Will Smith bounds into the hotel suite like a six-foot puppy looking for affection. "Where's the juice?" he booms, grabbing a bottle of orange juice and a chair and settling down to talk about his new movie, Enemy of the State, and a career path that has taken him from pop-rapper and sitcom star (both under his stage name of Fresh Prince) through action comedy like the 1994 hit Bad Boys, to two of the most successful films of the 1990s, Independence Day and Men in Black. Now, at the age of 30, he's an Alist Hollywood star, able to command eight-figure salaries for his services, and he's flexing his muscles with his first straight(ish) action role, in this brash, glossy and not unenjoyable conspiracy thriller, which bears the unmistakably slick imprints of its producer, Jerry Bruckheimer (Armageddon, The Rock) and director Tony Scott (Top Gun, Crimson Tide). In the flesh, as on screen, Smith is a charmer and a livewire performer, filling the room with his hearty laugh. Mind you, everything seems to be going right for him these days, doesn't it?
"Well, it definitely hasn't been as easy as it looked. When I was growing up, we were very disciplined, and I think that's very important. There's nothing worse than losing because you didn't give your all. I work hard and I have a lot of smart people around me who spend a lot of time making the right decisions about what the best thing to do next is. But getting Independence Day and Men in Black back to back is something you can't plan. I've been blessed in those roles and the timing of those movies."
He agrees that this one was more of a gamble. "If those movies didn't work, nobody was going to say it was my fault. With this one, it lives or dies on whether the audience are prepared to spend 90 per cent of the time with my character."
Taking this role also places him in the position of being the only black actor who can compete with the Tom Cruises of this world for the really huge movies (Cruise was scheduled to star in Enemy of the State at one stage, before Stanley Kubrick's marathon shoot of Eyes Wide Shut ruled him out). Being black has its own advantages in Hollywood, he believes.
"There are so few successful black actors that once you break through those barriers and become successful, you're locked in Hollywood forever. Someone like Chris O'Donnell, or even Leo DiCaprio has to work, because there's a thousand other guys just waiting for them to turn down that one great role. Once you're successful as a black actor you're much more secure. Also, any actors of ethnicity have entire communities who go to see our movies just because we're in them. For white actors, that base may not be as solid."
He knows exactly what direction he wants his career to take. "I like to mix it up. I want to have as diverse a career as possible, do action, comedy and drama - the same kind of range as Tom Hanks or Robin Williams, but with a little bit of Arnold Schwarzenegger in there too." He wouldn't mind an Oscar at some stage, he admits. "If they offer me one, I'm certainly not going to say no. But for me the ultimate respect is the reaction of the kids when I walk into Tower Records. There's a lot of people who've won Oscars, and they wouldn't even be recognised in Tower Records."
Smith's own brand of rap-lite is another big earner - his theme song for Men in Black and schmaltzy reworking of Just the Two of Us (dedicated to his son) have been Number One hits in the States - although he doesn't think much of the direction of hip-hop over the last decade. "But I think right now, after the deaths of Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur, it's getting back more to enjoying the music, rather than buying into that gangster fantasy."
His most cherished project at the moment is the prospect of playing the lead next year in a biopic of his idol, Muhammed Ali. "He is one of the most influential figures of our century, clearly the most influential athlete ever. I think it's an amazing story of a man who could give up anything he ever loved and his career because of his belief in his God. That's what we all wish we could do."
With Enemy of the State, his claims are more modest. "We make movies for entertainment. There aren't really any political issues in this film, although it does touch on those issues of personal privacy and the power of the state." The film revels in the technology that allows clandestine government agencies to follow our every move and hear our every word, through bugging equipment, computer records and satellite technology. "Being famous there's a certain amount of surveillance that you have to deal with anyway, but the satellites really shocked me," says Smith. "You can place a newspaper on the ground anywhere in the world, and they can read it from outer space. We had CIA guys on the set who showed us all this stuff." He picks up my tape recorder and shows it to me. "They have a battery gun, where you could have your recorder here with no batteries in it, but they could point this gun at it from up to a mile away, and it would power your machine."
