Tag: Flight

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Original Screenplay Nominees On Finding Ideas To Explore

Anthony D’Alessandro is managing editor of AwardsLine. David Mermelstein and Paul Brownfield are AwardsLine contributors. This article appeared in the Feb. 13 issue of AwardsLine.

The French-language Amour follows a husband who must care for his ailing wife.
The French-language Amour follows a husband who must care for his ailing wife.

Amour

Auteurs wouldn’t be auteurs if they weren’t enigmatic, especially when it comes to deconstructing details of their oeuvre. “Let the film speak for itself” is often the motto, and for Amour director and screenwriter Michael Haneke, that’s not too far from his own credo. However, he’s not completely inaccessible when responding to the audience’s fervor for his work.

“It’s very difficult for me to say, it was so long ago, I can’t remember,” Haneke told AwardsLine when asked if there were one particularly challenging scene to write for Amour. “Generally, when it comes to screenwriting, I can say that if it’s flowing, you enjoy it. If not, it’s far less pleasant. But there’s always ambivalence—the struggle to put something there on a blank page when there was nothing there before. If it’s successful, you’re happy; if not, you’re depressed.”

In writing the story of 80-year-old husband Georges who contends with his dying wife Anne’s debilitated state, Haneke was spurred by a beloved aunt’s long and painful battle with a degenerative condition. For the director, the story of the elderly couple’s struggle was a universal tragedy versus a tragic drama “about a 40-year-old couple who is coping with a child dying of cancer.”

In researching the script, Haneke met extensively with medical specialists who work with stroke victims. His only note to Emmanuelle Riva in terms of preparing for the role was to undergo speech-therapy sessions for stroke patients. Riva initially read for the part of Anne, but Haneke had Jean-Louis Trintignant in mind for the role of Georges and wouldn’t have made Amour if the actor weren’t available.

“I like writing for actors who I know and respect, and I know I can get results,” says Haneke, who has admired Trintignant’s work since he was a teenager. In regards to Isabelle Huppert, another Haneke vet from such films as The Piano Teacher and Time of the Wolf, the director praises her talents. “She is like a Stradivarius violin, on which you can play Bach, Mozart, or Brahms, and it will always sound good.”

Setting the film in one apartment “was always the choice,” says the director. “When you get older, when you have ill health, your life is reduced to the four walls that you are living in. But beyond that, there was also the challenge of dealing with a theme of this gravity. For that, I went back to the classical use of time, space, and action.”

Though asked by his aunt to assist with her death, a request Haneke denied, the director-scribe asserts that there’s nothing in Amour that he cribbed from real life. In particular, the film’s tragic ending.

“That’s the kind of question I never answer on principle,” says Haneke in regards to interpreting Amour’s conclusion. “I respect my films, and I am trying to force the spectator with these scenes to find their own answers and their own interpretation of what they see on screen. If I were to provide interpretation, I could be wrong and robbing you of your imagination.”

Spoken like a true auteur.—Anthony D’Alessandro, David Mermelstein

Jamie Foxx stars as a slave-turned-bounty hunter in Django Unchained.
Jamie Foxx stars as a slave-turned-bounty hunter in Django Unchained.

Django Unchained

Just as Quentin Tarantino casts extensively for the right actor who’ll recite his dialogue properly, he is equally exacting when it comes to the punch and snap of his comedy scenes. And if there’s one takeaway moment that helps ease the ultraviolent intensity in his revisionist western Django Unchained, it’s the lynch-mob scene where a gaggle of hooded Klansmen, led by plantation owner Big Daddy (Don Johnson), plot their attack against bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) and Django (Jamie Foxx), who have offed slave handlers the Brittle brothers.

“The comedy rhythm is very specific and an actor needs to say this word and this word for a punchline to work or for the tone to work, but I have perfect actors,” Tarantino explains.

It’s a classic western comedy moment, rivaling the campfire sequence in Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles: The dim-witted Klansmen debate about wearing hoods or not, because the person who made them didn’t cut the eye holes in the right places. For Tarantino, watching Birth of a Nation after his Django Klansman scene is all the more hilarious because the reality probably was that those actors couldn’t see a thing.

