I was surprised that they gave you a PG-13 rating, and what did you have to cut out, maybe, to get it to a PG-13?

Francis Lawrence: Um, we were always aiming for a PG-13, we didn't have to cut anything out. Um, you know, we, it's tricky when you want to try and make a movie that's intense and scary, you know, it was never our intention to have any overt sexuality or of gore or extreme violence, but sometimes you get into that gray zone of intensity, and we just hope that that didn't push us over the edge, but we didn't have any problems.

Can you talk about working with Will Smith, but also, um, Akiva and Francis, what was done to shape the project beforehand to shape Will Smith's star persona?

Akiva: Well you know, Will was actually associated with this project before we were. Um, Will has had a long courtship, relationship, affinity to--Will has been attached and unattached to I Am Legend for quite a while, and had a very specific sort of game plan to have done the movie years ago, so we all sort of came to it with very strong ideas about how to construct the object and reconstruct the object. It wasn't so much how do you remake it for Will, but how did Will's point of view and all of our point of view sort of come together in order to create this version, which is really sort of a hybrid of some stuff I did, some stuff Mark did, stuff Will brought to it and stuff Francis brought to it.

And working with Will?

FL: Working with Will. Uh, now I know all of you guys have heard stories, so it's a bit of a cliché, but Will's a pretty great guy to work with. He's really, he's as professional as can be, he’s as positive as can be, his energy is always fantastic, he's very smart, he's really good with story, he's a really good actor, um, he's very inventive and creative and has great instincts, you know? He was, you can't ask for a better person to work with. Other than Alice.

Alice Braga: What Francis said. And also, as an actress working opposite him, it's an enormous pleasure to work with someone who just wants to give you more and more and more, and just wants to open the door for you to be really comfortable, and just, as he said, such magic, which is wonderful. He just, all the time, he was pushing me harder and harder and just look in my eyes and say, 'do you want one more, do you want to try this, do you want this?' or pushing me to somewhere where he wanted me to go. And this is so generous; this is the best thing you could have from someone like him. He could be just in his own world and that's it. And for me, then, learning and I'm in the beginning, and it's my first American movie, and it was an enormous pleasure working with him.

Akiva, every adaptation to date has the catalyst for the virus, has been indicative of the times. Omega Man was a nuclear thing, Last Man on Earth also dealt with nuclear. This film deals with something very simple: a cure for cancer that mutates. Why didn't you lean toward something that might have been more terrorist related or something more timely, I should say?

Akiva: Well, we actually, and this also is reflected in the casting of Emma Thompson in that cameo at the very beginning. Uh, Francis and Will, this would be chapter one on nerds on parade, spent an unbelievable amount of time at the CDC, and I'm pretty sure are probably infected right now with something, so you should all wear masks. Um, but, I think that finally came to this idea that it's too easy for, it's too easy to always assume that things will go wrong because someone was twirling their mustache. Um, that in fact sometimes things go wrong out of people trying to do right, and that was, sort of trying to take a different turn on it. So that was where I think we came out. You really liked that, that was really you.

Francis Lawrence: Yeah, I really liked that. I mean, it was also just interesting in talking with people at the CDC, that this is how a lot of things come, you know, happen, and these horrible diseases and viruses that come around, you know, can pop up out of nowhere. It's not just bio-terrorism and things like that. It can be a change in the environment that brings unseasonable rain to an area, which attracts an animal and they have a disease and suddenly something's borne and spread. That kind of stuff is interesting to me. Where it comes when it's unexpected.

Was there a parallel between Hilary and Barack with Emma Thompson being the woman, white woman, and Will Smith being the black man? We noticed that last night.

Akiva: No.

Could you talk about the creatures and was it live action or all CGI?

Francis Lawrence: Uh sure. What we did was we did motion capture for the creatures. So what we had was--

Akiva: Tell them they were real.

