Will Smith tightens focus on a new career view

Will Smith plays the ultimate con artist in the new Focus, but in real life, he's getting more honest than ever.

After decades of bulletproof box-office status, Smith's legacy was shaken with 2013's After Earth, a big-budget bomb that he's called the most painful failure of his career.

The lens also has tightened on his family. As his children Jaden, 16, and Willow, 14, grow up and cultivate public personas, occasionally odd media encounters ("You never learn anything in school," Jaden told the New York TimesMagazinein November) have brought criticism to Smith's front door.

But today, laughing and chatting easily with co-star Margot Robbie while discussing their new caper dramedy from the directors of Crazy, Stupid, Love. Smith says a new chapter has begun in his career.

"I feel like I'm ready to take a new shot with new talents and a new outlook,'' he says. "I figure I'm going to sprint a little bit for the next couple of years. I was down for almost two years rebuilding, revamping, growing. I felt like I hit a ceiling in my professional and personal life.''

When pressed, Smith, 46, admits he's "always been extremely product-oriented. I could only be happy and only feel good about myself if I hit the marks I was aiming at. Box office, how my family looks, what my life is like. I'm just sort of shifting from product orientation to process orientation, to settle myself into allowing the process and the journey to satisfy my needs."

Smith's two-decade reign at the top can sustain more than the occasional hit, says Rentrak box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian, who calls the actor "truly one of the few movie stars working today."

"Everyone's always waiting for someone to falter," says Glenn Ficarra, who directed Focus with John Requa. Despite the reviews, After Earth "made more money than most movies do."

Ficarra calls Smith "the most positive person I've ever met. He's a force for good. He's a real person. We're all middle-aged men and we spend most of our time talking about our kids and our marriages and the indignities of growing older."

In Focus, Smith plays Nicky, an expert con man who takes up with the inexperienced Jess (Robbie). Smith, who recently produced Annie, did not produce Focus but stepped in after original lead Ryan Gosling dropped out. Smith "just kind of wanted to go on a journey as opposed to driving the boat," says Requa.

Smith's next project, Concussion (due at Christmas) could make an awards-season play: He plays Bennet Omalu, a real-life neuropathologist who discovers football-related lifelong brain traumas in football players and fights to bring it to the public eye.

"It's something that I want to say," says Smith, adding that bringing light to the NFL story and meeting the families affected was enough. "And in that I don't care whether the movie is No. 1 or opens at No. 9. That doesn't even matter."

But first, there's some comic-book brawn to attend to. In April, Smith and Robbie will reunite, to begin shooting Suicide Squad, with Smith as Batman villain Deadshot and Robbie as the Joker's psychotic girlfriend, Harley Quinn. Why? "Something like Suicide Squad is fun," says Smith with a grin.

And like Robbie, he's been training for months. "I started before Christmas," he says. No carbs on Christmas! It was terrible."