For ‘Collateral Beauty’s’ Will Smith, ‘love is elixir of life’

NEW YORK — One of the more intriguing plot points of “Collateral Beauty” (opening Friday) has Will Smith’s character writing personal letters to the concept of “Love,” “Death” and “Time” — during the years-long period he’s overwhelmed by unconquerable grief after the death of his beloved 6-year-old daughter.

During a recent interview about the film, Smith was asked which of those three things he would write to, if he faced a personal life crisis.

“I wouldn’t write a letter to Death, I wouldn’t write a letter to Time. I am the most hopeless romantic you’ve ever met,” said Smith. “I would spend all of my time writing to Love. Love is the elixir to the pain of the human experience — it is the elixir of life. Love is the way to get through this rough ride called life. Yes, all my time would be with Love.”

The entertainer was very candid as he shared something from his own life he explained had bearing on his involvement in “Collateral Beauty.” While he prepared to film the movie, he learned his own father was told he had six weeks to live. For the actor and filmmaker, that experience added extra poignancy to this moviemaking project.

“It was the most powerful blending of life and art. We shared the process of my preparation and reading and re-reading the script. To be able to firmly confront mortality was beautiful for both of us. We didn’t hide from it. We talked about the film and the fact that this character I was about to play had searched all of the religions on Earth — plus all of the scientific and psychological approaches — to find to try an answer to how we deal with loss.

“To have shared that experience with my father during his final days was one of the most beautiful experiences I’ve had — definitely as an artist but, of course, also as a human being.”

In the film, Smith’s Howard character builds the most amazing structures made up of domino tiles and taking up enormous amounts of space in his advertising agency office. The actor explained that what we see in the film is real; those are true domino structures created by teen artists hired for the movie, and not by computer-generated graphics.

“At the point the film starts, he’s [studying] Buddhism. The idea of the dominos was based on the mandalas that the Buddhist monks do. They take 12 to 15 hours all day long to make these beautiful sand portraits. They are these gorgeous, intricate 14 hours of art. When the monks finish, they look at it for 60 seconds — and then they wipe it away.

“The idea is it’s all about the perfection of impermanence — the idea that nothing is permanent. So that’s what I was doing with the dominoes in the film. My character would spend hours, or days, building those structures, then would knock them down, and turn and walk away, and not even watch them collapse and fall. It’s just like what the Buddhist monks do with their mandalas.”

Helen Mirren portrays an actress working in a small downtown New York theater, one of the three performers hired by Howard’s business partner Josh (Edward Norton) to portray Death, Love and Time. The idea was: If Howard believes those three concepts have become some kind of angel-like images, he might snap out of his emotional paralysis and help save their company via a lucrative merger.

While the Oscar and Tony winner plays an actress of a certain age — who clearly has never come close to the kind of success Mirren has experienced — she admitted that “if I hadn’t had the kind of career that I’ve had, I could easily have become someone very much like Brigitte. She’s very dedicated to her art. ”

Mirren also shared a similar reaction to the question posed earlier to Smith — about the emotion to whom she would personally pen a letter, if the circumstances dictated it in real life.

“It would be Love, and if I wrote a letter to Love, I’d write, ‘Where do you come from?’ The Greeks had the mythology of Cupid with the bow, but I think that really is more about lust than the true profound love.

“But as you progress through life and experience love in all its different forms and shapes, with different people and in different environments — you come to realize love is the most incredible human quality.

“You can’t see it. You can’t grasp it. you can’t package it up and sell it. All you can do is feel it.”