Enemy of the State focuses on the NSA, the agency responsible for national security inside the US, with Jon Voight as a rogue official seeking to cover up a political assassination, and Gene Hackman as a dissident spook reluctantly roped in to help the fugitive Smith, who unwittingly holds vital evidence. The CIA acted as advisers to the film-makers on the technology, and Smith visited their headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
"When you think about the CIA," he says, "you think of this bunch of clandestine guys who kill people, but going in there and meeting them, they were just like the kind of regular guys you'd meet if you walked into a computer store or anywhere else. They just happen to work at the CIA, the way you'd work anywhere."
Director Tony Scott is more realistic about the assistance he received from the CIA. "These government bodies realise the power of movies in creating a public image, so they've all decided it's better to help than to hinder. On Crimson Tide we were shut down by the Navy, and I think they regretted that in the end."
Scott's interest in the story was piqued by an article he read in the Baltimore Sun. "It was saying that the agency world was now run by people in their mid-20s, which I thought was interesting because film and television have always shown the NSA and CIA as guys in their 40s, wearing Brooks Brothers suits and carrying guns. I went to the CIA headquarters and it was like a college campus. They were all kids with green hair, red hair . . . because if you think about it, these organisations are all run with computers and these kids have grown up with computers."
And the surveillance technology shown in Enemy of the State is coming shortly to a free market near you, apparently. "It's fascinating," says Scott. "Twelve months from now, if your home is broken into while you're away on holiday, you'll be able to call into a satellite agency and say you want footage of a two-block radius around your house at a certain time, and you'll pay by the minute for this video footage of the guys breaking in. That's not George Orwell; it's next year in the States."
The idea for Enemy of the State originally came several years ago from producer Jerry Bruckheimer's late partner, the legendary and notorious Don Simpson (the film is billed as a "Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer Production"), who planned to make a movie like The Conversation (Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 film about surveillance experts, which also starred Hackman), but using new technology. Actually, Enemy of the State bears little resemblance to Coppola's brooding study, which is hardly surprising, given its provenance (although Scott describes The Conversation as "among my top 10 favourite films"). Simpson, who died in 1996 from the cumulative effect of years of heavy-duty drug abuse, was the subject this year of Charles Fleming's book, High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess, which describes in gory detail the producer's narcissism, prodigious appetite for alcohol, cocaine, heroin and prescription drugs, and for sado-masochistic sessions with prostitutes. Bruckheimer, by contrast, is described as the sensible, non-creative side of the partnership (which had dissolved before Simpson finally expired).
Mind you, he's also described as an egomaniac, and I note that the publicity material for the new movie describes him as "one of the most successful producers of all time" and tells us that we leave the cinema "enriched by the unforgettable characters, excited by the great stories and intrigued by the new experiences" his films offer. A quietly-spoken, watchful man dressed in black, his response is curt when I ask him what he thought of the Simpson book.
"I didn't read it, but from what friends have told me it's not terribly accurate. There are many things I've been told are in there which just didn't happen." So he wasn't tempted to set his lawyers to work? "I didn't want to do that, because it would have created more notoriety for it, which they would have loved. But it wasn't a bestseller and it disappeared. Nobody who was close to Don talked to the journalist, because they knew it was about sensationalising his life, and it didn't need to be sensationalised. The truth is a lot more interesting."
Since Simpson's death, Bruckheimer has been on a box office roll, with movies like Con Air and Armageddon - loud, testosterone-pumped, effects-driven juggernauts that pack audiences into the cinemas , while causing many critics to bemoan their shallowness and incoherence. The criticisms don't bother him at all, he says; after all, Armageddon defied all predictions to become the biggest movie of 1998.
"The press hounded us on that picture - I was sitting in a room just like this, being asked how we could possibly do as well as Deep Impact (the rival meteorite-destroys-Earth movie) had done. The picture came out, and it was the highest grosser I've ever had, but to the press it was a disappointment. It wasn't going to do $100 million in America, according to all these nay-sayers. And then it does $200 million, and nobody writes about it, they just let it drift away . . ."
With 25 projects in development, including a biopic of Veronica Guerin ("we've just hired a new writer, and we're waiting for a script"), he is unabashed about the image that goes with a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. "This is what I do. I like these kinds of films. The press may not like them, but someone does - look how many tickets we sell. Maybe, if you've got a college education, you don't like them, but the common guy in America loves the movies we make. I mean, my logo and credit gets applauded in theatres, so I must be doing something right."
Enemy of the State is on general release from December 26th