We heard rumors a few weeks ago that the Will Smith starrer I Am Legend went back to the set, completely reshooting the ending to the film.

Over at Shock Til You Drop, they had a chance to speak with director Francis Lawrence over the weekend, who talked about what went down.

“I’m a huge fan of pick-ups and re-shoots,” he tells us. “There’s this misconception that it’s always a bad thing and for me it’s like saying a painter only has one shot at a brush stroke. That you can’t erase and do it again. We weren’t seeing fully-rendered shots until about a month ago. The movie starts to take on a whole other life. It’s not only until later that you can judge a movie as a whole and go, ‘Huh, maybe we should shoot this little piece in the middle, or tweak this a little bit.’ It just so happened that our re-shoots revolved around the end of the movie.”

Though he doesn’t go into specifics about what exactly what changed in the film’s ending, it’s refreshing to see a director see that their was a problem that needed to be fixed. The only question is, did he sanction the changes, or was it pressure from the studio that caused them to happen? And on top of that, are the changes for the better?

We’ll find out when I Am Legend opens in theaters on December 14th.

- Jeff Heimbuch