Will Smith: Making a 'Legend'

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Confident in Goldsman and eager to stay in business with Lawrence, Warner Bros. soon announced that Legend was back. Very quickly, the duo hit upon a big idea: relocating the tale from Los Angeles to New York. Goldsman, a Big Apple native, felt the new setting lent it some timely resonance and differentiated it from its predecessors. By Christmas 2005, he had a script and sent it to Smith, for whom he had co-written I, Robot. The actor dug it enough to come back, even if he felt the writing wasn't quite there yet. ''It's a $100 million-plus movie where the lead doesn't talk for the first hour,'' says Smith. ''It's really just me and a dog. That's tough. We desperately had to get in there and figure out how to make it riveting.'' That took work: improvising scenes, reintroducing elements from Protosevich's earlier script (the scribe shares credit with Goldsman on the finished film), meeting with experts on infectious diseases and solitary confinement, and exploring earlier films in which an isolated soul struggles to survive. In other words, says Smith, ''we took a big hint from Tom Hanks in Cast Away.''

I Am Legend finally went into production in the fall of 2006, and for six months, it turned New York into a studio backlot. The film's congestion-causing presence wasn't always welcome. ''By the conclusion of this shoot,'' says Goldsman, ''I wouldn't tell people what I did for a living because they'd go, 'Oh, you're that motherf---er.''' During six frigid nights last January, Legend took over the Brooklyn Bridge to shoot a flashback of people fleeing Manhattan. The six-minute sequence required 1,000 extras, the construction of a fake pier, and the assistance of the Coast Guard and the National Guard. At one point, Smith warmed up the frosty extras by performing his 1991 hit ''Summertime.'' ''We had a good time out there that night,'' laughs the actor.

Six months later, Lawrence and his effects team are holed up at Sony Imageworks in L.A., eradicating all the people in New York — the Fifth Avenue rubberneckers, the workers in their skyscraper windows, the cars moving in the background — and adding animals and vegetation to create a New York reclaimed by nature. The director's visual inspiration? John Ford Westerns. ''We didn't want to make an apocalyptic movie where the landscape felt apocalyptic,'' he says. ''A lot of the movie takes place on a beautiful day. There's something magical about the empty city as opposed to dark and scary.''

Also on Lawrence's to-do list: finishing Legend's monsters. Their appearance is one of the film's two closely guarded secrets. In fact, nobody can even agree on what to call them. To Goldsman, they are ''the Infected'' (as in 28 Days Later). Smith's character refers to them as ''dark seekers,'' while the actor himself often wants to call them zombies. They're not exactly vampires either, though Goldsman will say that they have vampirelike drives. As for that other secret, it concerns the film's cryptic tagline, ''The Last Man on Earth Is Not Alone.'' A coy Goldsman says that Smith represents ''85 percent of our cast,'' and that while a Web rumor about Johnny Depp making an extended cameo is not true, another recognizable face does pop up in the film.

Even without a Depp drop-in, Smith is sure Legend hits that sweet spot he's long sought. More important, the film lives up to a new standard of his. ''With The Pursuit of Happyness, I turned a corner,'' he says. ''My movies need to mean something. I Am Legend is essentially the story of Job, the idea that life is awful if you can't connect to the possibility that there's a reason for everything. To have those ideas at work in a movie with special effects — that's magic.'' Thinking back to that day of shooting on Fifth Avenue, Smith says he didn't mind the gawkers, especially now that Legend has given him a taste of true solitude. ''As much as you wish people would just get the hell out of your face...that is so not true,'' he says. ''Because if everyone really did, that would be a miserable existence.''