LOS ANGELES—Will Smith's influences are slightly disparate, although they make some sense in the context of Smith's career. He started rapping as a teenager, became a TV star in his early twenties, one of the world's biggest movie stars in his thirties, and the head of what appears to be a dynasty in his forties, thanks to the film and recording success of son Jaden and daughter Willow.

So perhaps having rappers the Sugarhill Gang, the TV show Dallas, and the movie Star Wars as major career influences isn't that surprising. In an L.A. hotel room, Smith says that it all started when he was seven and watched the Ewings of Southfork. He knew he wanted to live in a big house with a name on it and have a family business where the family never had to leave home.

“As a child, I watched Dallas, and that was my vision for my life as long as I can remember. The property had a name! It was called Southfork. How does a property have a name? Ours was just Row House. Everyone at Southfork came to breakfast, but they were grown and they lived on the property, and everyone worked in the family business. The greatest experience I ever had with a movie was Star Wars. I was 10, and it shaped the way I looked at the world. My imagination was so small, and then there was an explosion in my mind. When I was 12, I listened to the Sugarhill Gang and that was a big thing. So I have been a mad scientist trying to build Dallas through rapping and Star Wars.”

Star Wars also had an influence on the movies he chose as his career moved on. He wanted to find films that would have the kind of impact on audiences that Star Wars had had on him. He has made several of those and is going into production on sequels for three of them, I, Robot, Bad Boys, and Hancock. On May 25, he will be seen in the third installment of his most successful franchise, Men in Black, in which he goes back to the 1960s to save his partner, Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones in the present, Josh Brolin in the past), from an alien (The Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement) bent on revenge.

Smith says that although he has made some smaller movies, he finds bigger to be better. “For me, there is nothing more valuable than how people feel in a movie. It's knowing that there are the maximum amount of people that can have an experience that will give them some germ that they can think about. I like big movies, but there has to be a message or a statement for me to connect with. In Men in Black III, it comes with the nature of secrets and how a relationship can get repaired and go to another level through the exposure of a secret. You can have a serious idea at the centre and the blockbuster wrapping. I like the big landscape.”

Watch the trailer for Men in Black III.