“I’m positive it’s half the reason why Amy (Pascal) wanted to be involved in the movie because she felt that the bag scene was so funny,” Tarantino says. “It’s actually terrifying to write something that funny on the page. If I write something that funny on the page and count on Jamie (Foxx) and Sam (L. Jackson) to say it, then I have no worries. But I had to spread that scene out between six people, and they all had to deliver.”

Despite any outrage that Django has triggered in the African-American media, in particular Spike Lee’s ire, the film was recognized by the NAACP Image Awards with best supporting acting wins for Kerry Washington and Samuel L. Jackson, as well as a best picture nomination and acting nod for Jamie Foxx. Yet from what Tarantino has observed at screenings, it’s his bag scene that’s a clincher.

“You get a cathartic laugh from audiences, especially black audiences, because they start giggling uncontrollably as that scene builds in its absurdity,” says the director. “The tone of the laughter is: ‘We were scared of these idiots?’ ” —Anthony D’Alessandro

Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) safely lands a jet after a catastrophic failure in Flight.
Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) safely lands a jet after a catastrophic failure in Flight.

Flight

In Flight, screenwriter John Gatins had to figure out how his main character, pilot Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington), would first cross paths with the heroin addict Nicole, played by Kelly Reilly.

Flight is a story about an alcoholic hitting rock bottom inside the protective shell of an act of daring heroism: The crash-landing of a commercial flight. But Gatins says he wanted “a little bit of a two-handed narrative in the first half of the movie.”

Enter Nicole, a junkie on her own descent. Gatins set their random meeting in the stairwell of a hospital. He did not, however, expect a third character to insert himself into the scene—a young cancer patient, played by James Badge Dale, who, finding Whip and Nicole smoking in the stairwell, asks to bum a cigarette and becomes “thematically a guy who comes and talks about the random nature of life and events that have to do with, what
do you believe?”

“Had I sat to really try to outline the entire movie, I never would have said, ‘Oh, scene 17 is going to be in a stairwell, and a cancer patient is going to walk in and talk for six pages and then leave, and we’re never going to see him again.’ But given the nature by which I wrote this movie, with letting the story unfold a little bit, and even though it was a little bit unwieldy at times—it was long and I had to do a lot of cutting and circling back and everything else—that cancer patient was one of those happy accidents of living in the world of (Whip’s) mind and what he might encounter once he was there,” Gatins explains.

Yet even though the character simply called Gaunt Young Man helped solidify the scene, Gatins wasn’t necessarily sure the man would ever be fully realized as a character. “There was a part of me that thought at times that he wouldn’t survive the movie or even the script cut, but I kind of fell immediately in love with him. I mean, I know he was a bit of the Oracle at Delphi, but I loved that about him, too. It was one of those things where it’s like, ‘Well, he can just say whatever he wants.’ Everyone has interesting reactions to that scene, which is another thing that made me very grateful that I decided to leave it in the script, and when (director Robert) Zemeckis and I sat down, it was one of the first things he wanted to talk about. He said, ‘It’s the framework of the whole movie. It’s important, it’s pivotal.’ ”—Paul Brownfield

Jason Schwartzman is a Khaki Scout in Moonrise Kingdom.
Jason Schwartzman is a Khaki Scout in Moonrise Kingdom.

Moonrise Kingdom

On the lam from their parents and the authorities, two 12-year-old lovers enlist the aid of a high-ranking official in the Khaki Scouts to marry them quickly and help them escape the forces that would return them to adolescence. Roman Coppola, who cowrote Moonrise Kingdom with director Wes Anderson, is quite fond of the scene that stars his cousin, Jason Schwartzman.

Schwartzman is Uncle Ben, the aforementioned high-ranking official in the Khaki Scouts. Paid off to help the young Scout Sam and his child-bride-to-be Suzy escape, he tells the boy: “There’s a cold-water crabber moored off Broken Rock, the skipper owes me an IOU, we’ll see if he can take you on as a claw-cracker. Won’t be an easy life, but it’s better than shock therapy.”

“He can’t legally wed them, but he has a certain status due to being this high-level scout,” Coppola says. “And his language and the way he speaks has a distinctive manner that has to do with his position.”

Within Uncle Ben’s blizzard of words and comic alliteration—“cold-water crabber,” “claw-cracker”—is the surface tone of Moonrise Kingdom, in which characters have their own verbal coding: Deadpan and heavily formalized speech is part of the engine of a comedy about adolescence.

“The choice of words relate to the character’s function,” Coppola says. “For example, there’s the police officer, and the parents of Suzy are some type of lawyers. Often in their conversations, they use legal turns of phrase.”

Uncle Ben talks fast, in keeping with his function in the story—to conduct a quickie, unofficial wedding and get our two young lovers off the island. Schwartzman, with little time to waste, speaks his lines in what Coppola calls “a wonderful kind of ’40s, Ben Hecht-ian kind of way, in this urgent blast of dialogue.”

“When some dialogue comes out so quickly, it takes a moment to catch up to it, so it’s a scene I enjoy watching again and again,” Coppola continues. “The writing of it, and seeing Wes manifest that through his work as a director—and the actors, of course—it’s really one of the more touching scenes for me. These two young lovers are committed to each other, and they want to be married. They’re willing to be on the lam and live in a chaotic way, due to this true love. The sentiment is rather deep and sincere, and yet it has a very playful way that it’s presented.”—Paul Brownfield

Zero Dark Thirty
Seeing Maya’s transformation after years of obsessively tracking Osama bin Laden was a key part of Mark Boal’s screenplay.

The scene calls for our CIA agent heroine Maya (Jessica Chastain) to explode at her boss in Pakistan, station chief Joseph Bradley, over the prioritizing of resources in the near-decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden.

“It’s the day after the attempted bombing in New York City” in 2010, screenwriter Mark Boal explains. “We’ve watched (Maya) evolve and devolve from a relatively innocent young officer in the course of seven years to this obsessively driven, committed hunter.”

Stoic for much of the film, Maya finally sheds her emotional armor. “It’s scripted in a way that allowed Jessica to uncork a powerful emotional moment. So it works on an emotional level, and she has the opportunity to really flex her acting muscles and show the strain that she’s been holding beneath this veneer of professionalism. But it also works on a political level, because it shows the resource allocation was so important to the story, and that the CIA was constantly torn between the trade-off between trying to prevent an attack and trying to achieve the longer-term goal of finding and killing bin Laden. We know from history that different administrations placed different priority on that trade-off.”

The hunt for bin Laden, by then, has also led to the death of Maya’s close colleague Jessica (Jennifer Ehle), killed in a suicide bombing on a U.S. base in Khost, Afghanistan. “We think of the CIA as just this faceless organization, but it’s susceptible to all the same personal pettiness of any big corporation or any big high school,” Boal says. “And over the years she’s lost friends and put up with enormous frustration. And then she finally screams at her boss.”

Although the government remains a big bureaucracy, Boal says he also wanted to show how close CIA agents become in this type of work. “The team that found and killed bin Laden is a pretty small team,” he says. “And they all, or most of them, knew each other. It was a very personal undertaking. There’s so much death all around on this story. You have all the deaths in 9/11 and then subsequent deaths in Iraq on both sides and the civilians, and Afghanistan, you have the horrors in the black sites and everything. But in addition to that, you have the deaths among the CIA. There was a real historic, personal connection between Maya and the character that’s represented as being killed in Khost. There’s a scene in the film where they’re texting each other right before. They were friends. That sort of friend-mentor relationship in the film I didn’t pull out of my ass—that’s real. It just shows how personal this all was for them.”—Paul Brownfield

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Q&A: Walter Parkes On Flight

This article appeared in the Dec. 19 issue of AwardsLine.

