Will Smith stars opposite his son, Jaden Smith in the upcoming Columbia Pictures film, After Earth. The film has a new release date set for May 31 and tells the story of a father and son crash-landing into Earth 1,000 years after mankind was forced to escape the planet.
The two joined in a Google+ Hangout Tuesday and discussed ideas about the Earth's environment and the need for continued efforts in space exploration.
"With this film, it was such a perfect collision of art, entertainment, education, and a posing of fantastic questions. As an artist this film does exactly what I've always dreamed to be able to do, to be able to entertain and to also pose very interesting questions," Smith said during the Google+ Hangout.
The meetings of the minds for the "After Earth Day" Google+ Hangout took place on the day after Earth Day.
For Smith, on-location filming of After Earth brought about some environmental discussions among some Costa Rican natives. Smith said that some of the elders were around for many years and saw the climate and land changes over the course of 60 years.
"It was wonderful for the two of us to become environmentally educated together. We did a lot of the shooting in Costa Rica, which is one of the most beautiful places on Earth. One of the questions that was posed during the shooting was about what was the actual damage that was being done by human occupation of the planet," Smith said.
Included in the discussion were environmental advocate, explorer and filmmaker Alexandra Cousteau, NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, founder of SpaceX, Tesla Motors and PayPal co-founder Elon Musk and the stars of After Earth, Jaden and Will Smith.
"The exploration of space is an absolute necessity. I think that it's something that we need to take very seriously. We look at it in our film from an entertainment standpoint, but I think it's something that the world needs to take very seriously," Smith said.
Check out the trailer for After Earth and the Google+ Hangout featuring Jaden and Will Smith below.
