"Bunting today," Denzel Washington groans theatrically. "We been buntin'." The afternoon is grinding to a close on the Sony Studios lot in Los Angeles, and Washington hasn't made any grand advances in editing The Great Debaters, a 1930s period piece that marks his second effort behind the camera and the follow-up to 2002's widely admired Antwone Fisher. Instead, he's spent eight hours slogging away in a beige, windowless room littered with spent water bottles and a sad plate of muffins. Dressed in dad-casual workout clothes, the 52-year-old star swivels contemplatively in an office chair, folded in on himself—legs crossed, right arm barred across the body, left hand absently worrying his chewing gum—absorbed by his work in progress.
Seeing him like this presents a Hollywood kind of paradox. One of the prime pleasures of watching Washington over the past two decades—the years since his breakout performance as the antiapartheid activist Stephen Biko in 1987's Cry Freedom and his Oscar-winning turn in Glory—has been marveling at his self-possession. The key to his superstardom, more important than his exactitude or his send-the-ladies-swooning looks, is his restraint in revealing only the subtlest shades of what's on his characters' minds. So it's an odd sensation to watch him in that familiar situation—lost in thought—but with his charm on pause. He almost appears to be a regular guy.
Almost. "It's a very tedious process, as you see," Washington tells me, as if loving the tedium. Then he unleashes a laugh that suggests he knows how to amuse himself and enjoys the abrupt flourish of his charisma. You know the laugh well, a quick explosion followed by a warm and swaying cackle, his easy demeanor enveloping the righteous core of someone raised by a Pentecostal minister.
The buzz around the suite is that the due date of the director's cut (The Great Debaters is set for an Oscar-baiting holiday release) has been a matter of contention between the postproduction team and their minders at the Weinstein Company. But Denzel Washington, being Denzel Washington, doesn't quake at the name Harvey. "The movie tells you when it's ready," says Washington. "Besides, I think I have a little leverage." Coming from almost anyone else, such a line would be indigestibly cocky; from him, it's a welcome counterpoint to his humility.
We head down the stairs and into his black Land Rover for a ride over to Beverly Hills. (You know the stride, too: an unstoppable swagger with a hint of military bearing and nothing to prove.) A rich suite by the late composer R. Nathaniel Dett—possible music for the film— is on his stereo, and the future's on his mind. For starters, Ridley Scott's American Gangster, hitting theaters now, stars Washington as Frank Lucas, a Southern country bumpkin turned urban drug lord, and the role ranks among the most electric of his high-voltage career. But Washington makes it plain that he'd rather be tapping away in the edit bay than swinging for the fences on other directors' sets. "I still like acting," he says, "but my passion now is filmmaking. That's where my heart is."