When Walter Parkes and his wife and partner Laurie MacDonald read the first 40 pages of John Gatins’ script for Flight in 2006, the adult drama about a substance-abusing airline pilot piqued their interest. The dark, character-driven story hearkened back to the type of films the major studios used to make on a regular basis. Neither Parkes nor MacDonald envisioned a high-wattage actor like Denzel Washington taking on the role—not only was Washington way out of the price range of a film that needed to be made on a modest budget, their main character worked in a field with few African-American pilots. Nevertheless, once the script made its way to Washington’s agent, the late Ed Limato, the actor read it and was hooked, according to Parkes. “The excellence of a project is no longer enough to get it made: It’s a combination of the quality of the material, the quality of the people making it, and, honestly, the financial circumstance under which the movie is made,” says Parkes, who points out that Washington’s enthusiasm (and, well, severe price cut) helped push Flight to the finish line. Parkes recently spoke with AwardsLine about how it all came together.

AWARDSLINE: Hindsight says that Flight was a great project to take on, but did doing a midrange-budget adult drama give you pause when it first came across your desk?

PARKES: It’s been so long that the business was slightly different then. We first got involved with the project in 2006. John Gatins sent us 40 pages, the only 40 pages he’d written of the project, which only really took us to the crash and the immediate aftermath. While it wasn’t exactly clear where the movie was going, the quality of the writing and the strength of that premise were enticing enough that we felt that, if the script was completed correctly, it would attract terrific elements. And at the end of the day, that is necessary to get a movie like that made. We’re talking 2006, before the (financial crisis) and the way it affected Hollywood. You know, there were many independent labels then—Paramount Vantage would have been a good place for this—but over the course of the development, they pretty much stopped being in business, as did many of the specialty labels of other studios. All that meant was that it was less of a sure bet that the project would get made, regardless of the quality of the script. It really put it upon us to meet certain other criteria—mainly, get really amazing people to do it for very little money. (Laughs.)

AWARDSLINE: So how did you get those amazing people to participate?

PARKES: I wish we could take credit for a lot of it, and we really can’t. Sometimes your job is to keep a project afloat and in the consciousness of the studio, long enough for the right elements to become attached. We worked with John for the better part of 2006 and 2007, and there was a draft, a good draft. There had been conversations with different actors and certain actors chasing it, but there wasn’t the kind of explosive combination that would ignite it as a movie to be made. That really happened because Denzel Washington’s agent, (the late) Ed Limato, had read it and took it upon himself to call me and Laurie and say, “This would be extraordinary for Denzel.” We said, “Great, if he’d be interested…” And about six weeks later, I got another call from Ed saying Denzel read it and he loves it, and he’d love to sit down and talk. So Laurie and I flew to New York, and we had lunch with Denzel. We sat down and Denzel said, “Well, I’m in.” And I said, “Denzel, we don’t really have a director yet.” And he said, “We’ll get a great director.” And I said, “The studio hasn’t said that they’re making the movie,” and he said, “I understand.” And I said, “Denzel, it’s not that kind of movie where everybody’s going to get paid their full rate,” and he said, “It’s a great role, though; it’s a great movie. Let’s see if it can get done.” But still we went through probably a good year having different conversations with different directors. There was a moment there where John Gatins himself was being considered as the director, and Denzel was open to it, but I think for that role he felt that he needed a more experienced hand behind the camera. But it was all done in the very positive way of, “How can we make this work?” I had never thought that Bob would do this small of a movie, (but) it suddenly began to make sense because he’s a pilot, and he was inspired by the screenplay. Once that happened, it felt like we were finally going to make the movie. Even so, there were still fairly stringent financial circumstances that had to be met in order for the movie to be officially greenlit. But, luckily, a director as masterful and experienced as Bob can make a movie like Flight for the price that we made it for.

AWARDSLINE: Did you go in knowing that this needed to be in that $30 million dollar range long before anybody was attached?

PARKES: It’s not our first time at the rodeo. It was not a conventionally commercial project, so the studio would only feel comfortable if we spent “x” on it. It’s not a bad way of approaching interesting and unique material, which was an approach we used at DreamWorks: Use your professional experience to make a best guess (about) a break-even scenario and see if the movie could be made properly under this financial circumstance. Then if you exceed (expectations), the movie is wildly profitable and successful for everybody involved.

