Smith told the story at least three times as additional people joined the circle-each new rendition featuring new details, new animated gestures, and an even more refined take on Scoty’s accent-until his staff and security were all giggling with glee. “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.
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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. “This is a pitfall area,” he told me, before diving into one of the more contentious semantic debates in contemporary politics. Naturally, I asked him which certain things we should be arguing about less, prompting Smith to slow his sentences and consider his words carefully. “I would just like us to argue less about certain things and pay attention to the big ripe fruit.” “I just want to encourage Black Americans to take the acknowledgment and seize upon the present global opportunities,” Smith continued. In a golden era for Black talent in Hollywood, when funding is available for projects that would once have been overlooked, Smith sees no sense in wondering if the apple is poisoned. And those opportunities are globally present and plentiful.” And the amount of money that Apple is paying to tell the story is unprecedented. I’ve been trying to get movies made for a long time. “That’s never happened before and with that the opportunities are unlike they’ve ever been. “The entire world was in lockdown, watched what happened to George Floyd, and stood up with one voice and said, We see it. 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.