Will Smith shocked fans in a recent interview with the Kiss Xtra radio station (via HuffPost) by revealing that he refused the main role of Christopher Nolan’s “creation” because he did not understand the intrigue. Leonardo DiCaprio ended up the headliner of the brain action thriller instead. “Inception” is on a painful list for Smith, alongside “The Matrix” and “Django Unchained”, of emblematic films which he refused during his career.
“I don’t think I have ever said it publicly, but I’m going to say it because we open up to each other,” said Smith. “Chris Nolan first brought me” creation “and I did not understand it. I never said that out loud. Now that I think about it, these are the films that go into these alternative realities … They don’t boast well. But I am injured by them too. ”
Smith’s potential involvement in “Inception” was revealed for the first time by ThR several months after the opening of Nolan blockbuster in theaters and has succeeded in $ 839 million at the world box office. Sources revealed at the time that Brad Pitt was in fact Nolan’s first choice, but he did not engage in the project. Smith was the next one, now revealing that he did not understand the plot. DiCaprio signed afterwards and ended up with one of his greatest successful films.
Although Smith knows that the rejection of “creation” was a career error, it was not as painful in retrospective as his decision to refuse Neo in “The Matrix”. The game went to Keanu Reeves, which gave him an emblematic action of action. As Smith said during the radio interview: “It hurts too much to speak.”
Smith published a YouTube video in 2019 explaining why he refused “the matrix”. The main reason was because he did not connect to the height of the brothers and sisters of Wachowski, who, according to him, focused more on their planned style of realization and not on real history. Smith told the field as follows: “We think like … imagine that you are in a fight. You, like, jump. Imagine if you could stop jumping in the middle of the jump. But then people could see around you at 360 degrees while you stop jumping. We will invent these cameras and then people can see the whole jump when you stop in the middle of the jump. ”
Then there was “Django Unchained”, which Quentin Tarantino offered him before finally going with Jamie Foxx in the title role. Smith told GQ magazine that he “did not want to make a slavery film on revenge”, so he fell Tarantino.
“It was the creative direction of history,” said Smith previously about skipping “Django”. “For me, it’s a story as perfect as you could wish: a guy who learns to kill to recover his wife who was taken as a slave. This idea is perfect. And it was just Quentin and I couldn’t see [eye to eye]. I wanted to make this film so much, but I felt the only way, it should be a love story, not a story of revenge. »»
