“What’s the point of going to the movies if you miss the trailers?” Smith yelled out, prompting Scoty to throw their vehicle in reverse and back up on the freeway until they got to the exit. The driver of the car, a dreadlocked friend named Scoty with a Trinidadian accent to match, had missed the exit-forcing them to take a 22-minute loop in order to turn around. Between takes, I watched as he recalled with his assistants the time, while filming Concussion in Pittsburgh, that they all attempted to make it to an evening showing of Denzel Washington’s The Equalizer, also directed by Fuqua. You can’t blame Smith if he’s confident he knows the best way to tell a story: The man is a natural raconteur. I’m saying, just don’t say that, because then people who would help you won’t.” “I’m not saying we shouldn’t defund the police. ‘Defund the police’ doesn’t get it done, no matter how good the ideas are,” he continued. “From a standpoint of getting it done, Black Lives Matter gets it done. So when I talk about the marketing of our ideas, Black Lives Matter was perfection.” Anybody who tries to debate Black Lives Matter looks ridiculous. This is a difficult area to discuss, but I feel like the simplicity of Black Lives Matter was perfect. And there’s a certain humility that will most capitalize on the moment for the future of Black Americans, without discounting the difficulty and the pain and the emotion. “The pendulum is swinging in our direction beautifully. So ‘critical race theory,’ just call it ‘truth theory,’ ” Smith said. Defund the police.’ I would love if we would just say ‘Defund the bad police.’ It’s almost like I want, as Black Americans, for us to change our marketing for the new position we’re in. Yet when Smith took the film to studios last year, George Floyd had died and the world had changed. I understood what it was to try to mold a young mind, how it’s different with sons than it is with daughters.”Įmancipation is an even bigger swing, the kind of big-budget script that often lingers in preproduction for years, if not decades. “So when I first read, I understood what it’s like to want your kids to succeed. “Richard Williams is a lot like my father,” Smith explained to me. Smith’s portrayal, Serena added, was so convincing that there were moments she had to remind herself that it wasn’t actually her father on the screen. They think, How do we break them? My dad anticipated that, but he would not allow himself or his family to be broken.” “You see, when someone is different-when they don’t act or look how a person assumed they would-the first reaction is often fear. “My dad was and still is way before his time,” Serena Williams told me in an email. Smith plays him as a crotchety, unbending, but fiercely loving parent. The irascible Williams trained both daughters with balls collected from the tennis clubs he couldn’t get into, and protected them from the grind of tennis and the media in a way that makes him look like a prophet of the current moment in which athletes like Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles prioritize their agency and mental health. In the grand Smith tradition, it’s an inspiring story of triumph over adversity that contains an affecting character study. That means making movies like King Richard, directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green and due in theaters this November, in which Smith portrays Richard Williams, the eccentric, hard-nosed father of Venus and Serena. Once we settled in for a conversation, Smith told me that his aim now is “strictly to tell stories that help people figure out how to be happy here.” He continued: “The idea is I spent the first half of my life gathering, gathering, gathering, and now the second half of my life is going to be giving it all away.” Before I spoke to Smith, his collaborators and friends kept telling me how great a place he’s in at the moment-that he’s centered, deliberate, and even spiritual.
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