, you know I made Jaws, right? You know I made E.T.‘”
Smith goes on to talk about his role as Chris Gardner in the 2006 drama The Pursuit of Happyness, where he played a homeless salesman, based on the real-life story of Gardner.
For that film, there was no helicopter and no carbonated lemonade in influencing Smith’s decision. Rather, he points to a 20/20 piece on Gardner he saw after reading the script.
He credits the news program for helping him find the structure of the story. And then he met Gardner himself.
