The secret connection between Will Smith and Faith No More
Hollywood megastar Will Smith and eccentric funk metal pioneer Mike Patton aren’t names many people would associate. While both sprung to fame in the late 1980s and early ’90s, their career paths couldn’t have been more different. Smith first gained popularity as one half of the hip-hop duo DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince before parlaying his musical persona into the massively successful sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
By contrast, Patton formed an experimental rock band named Mr Bungle while still in high school, then joined Faith No More in 1988 and by the early ’90s, that band had become one of rock’s weirdest, least mainstream-sounding success stories. In 2007, though, the paths of these two disparate men crossed.
To say that Patton has always been a wildly creative artist would be a gross understatement. For starters, he is widely hailed as one of the most influential vocalists in heavy music because his singing encompasses many styles. He can go from a beautiful croon to a throat-shredding scream or a funky rap – often within the same song – and has always been known to add bizarre vocal sounds to his music that defy common description.
Over the years, Patton proved himself to be a multi-disciplinary artist similar to Smith. While Smith chose to conquer the worlds of music and acting, Patton rose to the top of the rock world before branching off into film scoring. In a 2013 interview with Believer magazine, he revealed that the world of cinema influenced him hugely, even long before he decided to try his hand at composing for a movie.
Patton explained, “I mean, with pretty much every musical situation that I’ve been in, like Faith No More, especially, we always would say, ‘Picture Harry Dean Stanton in Paris, Texas.’ And we’d use moments like that. Or the pistol-whipping scene in Goodfellas.” He added, “There’s a lot of musicality in film.” In 2009, Patton scored his first film – the Jason Statham action sequel Crank: High Voltage, and he has since scored three other movies: The Solitude of Prime Numbers, The Place Beyond the Pines, and 1922.
Before he landed the gig on that 2009 Crank sequel, though, Patton made inroads in Hollywood thanks to another aspect of his prodigious and varied talents. When one of Patton’s pals found out production was looking for someone to add a terrifying human-esque twist to the sounds of the monsters in their big-budget horror blockbuster, the friend immediately thought of Patton. After all, making bizarre, animalistic-yet-still-human noises was something Patton had been doing for years on Faith No More records.
The movie was I Am Legend, which starred Will Smith as US Army virologist Robert Neville, the last human in New York immune to a terrible virus that turns people into mutant “Darkseekers.” When Patton stepped into the studio to lend these frightening creatures a voice – not to mention their grunts, snarls, howls, and screams – he didn’t really know what to expect. Thankfully, he found the process “a natural way to record.”
Patton told Believer, “I just walked into the room—they had a giant freakin’ movie screen in front of me and a microphone—and they would play me the scene once, so I could understand, more or less, what was happening. And then they’d say, ‘OK, concentrate on this character. That guy with the green eyes. That zombie.’ And so I’d do a pass.” He soon found that he could nail what the sound team wanted within three or four takes.
Interestingly, after this fairly painless sojourn into voice acting, Patton must have developed a taste for it. Over the next decade, he began recording voiceovers for video games, including The Darkness, Portal, Left 4 Dead, Bionic Commando, and Edge of Twilight – Return to Glory.
It’s not clear if he ever met Will Smith, though, or whether the iconic star witnessed one of his harrowing Darkseeker howls in person.
