Will Smith in I Am Legend Courtesy of Warner Bros.

LEGENDARY HISTORY

Bringing I Am Legend to the screen has been a long and arduous journey, spanning more than 12 years. "We are sort of competing for the record of the longest in-development project in history," laughs Goldsman.

"I've loved it for a long time," echoes Smith. "Just the idea is riveting, just the one line of 'Last Man on Earth.' It's something I've been interested in for a long time."

And so were many others. Actors Tom Cruise and Michael Douglas and directors James Cameron and Guillermo del Toro were all associated with the project at different times. Then Ridley Scott and Arnold Schwarzenegger were given the go-ahead in 1997 but the project was scuttled due to an exorbitant $108 million budget. Warner Bros. resurrected the concept again in 2002. Michael Bay was brought on board and Smith was attached.

"With the Mark Protosevich draft of the script, we actually were moving forward six or seven years ago," Smith recalls about one of the film's writers. "And then 28 Days Later kind of pillaged the idea… [But still] I absolutely loved the concept. I've always seen it bigger than that. It's the entire world and we've lost the whole of humanity. And that was the difficulty with getting it done in the past. In the vision I had of the novel, it's not a $50-million-dollar movie. In order to really capture the essence of that [you need something like] the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan. And that to me is the grand size of this idea. I always saw it as bigger than 28 Days Later."

The project came to Goldsman when "everybody was done with it." Warner Bros. had it in active development in several different incarnations and each one accumulated a tremendous amount of velocity that invariably fell apart.

"I have a company at the studio that is, essentially, sometimes like the home for broken toys," Goldsman says. "I wish I could tell you that it was a really exciting project that they threw me on. They were like: 'Um. You want this?' So they threw it to me."

Director Francis Lawrence and Goldsman had just completed work on Constantine. Smith and Goldsman had also previously collaborated on I, Robot and both had "a sweet tooth for serious science fiction." When Goldsman found out that Smith had been attached to I Am Legend in the past, he approached the actor when a draft was complete, and said "Hi. Wanna play?"