AWARDSLINE: The film also walks a careful line in tone with having a somewhat unlikable protagonist. Did you have a lot of discussions with John Gatins about maintaining that balance?

PARKES: There’s an aspect of the character of Whip as portrayed by Denzel that was absolutely on the page: He was charming; he was high functioning; and he had, even on the page, the kind of competence and swagger that we look to in our heroes. So the fact that all of that in a person that was self-destructive, selfish, and teetering out of control just made it more interesting. We were even less concerned once Denzel was cast, because Denzel has pure charisma—no matter how dark he goes, as proven by Training Day, somehow the audience never loses connection with him. I also don’t think I have ever seen him portray fear like this, portray a man who is much smaller than his circumstances. There’s a scene where we’re inside the big meeting with Carr, the owner of the airline, and they’re all talking about, “Is he going to jail?” Through the glass, you can see Denzel, and his knees are together, and he’s in this suit, and his head is frozen down on a magazine that he’s turning the pages of. It’s what you do when just don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing. That kind of vulnerability is just extraordinary.

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Behind The Scenes On Flight

Diane Haithman is an AwardsLine contributor. This article appeared in the Dec. 5 issue of AwardsLine.

One thing’s for certain about Flight: The Robert Zemeckis-directed drama starring Denzel Washington as an alcoholic pilot will never be a popular in-flight film. “After this movie, people are going to be waiting out on the steps for the pilot with a Breathalyzer test,” Washington recently joked in an interview.

Denzel Washington plays a pilot with a substance-abuse problem in Flight.
Denzel Washington plays a pilot with a substance-abuse problem in Flight.

Flight screenwriter John Gatins also does not recommend his story for in-flight reading. “I’ve gotten emails from people saying:, ‘Man, I made the mistake of opening your screenplay on a plane,’ ” Gatins says with a laugh. His fictional concept is not too far from recent fact: In 2009, not one, but two pilots were arrested preflight at London’s Heathrow Airport after failing Breathalyzer tests. Both planes, one American Airlines and one United, were coincidentally headed for Chicago.

That basis in reality might be why Flight is taking off at the boxoffice. In fact, it’s impossible to avoid the aviation metaphors when describing the success of this $30 million action film. With Oscar buzz for Washington’s performance and an estimated $80 million domestic boxoffice take through four weeks, it’s soaring, flying high, and taking flight simultaneously.

However, as with the occasional airport experience, Flight didn’t exactly take off on time: Gatins’ ETD for his Flight was 1999; ETA on the big screen, more than 12 years later.

Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) safely lands a jet after a catastrophic failure in Flight.
Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) safely lands a jet after a catastrophic failure in Flight.

Gatins based his tale on two of his own worst fears: Getting killed in a plane crash and dying of an overdose. After moving to L.A. and living the hard-partying life as he struggled to become an actor, Gatins, 44, says he finally got sober at age 25 and started sketching out this story at age 31. He wanted to examine the conundrum of a successful, talented man who had functioned with addiction for years but was now “circling the drain both physically and emotionally.”

Gatins also sought to explore society’s desperate need to anoint heroes but remain blind to their human faults. The screenwriter compares Washington’s smart, arrogant Whip Whitaker to bicyclist Lance Armstrong in terms of being stripped of hero status once a tragic flaw is revealed.

Besides having to work out the puzzle for himself, Gatins also quickly discovered that Hollywood was not exactly waiting for this story—part plane-crash thriller, part character study of a troubled antihero. The script stayed in his back pocket for years, partly because of his own stop-and-start struggle to put together what he calls a personal Rubik’s Cube of an idea, and partly because he knew that an adult drama about substance abuse was a tough sell. “It’s like, ‘Show me comps of addiction movies that have made $100 million,’ ” Gatins says, describing the initial reaction of film executives to the idea.

