Will Smith, you're used to working with a large-cast production. I was wondering if you could talk about working working pretty much on your own and also working in New York, where the production had to shut down streets and empty them out.

Smith: Shooting in New York, especially something on this level, is difficult. I would say percentage-wise, it's the most amount of middle fingers I've ever received in my career [laughs]. I'm used to people liking me. When I come to town, it's like fun. Middle fingers. I was starting to think "F you!" was my name. ... We shut down six blocks of Fifth Avenue on a Monday morning. That was probably poor logistics. That was poor planning. But ... you realize you've never actually seen an empty shot of New York. And when we were doing it, it's chilling to walk down, like, the middle of Fifth Avenue. There's never an opportunity to walk down the middle of Fifth Avenue. Two o'clock in the morning on a Sunday, you can't walk down the middle of Fifth Avenue. And so what happened is, it just created such a creepy energy. And there's iconic buildings and there's ... a shot in the movie of the U.N., and there's Broadway, and ... it puts such an eerie, icky kind of feeling on the movie when you see those shots. So logistically it was just a nightmare, but it absolutely created something that you can't do with green screen, and you can't do shooting another city for New York. Could you talk a little bit about the loneliness of the character and the madness, and acting for half the film or more by yourself? Could you talk a little bit about that?

Smith: It was such a wonderful exploration of myself, because what happens is, you get into a situation where you don't have people to create the stimulus for you to respond to. So what happens is, you start creating the stimulus and the response. So there's a connection with yourself ... where your mind starts to drift to in those types of situations, that you learn things about yourself that you never would even imagine. ...

In order to prepare for that, we sat with former POWs, and we sat with people who had been in solitary confinement, and that was sort of the framework for creating the idea. They said that first thing is a schedule. That you will not survive in solitary if you don't schedule everything. And we talked to Geronimo ji-Jaga—he's formerly Geronimo Pratt of the Black Panthers—and he was in solitary for over three months. And he said you plan things like cleaning your nails, and you'll take two hours [and] that you have to [do it], because it's on the schedule, that you have to just clean your nails. He said that he spent about six weeks, and he trained roaches to bring him food. And, you know, I'm sitting, I'm like, "Oh, my God." The idea of where your mind goes to defend yourself. And either he really did train the roaches, which is huge, or his mind needed that to survive. Either way, you put that on camera and it's genius.

And for me, that was the thing: to be able to get into the mental space where what the truth was for Robert Neville didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was what he saw and what he believed. How many people picked up on the mannequin shot up at the end with the little turn of the head? You saw that? Like, there's probably about six or seven of those in the movie. And it was such a great exploration of what happens to the human mind that is trying to defend itself. And for me, I'm a better actor for having to create both sides of the scene with no dialogue.Can you talk about working with Willow, your real-life 7-year-old daughter, who plays Neville's daughter, Marley, in the movie? [She makes her big-screen debut.]

Smith: You kind of don't work with Willow, you work for Willow. ... Jada [Smith's wife, Jada Pinkett] and I, we debate, you know, the age-old debate: nature versus nurture. Now, is it because two actors went to Mexico and drank some tequila and made a baby, right? So does that make the baby an actor? You know? Or does she grow up in a house where that's what's in her house, that's just the life, that's the experiences that she knows? And when I look at Willow, I just believe it has to be neither one of those. Like there has to be something else. ...

Willow, she just loves it, you know? ... We were shooting the bridge sequence, and there's a building that had a temperature gauge on it, and ... we started at sunset, and it was probably 29 degrees or something, and we watched it go down to 1 and then negative. And Willow's out there, and she has her stuff on, and she's cold, and she's getting a little irritable, and she looked at me and she said, "Daddy, I don't care how low it goes. I'm going to finish." And I was like, "Wow, that's good, baby, because Daddy's leaving if it goes any lower." You know?

But she just wants it. She has a drive. She has an energy. And she just connects to human emotion. And I think a big part of it is probably [my son] Jaden [who co-starred with Smith in The Pursuit of Happyness]. After The Pursuit of Happyness, and she saw what Jaden did, she's like, "I want that." The night we told Willow that she got the [Legend] role—because we make our kids audition and all of that, we don't do the whole nepotism thing.— ... the night that she found out, ... Jaden was sitting where you are. I'm Willow. ... And we say, "Everybody, we just want to congratulate Willow. She got I Am Legend." And she immediately turns around to Jaden and goes [smirks and does a little dance]. And I'm like, "What was that?"Have you ever thought what you'd do in a disaster? And do you [think you'd be] a real-life hero?

Smith: Oh, man. That, you know, that's always a tough question. That's what's interesting about playing characters like this, because you get to explore and wonder how would you react. Like, for me, Ali was the greatest time of asking myself that question. You know, when Ali didn't step forward because they wouldn't call him Muhammad Ali. And he knew he was going to go to jail. He knew what the situation was, but he couldn't step forward. And I just knew, at that moment, like, what would I do? And I just don't know if I would be enough man to give up everything I have right now the way Ali did for that principle.

And like when I look at Robert Neville, what was there to live for? What was there to hope for? To wake up every day and to try to restore something that is good and gone. So I like to believe that I would put my chest up and stand forward and march on and continue to fight for the future of humanity. Um, but I'd probably find a bridge [laughs]. "I'm coming to join you, Elizabeth!" It's a tough question. I guess the answer is I don't know. I don't think so, I don't think so. And there's a part of me, you want to be tested, to know what you would do, but you really don't want to be tested. So that's sort of the space I've lived in with quite a few of the roles I've played.Can you talk about working with the dog?

Smith: Oh, the dog. Abbey is the dog's real name. And yeah, when I was probably 9 years old, I had a dog, Trixie, a white golden retriever that got hit by a car. So I have, I refused [to get another one]. No animals. Jada, you can have the dogs you want. The kids can have the dogs they want. I'm not putting myself emotionally connected to a dog anymore.

And then Steve brought that damn Abbey on the set. It's like, you say a smart dog. It's like, it got to the point with Abbey, she'd be playing, playing, playing, she'd hear "Rolling!" and she'd run over to her mark and get ready. And I was like, "What in the hell?" It's like she would know when I wasn't doing my lines right. If I would get lost in the scene, you know, she would just go [tilts head]. And it's like, it was the first time I had connected with, allowed myself to be fond of, a dog since that experience, and I was like, the owner, Steve [Berens], I was like, "Steve, please! Abbey has to live with me. Please." And he was like, "Well, this is how I make my living, man." It's like, "Tell me what you need. Tell me what you need now." She's just smart and fun and warm, and I was like ... So I experienced the pain again, because he was like, "I'll bring her over every weekend, Will, but you know, she has to work." It was painful, but yeah, she was great.Akiva Goldsman, can you talk about the changes you made to the book?

Goldsman: Well, if you look at the source credit, you'll see that it really is adapted both from Matheson's novel and from Omega Man, which is really an intact work of its own. And it's a little bit of a hybrid. I don't want to sort of say specifically what we did and didn't change. We tried to stay true to the spirit. Obviously, one of the most contentious issues always in the development of this property has been the ending. So I leave it to others to determine to what degree they find it faithful.There are a few hints that this is a New York of the future, like the Superman/Batman poster in Times Square and the gas prices over $6 a gallon. But otherwise it is the New York of the present that we're all familiar with. Can you talk about the decision to keep it in that setting instead of really post-apocalyptic distant future?

Lawrence: Sure. You know, we did a lot of conceptual work on this world before we got started, while Akiva was working on the script, and what we didn't want to do is exactly what you're talking about. We didn't want to do the same grim world we see in movie after movie after a situation like this. And so we started to do research, and we talked to scientists and ecologists and people and really started looking into what would happen to a city once the population disappeared, and the truth was nature would start to reclaim the city. And ... since our film, there have been scientific studies, and we're sort of in line with the types of animals that would start to repopulate, the types of plant life that would start to repopulate. How, you know, the air would start to get cleaner, the water would start to get cleaner. It actually would probably start to become a slightly more beautiful place. Where did the Superman vs. Batman movie poster, with a release date in 2010, come from?

Lawrence: That was Akiva's thing, by the way. He's the man behind all the movie posters, throughout the film.

Goldsman: One of the big changes from the source material, obviously, is the relocation to New York, which was something that we did because, novelistically, it's really very effective to render Los Angeles empty, but cinematically, Los Angeles is always empty, so it's very difficult to kind of really do that sort of stark "Oh, where did everybody go?" Very different in New York. ... And then once we got to New York, we just picked a specific date, and we built a sort of present, and I took every DC poster and character that I could think of that Warners hadn't made, slapped them up there. Some of them we got cleared and some of them we were just, we stalled, so that clearance never saw them, so I'm pretty sure that somebody owes somebody a lot of money for that Batman vs. Superman poster.

Lawrence: But we did some kind of fun stuff, too. There are certain things in Times Square. There's a bunch of the scene takes place around the TKTS kiosk, where you can buy tickets for the Broadway plays, and that's actually not built yet, but we got the designs from the city and actually built our set to be how it will look in the year when our viral apocalypse is supposed to happen.To create an abandoned New York, you really got a great access to close down part of Manhattan. How difficult was that?

Goldsman: We had almost every problem you would imagine you would have in New York when you try to shut the streets down. I am a New Yorker. By the end of the shoot, which was endless, none of us would tell anybody what we did for a living, because you'd be at a cocktail party, and you would hear across the room, "Oh, you're that motherf—ker." There was not someone that we hadn't stopped from getting somewhere by the end. But New York, actually, they were great. I don't think they saw us coming, but once they sort of took us in, they were really amazing.

Lawrence: Yeah, the city was really helpful. I mean, they let us shut down pretty much everywhere we wanted to shut down. I mean, you name it, we shut it down. ...

[It was] 40-plus days [of shooting in New York]. Just because, you know, we did six days alone up by Grand Central and the viaduct, and there's the whole chase through the city at the start of the film. That's 57th Street, Sixth Avenue, Herald Square, Fifth Avenue, Park Avenue, 42nd Street. I mean ... all of those sections have to be, for a minimum of a day or two, shut down for a while. It was tricky.How was it working with Will?

Lawrence: Working with Will. Uh, now, I know all of you guys have heard stories, so it's a bit of a cliché, but Will's a pretty great guy to work with. ... He's as professional as can be. He's as positive as can be. His energy is always fantastic. He's very smart. He's really good with story. He's a really good actor. He's very inventive and creative and has great instincts, you know? ... You can't ask for a better person to work with.You created the mutant creatures with computer animation and motion capture?

Lawrence: What we did was we started a boot camp for creatures, so we had a creature choreographer who was working on creature movement, and then we hired a bunch of dancers and stunt people, and they trained every day and they worked on movement every day, and we would sit down and meet with them a couple times a week and practice things. And then on set they would be in character, but they would be wearing these skin-tight suits, and we would shoot them as if they were in character, and there were these other cameras that were spread out around the set that were capturing their movement and tracking these dots that were attached to their bodies, and they were then digitally replaced by our CG characters. But all [of their performance], including facial performance, was all built on the real people that we had in the room. And that way ... people could interact and Alice could interact and Will could interact with real people, and there's real performances. And the alpha male, sort of, the main bad guy in the film, was an actor as well [Dash Mihok].You were originally going to use actors in makeup instead of CG characters?

Lawrence: We had one day of shooting with practical makeup and our performers, and I could see and we could see that it wasn't really going to work. It was in Washington Square Park.

Goldsman: You ever see Mummenschanz? Remember Mummenschanz? It was like attack of the angry mimes.

Lawrence: And what we realized very early on was just [that shooting] at night and [having our actors run] barefoot, that we weren't going to get the sense of abandon that these creatures needed to have. That even though some of these people were stunt people, running across Washington Square Park at night, half naked and barefoot—it's 35 degrees out—was just not going to work. So literally one night, we went to dailies, I started to sweat, and everything started to change, and we changed it all that night. Talk about the dog.

Lawrence: The dog was fantastic. I mean, the dog, that was Abbey, and Steve Barens is the trainer. And we all wanted a German shepherd, and he sent me some pictures, and I saw some German shepherds that he had trained, but their faces were very dark, and I wanted a dog that felt a little friendlier. So he went searching, and he found a dog, a 2-year-old German shepherd at a rescue, which was Abbey. So she had never been trained, never worked in film before. And he only had a couple of months. So he started working with her, introduced her to Will, and I had to say she was fantastic.

Goldsman: Tell the story about petting.

Lawrence: Oh, yeah. There was a rule on set that nobody could interact with her other than the trainer and Will. ... Everybody was dying to pet her, because she was the most beautiful, friendly dog that I had ever seen, but nobody could touch her. Except Alice told me today that she touched her all the time.

Braga: I read an interview, and I was like, "Oh, my God, the guy never stopped me."

Lawrence: What was great was when she was finally wrapped—and you know when an actor wraps, the crew gathers around—and she was finally wrapped, and it was the one day that everybody could finally go and pet her, and she was very excited that she got all that attention from everybody that she had been dying for.

Goldsman: She's a star. How did Alice Braga get cast?

Lawrence: She was actually the first and only person we had read with Will, and the reason we cast her is we found something very warm and authentic about her, and there's something very believable about her. And she had really strong qualities of a survivor that I think impressed all of us. The other thing is being from a different country instantly made our story more global. Assume that she showed up in New York City, and it felt like our issue wasn't just in Manhattan, but, you know, all across the globe.Was it written as a woman from Brazil originally?

Lawrence: No.

Braga: Thank you. That's the first time I heard it. No, I read for the casting director here when I was in L.A., as lots of actresses get materials. And then I read the sides [script pages], because you don't get the [entire] script, and I remember the sides, I was really curious about it. And I did the reading, and I loved the reading. But then I flew back to Brazil, and then they called me, and said, "Well, Francis would like to meet you and would like to put you to read with Will." When I came in the room, it was really magical.And how would you describe her?

Braga: She's a really strong character. ... We talked a lot about having hope. And having hope not just in life, but in love and everything else. So I think it's wonderful to be able to portray that, not just stick her with one particular thing, like believing in one thing or the other, but just believe in yourself and life and in love.