M. Night taps Smith father-son dynamics in ‘After Earth’

WILL and Jaden Smith in “After Earth”

LOS ANGELES—In the extended footage of “After Earth” that we saw, there’s a crucial scene where Will and Jaden Smith, as father and son Cypher and Kitai Raige, have a tense, moving exchange before the latter decides to make a perilous jump from a cliff.

If this scene proves to be as potent in the finished film (we have yet to see the movie as we write this) as it was in the footage, “After Earth” may signal Jaden’s transformation into a young actor of note.

Sci-fi action film

In the sci-fi action-adventure, a crash landing strands Cypher and Kitai in a hostile Earth, a thousand years after humankind escaped the planet.

Director M. Night Shyamalan, between bites during lunch at a hotel in Cancun, Mexico, explained that the spaceship breaks into two pieces. One piece bearing father and son lands in North America while the tail, containing an emergency homing beacon, ends up in Africa.

With his father injured, Kitai has to leave the spaceship and find the beacon that is crucial to their survival. In his journey, Kitai encounters menacing life forms that have evolved drastically.

To help the 14-year-old actor go, figuratively, to “dark places,” M. Night said he was assisted by Jaden’s parents, especially Will since he was often on the set as an actor and producer.

In that important scene we mentioned, the filmmaker told us that Will was off camera reciting his lines to Jaden as their characters engaged in a pivotal conversation—Cypher was inside the spaceship while Kitai was about to make a dramatic leap.

M. Night remarked, “Jaden just doesn’t like to go to that dark place but when you see it emerge, it’s riveting.” We saw that in the extended footage.

“We did the scene a few ways,” M. Night said. “It was an extremely difficult scene to shoot. We were in the redwood forest and I had so many takes. What happened was, like most of the time, you go a little far. We get too emotional, get too  caught up in everything and then come back five percent. That’s the one that actually feels more truthful because, in a way, the actor lets go a little bit.”

DIRECTOR M. Night Shyamalan: You would never have someone off camera yell at a child like that. It would have to be the dad.

The director explained, “We had Will off camera. Jaden’s talking to his dad over the microphone. Sometimes we’d go off the script. They would be extemporaneous, go back and forth and get to the right emotion. Then I would be like, ‘Back to the script.’ We would get back to the actual line so that once Jaden was in the right place, I would say, ‘That’s it, right there. But now, we have to do it in the movie. You guys just did it by goading and yelling at each other until you felt the heat. Once the heat was at the right temperature, go back to the screenplay.’”

Fascinating exercise

M. Night said having Will around “was a fascinating acting exercise. Now, you would never have someone off camera yell at a child like that. It would have to be the dad and so it worked out well.”

The director, best known for “Signs” and “The Sixth Sense,” said of his young actor, who marks his fourth feature film role with “After Earth” after “The Pursuit of Happyness,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still” and “The Karate Kid”: “Jaden is a really quiet kid. He’s not a yeller. He doesn’t go up and down emotionally. Evoking that is an unnatural state for him. He only does it for roles. He’s an even-keeled kid. That was a new dynamic for them as father and son when they’re yelling at each other or angry at each

other.

“That was not something they normally do. That was tough for them but it made for very truthful moments because it was shocking to see a child who doesn’t do that go to that place, express internal things toward his father—powerful stuff. When Jaden did, Will and I would look at each other like, ‘Wow, that was amazing.’

“Jaden lacks that self-consciousness that we all have—the thing that tells you you’re not good; don’t say that; don’t look; you want to be hidden,” M. Night continued. “He doesn’t have that. There’s some fury in him but he’s a gentle kid. He won’t like me to tell you that he’s a super sensitive, gentle kid. It’s fantastic to see onscreen that combination. He’s an entertainer by nature. But he’s also super sweet. That’s what I saw in ‘The Karate Kid.’ I really liked that combination. The world is his oyster if he wants it.”

M. Night said Jaden wasn’t hard to direct at all. “Whatever I wanted, he was very giving,” he said. “Jaden would do it 100 times if I wanted him to do it 100 times.”

But the kid in Jaden would surface on certain days. “It would be tough on Fridays because Jaden’s friends would come. He’s a kid. I would motivate him by saying, ‘If you get this right, you get to go home.’”

As for his other star, M. Night said he would be showing a different side of Will. “We did a lot of shooting in this cockpit of the ship,” said the India native who changed his name from Manoj Nelliyattu to M. Night. “Will had to be incredibly still. It’s my favorite acting I’ve ever seen him do. I told him, ‘Go make a movie where you’re not allowed to make us laugh and use your physicality and you do all of it here (points at his heart) and you have so much to offer.’ He’s a complicated, textured actor. I was mesmerized watching him do his stuff. Really world-class stuff he was doing.”

Not their usual stuff

He added, “I like to take these guys, like Mel Gibson and Bruce Willis, and not let them do what they became famous for. It’s refreshing to see them do (something else).”

Asked if Will was a sport at being second banana in a movie, the NYU alumnus laughed and replied, “It’s his son. I wonder if it was another boy…”

M. Night revealed that Jaden was, in a way, the catalyst for him and Will to collaborate on a film finally. “We have always wanted to make a movie together,” he said. “Will and I got close a couple of times [to making a film] and, over the years, we’ve just been talking about making movies. The conversation was [mostly] about Jaden so we were like, instead of us making a movie, we’ll make a movie together with Jaden.”

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