Will Smith in I Am Legend Courtesy of Warner Bros.

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Actor Will Smith follows his Oscar-nominated turn in The Pursuit of Happyness with a sharp detour: zombie-flick I Am Legend, in which he plays scientist Robert Neville, possibly the last person left on Earth after a virus infects the populace and the only hope for a cure. And while he may not win awards for the role, Smith's bankability as an action star promises ample rewards just the same.

PREMIERE talked to Smith about I Am Legend and power.

You carry a pretty big acting burden in I Am Legend. You are mostly alone.
We essentially wanted to make something new. And I'm by myself with a dog for the first 60 pages [of the script], you know what I mean? So that's terrifying. My God, am I as interesting as Tom Hanks [in Cast Away]? Will people want to watch me by myself for [an hour]? But working with [screenwriter] Akiva [Goldsman], we're essentially trying to sneak a small character[-driven] art film into the body of a big summer blockbuster.

Did you shoot in a linear fashion so that you could get into the character?
Well, the structure of the script pops all over the place. There are essentially three sections. There's pre-disaster, there's Neville in current-time disaster, and then there's a story turn that I can't reveal, which is the last section of the script. But when you view it, there are parallel stories going on and flashbacks and fever dreams and all kinds of things happening. So we [shot] it in the order of the script, but the order of the script isn't the order of the story.

Do you think your character has lost hope?
That's interesting. We've been debating whether or not this character has lost hope. Is it just a routine that he wakes up every day, and here is this routine so programmed that he does it? Or does he actually hope that he finds the cure? Hope is actually the enemy. So probably in his deepest subconscious he has to hope to still wake up every day, but there's no conscious hope at all. There's an ego or super ego, whatever. There might be a little id hope going on.

If this happened to you in your own life, do you think you could survive?
Oh, no. You know, it's really interesting. I've been working on a family charter essentially, putting together family rules and how we function and what our purpose is and all of that. And one of the basic ideas of why human beings form groups is because you can't survive by yourself. Most of us don't know how to distill clean drinking water. The second we get an infected tooth, most of us couldn't do what Tom Hanks did in Cast Away. So we need other people for our very survival. So I can't imagine that I'd be that quick a learner if something like this were to happen, and there was no chance of folks coming back. I'd drive that thing right off the George Washington Bridge.