Will Smith Calls Emancipation His Toughest Film Shoot Ever

Antoine Fuqua's "Emancipation" began with a single image. You're probably familiar with the photograph already: not only just because it's spent decades printed into history books, but because it's the kind of image that embeds itself into your mind. It's "The Scourged Back." It depicts an escaped slave best known as 'Whipped Peter' who is forever memorialized by that single photo of his back, ravaged by lashings that left keloid scars. It's the atrocities of slavery, captured on a single human body in a single image. It's become one of the most widely circulated photographs of slavery for good reason: when first taken, it played a pivotal role in the growing opposition to slavery. And now, it has inspired a film that's due to hit theaters 159 years after it was taken.

"Emancipation" promises an unflinching look at one man's story. After being whipped nearly to death, Peter (played by Academy Award winner Will Smith) escapes from a Louisiana plantation and makes his way North, where he eventually joins the Union army. To call this a weighty subject would be an understatement, so it's no surprise to learn that the film was often grueling for its performers. During a roundtable discussion with Entertainment Weekly, Will Smith went so far as to say: "This was, without question, the hardest film I've ever shot." Smith went on to list the many factors, explaining:

"The swamp, the gators, and snakes, and spiders — and then we had a COVID shutdown. We had a hurricane. We had the heat index clipping up at 115 degrees. I mean, it was absolutely grueling."

Challenging as it may have been, all of those aspects came together to make "Emancipation" the film that it is.

For Smith, every obstacle they encountered got funneled into the final product. He said,

"All of that adds to what you see on camera. It's like you can feel the difficulty of the shoot in the texture of the scenes. It was grueling, but I love it. I am as proud as I have ever been of a piece of art."

In the same discussion, he and co-star Ben Foster revealed that they rarely spoke to one another out of character. It wasn't just about dedication to the role — that was just the energy of the shoot. Foster said that this was the case from the very start: "My first day on set, I didn't see Will Smith doing Will Smith. I saw a man going deep in, and we didn't need to speak."

Digging deep seems to be the mantra of the movie. Charmaine Bingwa, who plays Peter's wife Dodienne, embraced the intensity as well. During the roundtable, she revealed that emotions still ran high even when she left the set. "My team knew the intensity of the shoot and they sent me a massage voucher," Bingwa explained. "I sobbed the entire 90 minutes through that massage. It made me grateful because I had somewhere to take my stress — [my character] had nowhere."

If that's anything to go off of, then "Emancipation" probably won't be your average Friday night movie. That's to be expected given the film is based on a decades-old photo used to expose the inhumanity of slavery. Rather it'll be a brutal and necessary portrait of American history. (Something that's much too important to take a backseat to the most exhausting conversation topic of 2022.)

"Emancipation" will arrive in select theaters on December 2 before hitting Apple TV+ on December 9.