Francis Lawrence: What's that? I mean they were real. No. What we did was we started a boot camp for creatures, so we had a creature choreographer who was working on creature movement, and then we hired a bunch of dancers and stunt people, and they trained every day and they worked on movement every day and we would sit down and meet with them a couple times a week and practice things. And then on set they would be in character but they would be wearing these skin tight suits, and we would shoot them as if they were in character and there were these other cameras that were spread out around the set that were capturing their movement and tracking these dots that were attached to their bodies, and they were then digitally replaced by our CG characters. But all, including facial performance, was all built on the real people that we had in the room. And that way we could have you know, people could interact and Alice could interact and Will could interact with real people and there's real performances. And the alpha male, sort of, the main bad guy in the film, was an actor as well.

I read that when you start this you were going to have the actors just do it.

Francis Lawrence: Yeah--

And you had to come up with say $20 million for the budget.

Francis Lawrence: we had one day of shooting with practical makeup and our performers and I could see and we could see that it wasn't really going to work. It was in Washington Square Park--

Akiva: You ever see Mummenschanz? Remember Mummenschanz? It was like attack of the angry mimes.

Francis Lawrence: And what we realized very early on was just at night and barefoot that we weren't going to get the sense of abandon that these creatures needed to have. That even though some of these people were stunt people, running across Washington Square Park at night, half naked and barefoot, it's 35 degrees out, was just not going to work. So literally one night, we went to dailies, I started to sweat, and everything started to change and we changed it all that night.

And the dog--

Francis Lawrence: the dog was fantastic. I mean, the dog--that was Abbey, and Steve Barens is the trainer. And we all wanted a German Shepherd and he sent me some pictures and I saw some German Shepherds that he had trained, but their faces were very dark and I wanted a dog that felt a little friendlier, so he went searching and he found a dog, a two year old German Shepherd at a rescue, which was Abbey. So she had never been trained, never worked in film before. And he only had a couple of months. So he started working with her, introduced her to Will, and I had to say she was fantastic.

Akiva: Tell the story about petting.

Francis Lawrence: oh yeah. There was a rule on set that nobody could interact with her other than the trainer and Will. And that was so that, everybody was dying to pet her because she was the most beautiful, friendly dog that I had ever seen, but nobody could touch her, except Alice told me today that she touched her all the time.

Alice Braga: I read an interview and I was like oh my god, the guy never stopped me.

Francis Lawrence: But what was great, was when she was finally wrapped, and you know when an actor wraps, the crew gathers around, and she was finally wrapped and it was the one day that everybody could finally go and pet her, and she was very excited that she got all that attention from everybody that she had been dying for.

Akiva: she's a star.

It's a surprise in the film when he calls her Samantha--

Francis Lawrence: That was Akiva. That was all, that was Akiva's invention there, which was a pretty powerful moment. A really, really great idea, in a scene that's already tough.

I have two questions for you. The children in the film were awesome. Did you guys have to insulate them from some of the more intense scenes? Were they on set when some of the other things were going on? Because they're so little, I imagine they'd be kind of afraid. And the other question is, have you guys thought about, and it might be a little too early for DVD, but alternate endings, maybe upping it a little to a higher rating?

Francis Lawrence: Um, well first of all, the kids. Willow is definitely not afraid of anything. Not anything that I know of. Willow is a pretty tough girl, so she was not insulated. And I think it was actually the opposite for Charlie, because Charlie was a lot with Alice, and a very young boy, very good but, you know, he's a kid, so sometimes it's hard to keep his attention. And so sometimes we would actually before takes make the scene more intense to get him kind of locked into the scene. And so she would really, Alice and Will would really help out with that and that would get him in, because he'd be messing around with the crew and all this stuff between takes. You got to bring him back into it.

So you traumatized the child.

Francis Lawrence: No, Alice. Alice traumatized him. Alice would.

Alice Braga: Because going with what you said about the creatures. They were for us Teletubbies. That literally was an attack of Teletubbies with dots. And the kid was like--So we were like shaking him, not traumatizing, but bringing a little bit, and it was funny, because after the third day he was just by himself doing breathings and we were doing push ups and he started to do push ups and just together. It was good.

For Francis, are we going to be getting another Constantine?

Francis Lawrence: Oh, I don't know. We've talked about sequels,  but I don't know that anybody's come up with an idea yet that we're all super excited about. But it would be cool to revisit that world.

Alice, is Sonya Braga really your aunt?

Alice Braga: Yeah.