TORONTO—Back in the day—well, the 1980s—Antoine Fuqua was more likely to catch an episode of Miami Vice than The Equalizer. He was a music lover in his late teens and early 20s, after all, but he tuned into the Edward Woodward series every once in a while.
So, when a movie called The Equalizer came the director’s way decades later, he didn’t need to revisit the CBS show about a retired secret agent who placed ads in local newspapers urging people in trouble to contact him.
“I pretty much knew what that one was. This had the right spirit, which is really doing the right thing of helping others who can’t help themselves,” the Pittsburgh native, 48, said in an interview during the Toronto International Film Festival.
“I liked the idea of creating the origin of it. Where does a guy like that come from? How would you know who he was, anyway? He’s very humble. He obviously has some sort of issues, some sort of post-stress syndrome going on, OCD and hiding from something, trying to blend in….
“We see he’s flawed, he’s not just some guy running around, some action guy. He’s a real character.”
And, saving the best for last, Robert McCall is played by Denzel Washington. The previous time the actor and director collaborated, on Training Day, Washington won a Best Actor Academy Award and his costar, Ethan Hawke, was nominated in the supporting category.
This time, Washington stars alongside Marton Csokas, Chloe Grace Moretz and David Harbour, with smaller roles filled by Melissa Leo and Bill Pullman.
The two-time Oscar winner plays a retired government agent who, despite a vow to leave that life behind, springs back into action to help a teenage prostitute (Moretz) under the thumb of violent Russian gangsters.
When young coworkers at a big-box home-improvement store ask about his old life, he jokes he used to be a Pip, as in Gladys Knight and the Pips, and then provides a little fancy footwork, complete with hand motions, a spin and signature smile.
Fuqua has worked with his share of magnetic leading men—Jake Gyllenhaal, Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, Morgan Freeman, Don Cheadle, Richard Gere, Mark Wahlberg, Clive Owen, Bruce Willis, Jamie Foxx and Chow Yun-Fa—but he and Washington have a synergy.
“We trust each other. We collaborate really well together,” Fuqua said. “It’s like jazz sometimes, you just kind of go with the flow, you have a sense of where the other person is going so you can try to anticipate it and be ready as a director to capture it.”
The filmmaker recalled being nervous when he started Training Day and asking his star if he wanted to look at the playback monitor. The actor said no, explaining, “You’re flying this plane. The time to be afraid is not when you’re in the air. You don’t like the pilot, don’t get on the plane. Call me when you need me.”
Unlike the last time Fuqua sat down with the Post-Gazette—in the lobby of Pittsburgh’s Fairmont Hotel, fresh from a workout before resuming filming Southpaw with Gyllenhaal—this time he was clad in a smart suit and shirt in deep shades of gray and black.
His day was sliced into increments for interviews at the new, luxurious Four Seasons Hotel, photo sessions, a festival press conference and the red-carpet film premiere. “I’ve gotten to know these walls pretty well,” he joked about the suite where he was holed up.
Although the movie is rated R for, among other reasons, strong bloody violence, it treats with discretion the prostitution of the teenage girl. She and McCall frequent the same 24-hour diner, and he watches as she gets a call from her pimp ordering her into the night and the car of a customer she calls “a fat pig.” The camera doesn’t follow them further.
“You don’t need to see that. You get it. You see the guy who gets out of the car, that tells you everything about those type of characters, and this young girl has to go and deal with that.
“We all—the writer, Richard Wenk, and Denzel and producers Todd Black and Jason Blumenthal—talked a lot about that.”
Amy Pascal, cochairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, had first floated the name of Moretz, seen most recently in If I Stay. But Fuqua envisioned the actress who had appeared in Martin Scorsese’s Hugo.
“So, in my mind, she was even younger. I was like, really, Chloe?” said Fuqua, asking how old she was—16 then, 17 now. “We set up a meeting and, really, Chloe walked in and kind of blew me away. She was so mature.” Reminiscent of a young Jodie Foster, she won the role.
In other behind-the-scenes challenges, Fuqua brought what’s being called “Equalizer-vision” to life.
“In the script, it was written that he does something that’s unexplainable. Richard didn’t go into details of what that was.” The director researched how someone such as McCall might react to situations that would panic or paralyze everyone else.
Fuqua questioned “people who do this for a living for the government and things like that—unfortunately, that’s their life” and spoke to physicians about how civilians may jump at a car crash but elite agents are so prepared that their heart rates go down. “They’re trained to have comfort in chaos,” he said.
“I talked to an eye doctor about what happens to the eye in excitement, and how the pupil sometimes opens wider for more light to come in. Things become more focused, so to speak.”
Regular folks might say something happened so fast but the equalizers “are trained to take it in quickly because that’s what they do, their brains are built that way. That’s where I came up with the idea. I need to go inside and think about the action from the inside out, instead of the outside in.”
The first time McCall springs into action—an explosion of power, payback, violence and staying three steps ahead of his adversaries—takes 19 seconds onscreen but a week and a half or two of shooting and careful choreography. After all, as he says, “You’ve got Denzel…so if there’s drama within the fighting, there were times where I would just let the camera play on him.”
As for the home-improvement store where the retired agent works, it wasn’t a thriving business. The production took over an abandoned store and dressed it, stocking shelves and aisles so it looked authentic enough for a do-it-yourselfer’s Saturday visit.
Or a vigilante hero’s revenge.
Barbara Vancheri / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette