The 1997 movie Denzel Washington never wanted to make: “I’m not in the mood”
There aren’t enough words to describe the kind of passion that Denzel Washington puts into everything he does.
He has always been one to make the biggest impact that he can on any of his movies, and even if he has a few clunkers along the way, the fact that he could still give 100% to a flimsy script is the difference between a good actor and a great one half the time. But the real measure of his talent is his knowing when he knocked it out of the park and when to say no to movies that didn’t fit his style.
Then again, Washington’s style has changed a few times throughout his career as well. He wasn’t looking to be one of the biggest stars in the world by any stretch, and when looking at his films, every one of his classic roles has all been about him stretching him in some form or another. He didn’t like the idea of being put in a box, which probably explains why his villainous roles are celebrated just as much as his heroic ones.
Everyone might like to see Washington as this virtuous man who led a football team in Remember the Titans or someone we’d want to root for in Philadelphia, but his performances in Training Day and Richard III proved to everyone that he wasn’t supposed to be one thing all the time. He had a much more diverse range, but a lot of what became Training Day also came from him dropping the ball on some movies.
No one would have been proud to have turned down the role Brad Pitt eventually played in Se7en, but Washington did at least have some standards that he wanted to adhere to. He wasn’t going to make something that he thought played on the shock factor too often, and even when working with some of the best directors in the world, Washington felt comfortable enough in his own skin to step away from a movie like Amistad.
Working with Steven Spielberg is the kind of dream situation that any actor would kill for, but Washington wasn’t going to go against his principles whenever making something new, either, saying, “I just didn’t see myself in Amistad. I ain’t putting no chains around my neck. I’m not in the mood right now, too edgy. It just wasn’t for me. I’m not having it. I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s what happened then, but how about me cutting everybody’s head off and end the movie there?’”
And when you see what he was doing around that time, you can see what Washington was talking about. He didn’t want to go back and play a gritty film about being on a slave ship, and even if anyone else would have called him an idiot for walking away from it, it’s not like there were ever any hard feelings between him and Spielberg when he decided to go in another direction. In fact, Spielberg seemed to have more respect for Washington as the years went on.
He knew that he was looking at a true artist when he saw him act in Training Day, and when looking at the projects he would do later, Washington would even come back to Spielberg movies when looking for inspiration. It wasn’t going to be easy for him to make a turn to overseeing the production of a movie like Fences, and his idea of coming back to Spielberg films was the perfect way of reminding himself of what greatness looks like.
That kind of greatness had to keep going on when Amistad came out, but Washington didn’t need to define himself by the people that he worked with. He wanted people to judge his performances solely based on the quality of the characters that he portrayed, and if that meant saying no to movies that would have been huge, it was a fair enough trade for him to be able to sleep at night.
