“When he watched the movie, I sat behind him when he watched the movie, which is the most gut wrenching thing you could ever do is make a story about somebody’s life and then sit in the theater with him while they’re watching it… With Chris and with Ali, I’m not doing that anymore. So he sat near him when they debuted the movie and anxiously awaited his reaction. Will explained that having Gardner’s approval was of the upmost importance to him. I knew that I was saying it with my left hand every time so in order for them to make the edit, I would do it with my left hand every time. But I had my blocking I knew my left leg was forward. If he decides he wants to get up and walk, he’ll get up and walk. I started watching him and you know how kids are. I thought we were supposed to be trying to make this real.’ He was feeling like, ‘Well, that’s not real. But what he was saying was that innately he couldn’t understand how I was reading everything exactly the same way every time. With a particularly difficult scene I was struggling and Jaden said to me, ‘Psst, you just do the same thing every take, Daddy.’ And I was like, you know, I was a little offended by that. Seven, eight times was coming up and giving me notes. But surprisingly, he said the little Smith was the one who helped him break out of the super hero, action star shell and tap into the authenticity the film needed. Technically, Will was the bigger star when this movie came out. To have this boy at 2 years-old stand up and say you’re a good papa, and have that incorporated into the script and the movie, that was the big thing for me.” “I’ve got to tell you I saw one scene last night where my son says something to me that is probably the most important thing he’s ever said to me in his life when he says, ‘Papa, you’re a good papa.’ In the book, I had a chance to talk about where I was emotionally, how frightened I was. But Gardner did say that at just two, his son said some very important words to him. They made him older in the movie so he could be more expressive. And lastly, in real life Gardner’s son was a toddler, just two years old when the events depicted in the movie took place. In the movie, Smith sells a bone density scanner, in real life Gardner sold medical equipment but never a scanner. The film just shows him being arrested for parking tickets. In addition to the time lapse of certain events, Gardner’s run in with the law was initially about police responding to a domestic violence claim and they later found he had unpaid parking tickets and was arrested. While the movie makes it seem like Gardner’s homeless was just a few months, he was actually in that situation for a few years. Whenever there’s a movie based on someone’s true life story, people always leave the theater wondering just how much was true and what was embellished. I went, ‘Oh my God!’ When he’s comfortable with you, he’ll say things and you think he’s serious.” This cat said some things to me… I won’t say what. I said to him, ‘I’m going to be as open as I can and I’m going to trust you as an artist to pick and chose, slice and dice, cut and paste, whatever artists do to tell stories.’ I’m very happy to tell people what they ask me about Will, what kind of guy is he: regular, sweet, kind, humble loving guy, but he has a sick, twisted perverted sense of humor. I made a decision from the beginning I would trust him. Someplace in the conversation, he started looking at me like this. What do you want to do?’ You know what he chose? ‘Let’s talk about these two guys.’ We had a great conversation, a couple of hours, just he and I. I say to Will, ‘We can talk about the script or we can talk about these two guys. I take along the script and my notes, but I also brought along a picture of my son and I sitting in front of the house where we first lived in after living on the streets a year.
When I first met him, we go to the house with the idea to discuss the script. In another interview published on, Gardner told the story of the trip he took to Will’s house and how the two were able to connect before shooting ever took place. Once he agreed that Will was the man to tell his story, the two developed a rapport with one another pretty quickly.