Actors, however, always responded to the textured characters, Gatins adds. “Actors always said, ‘There is a way this movie could get made if we got an ensemble of actors together that kind of moved the   needle,’” Gatins explains.

In the years since the idea began to take shape, Gatins pursued other film projects, including writing and directing 2005’s Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story, for DreamWorks. Around that same time, a partial draft of Flight was gaining traction at DreamWorks but got shoved to a back burner when Paramount acquired DreamWorks, also in 2005.

Flight came back on the radar in 2009, when Zemeckis’ producing partner, Jack Rapke, brought him the script and let the director know that Washington was interested. “So I called up Denzel and said, ‘I just read this. Are you really interested in doing this?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, are you really interested in this?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘Well, let’s do it.’ ” (During this time, Gatins was also at work as one of the writers on the 2011 film Reel Steel, executive produced by Zemeckis).

Added Zemeckis:“Of course, that was fun. And then it got crazy. And then it got fun again.”

The “crazy” was coming up with a plan that would make Paramount willing to take a chance on an adult drama. In a nutshell: Keep the budget at $30 million, a tall order for a film that requires a jet to fly upside down.

“Here’s the thing: The guys who are running the studio, they love this kind of movie—we all grew up on these movies. That’s why we got into the business,” Zemeckis says. “Conventional wisdom is that people don’t generally go to see adult dramas. It’s sad that these are the hardest movies to market.

“When I approach a movie, my attitude is, I just want it to make $1 profit, then nobody gets hurt,” the director continues. “But Denzel and I realized that what we’d have to do is waive our fees and make the movie for the $30 million number that Paramount wanted. And then they basically said, ‘Go with God, and make the best movie you can.’ ”

Like Washington, Zemeckis declined to give his actual salary figure, but Washington says both artists were working at one-tenth of their usual pay for a major film. And, in term of amping up the visual sizzle while staying on budget, Zemeckis observes, “We’ve got maybe the greatest actor in the world, so that’s pretty great—you’ve got the spectacle of a Denzel performance, so that’s cool. And then what I can bring to the party is that I’ve got so many years of experience, I know a lot of great (visual effects) artists who can deliver, so I was able to bring them into the movie. That allows the movie to look a lot more expensive than it really is.”

Both the director and the writer acknowledge the movie might not have happened without the commitment of Washington, but the nuanced roles also attracted a celebrated supporting cast including Don Cheadle, John Goodman, and English actress Kelly Reilly, who portrays the vulnerable recovering addict who helps lead Whitaker to face his demons. “It’s a brave movie,” says Reilly. “They do things head on. It’s not cool or clever—there’s no vanity in it.”

For Zemeckis, Flight marks his first return to live-action cinema in 12 years after directing and producing films that use motion-capture technology, including The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol. He thinks too much has been made of this fact. “Making movies never really feels good, it’s always a lot of hard work,” he says. “But doing a live-action movie after not doing a live-action movie for a couple years, it didn’t matter. It’s kind of like riding a bicycle—it all came rushing back.”

For his part, Gatins hopes that Flight helps take the stigma off serious adult dramas when it comes to boxoffice potential. “That’s what the conversation has been like—will there be a turn back to these sorts of films, like the great cinema of the ’70s?” he says. “We were helped by True Grit and Black Swan and The Fighter—movies that had tougher issues at their core. This is a grownup drama.”

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Q&A: Denzel Washington On Flight

Diane Haithman is an AwardsLine contributor. This story appeared in the Nov. 14 issue of AwardsLine.

With a lean, mean budget of $30 million, Flight is an action film that could not afford a big movie star like Denzel Washington. Then again, this morally ambivalent character study of an alcoholic pilot flying under the influence couldn’t afford not to have a big movie star like Denzel Washington if it had a shot at getting made at all. Washington, 57, sat down with AwardsLine to talk about how and why he got involved, and how the numbers added up to make the role of troubled Captain Whip Whitaker a gamble worth taking.

AWARDSLINE: Industry observers have said this film wouldn’t have been made without you. It has so many of what Hollywood would call negatives—it’s both an action film and a character study, and that character is not a straight-up hero, he’s an alcoholic.

DENZEL WASHINGTON: It was not a struggle to get it made, but the studio wanted to do it for a price, and we ended up with (about) $28 million, and (director) Robert Zemeckis made it look like $100 million, especially the plane sequence. So he and I threw our money back in the pot, took a tenth of our salaries.

AWARDSLINE: May I ask?

WASHINGTON: It’s a tenth of my salary. You do the math.

[Ed. note: According to industry trade sources, Washington’s salary in recent years for several major Hollywood releases was $20 million].

AWARDSLINE: Does that come off the back end at some point?

WASHINGTON: Let’s hope so. (Laughs). I keep hearing the buzz from people who say, “Man, I want to see that.”

AWARDSLINE: Your agent, the late Ed Limato, brought you the script, right?

WASHINGTON: I don’t know how long it had been kicking around before it came to me. It must have been somewhere in 2009. He brought me two scripts: He brought me Safe House first (and said), “These are two very different films,” and I agreed we should do Safe House first. This was a real change of pace.

AWARDSLINE: Why did you want to do it?

WASHINGTON: The script. As simple as that. Good scripts are hard to find, and this was one that was not a black-and-white kind of story. There was a lot of gray in there.

AWARDSLINE: There are character actors, and there are movie stars. I think it’s fair to say you are the latter. Did you worry that playing such an unattractive, raw character would tarnish your image?

WASHINGTON: (Laughs). I get that—“Denzel, don’t do that!” I remember we were doing (August Wilson’s drama) Fences on Broadway a couple of years ago, and we were doing a scene where my character is discussing with his friend that he’s seeing another girl, and he’s like, “Man, you’d better tell your wife!” And (in a later scene) I say to her, “There’s something I’ve got to tell you,” and the audience is expecting him to say, “I’ve got another girl,” and instead he says, “I’m going to be somebody’s daddy,” and somebody yelled out, “Oh, Denzel, thank you, sweetheart!” It’s a play, and she’s saying, “Oooh, Denzel!”

AWARDSLINE:  Did Ed Limato have those same concerns for you?

WASHINGTON: I said to him: “What do you think about it?” And he said, “You know, all that drinking and drugging!” And I said, “Ed, it’s a good story.” I’m not afraid of (the movie audience) saying, “Oh, Denzel!” And if they do, I won’t be there anyway. That’s what it’s all about for me. Especially in the last 10 years I’ve started really opening up, doing what I want to do—some small films, the stage.

AWARDSLINE:  Are movies in the $30 million range a dying breed?

WASHINGTON: What I think has changed a bit is maybe five or six years ago they might have given us a $50 million, $60 million budget, or more, but nowadays the studios are tightening their belts, and they knew it was a project we wanted to do. And I think they were smart, they said, “Look, we don’t want to spend more than, whatever it was, $28 million, $30 million.” And neither of us wanted to walk away from it, so we did it.

AWARDSLINE: It must be nice to prove you can make a commercial movie for that.

WASHINGTON: And there’s a market for it, I believe. And the actors, at least the big actors, will have to make a decision: Do you want to cut your fee and do something good, or are you just in it for the ($20 million salary)? And then also there’s the agent side of it, they are not exactly looking for the smaller films, they’re looking for big payouts, too, because they get 10%. Nobody wants 10% of nothing.

AWARDSLINE: For someone who already has a couple of Oscars, is it still exciting to contemplate that this might be an Academy-nominated role?

WASHINGTON: I try not to think about that ahead of time. You just try to do the best work you can, and then you get the movie out there, and we’ve been hearing good things. But you never know, you don’t want to get too high, and you don’t want to get too low.

AWARDSLINE:  What’s it like doing an Oscar campaign? Is it fun to talk about the film?

Washington: Not after the 395th interview.

AWARDSLINE:  I hope this is 394.

WASHINGTON: (Laughs). You are 392. You’re fine. But look, it’s part of the job, too. I want people to see it.