For Washington, it's all about the climb

By Douglas J. Rowe , Associated Press

Friday, December 28, 2007

Courtney Case / Associated Press

Denzel Washington says The Great Debaters isn't about racism but overcoming obstacles.

"Clint Eastwood's my hero," Denzel Washington says. "That's the model. He's the guy."

At this stage of his career, the two-time Oscar-winner is most interested in going the actor-turned- director route, citing George Clooney, Sean Penn and Ben Affleck as other examples.

"There's a generation of us now that are moving in that direction."

He likes the idea of staying behind the camera rather than pulling double duty as filmmaker and performer as he did in his 2002 directorial debut, Antwone Fisher, and now The Great Debaters. But not so fast.

Washington wanted to stay behind the camera for his latest film, but Harvey Weinstein, whose company put up the money along with Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Films, wanted to ensure that the movie had the star power of the strikingly handsome, 6-foot leading man - and upped the budget to have him in front of the camera, too.

"I understand the business of it. And I said all right, all right," Washington says, adding matter-of-factly that casting himself is "not bad casting."

While he was happy to get a Golden Globe nomination for his muscular performance as a Harlem drug lord in American Gangster, Washington sounds particularly tickled by the best-picture Globe bid for The Great Debaters. He says it felt like the first time he received a best-actor Academy Award nod 20 years ago, for Cry Freedom. "So I am excited about it. It's like, wow, OK, I've tried this new career, which is frightening enough as it is - to jump out there. To be successful in one area and then jump out there, you're really sticking your chin out there," he says, then imagines what people might be thinking: " 'Oh really? Oh, does he? Well, let's just see.' "

And an Oscar nomination still might be in the offing for his bravura Gangster work.

"You never know. It's all good. It's all gravy at this point," says the five-time nominee, who won for 2001's Training Day and 1989's Glory.

In talking about the new movie in a conference room at NPR's midtown Manhattan studios, Washington is garrulous - almost giddy, actually. He laughs often and is quite animated in discussing the life-affirming tale of the debate team at all-black Wiley College that took on major, predominantly white universities in 1935 and won.

Most of all, he's excited by the themes of transcending the sum and limit of one's experience. Even though the movie (based on real events and co-starring Forest Whitaker) is punctuated by a lynching, racially motivated beatings and clear-cut signs of segregation, Washington, who plays the debate team's coach, says: "It's not a film about racism in the South. It's a film about young people overcoming obstacles."

Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, says the film "is not just a great David-and- Goliath story but an important story that resonates today."

For Washington, who turns 53 today, the message is an old-fashioned one: There's no easy way.

"You have to do what you gotta do in this life in order to do what you wanna do, or in order to get somewhere. Whatever your obstacles are. Pick one: race, obesity, peer pressure . . . drugs. Whatever it is.

"I injected a line (into the movie) that my kids have grown up on, which is: 'We do what we gotta do, so that you can do what you want to do.' . . . No, you can't go running the streets before you study. Or you have to prepare for your exam before you watch television. That's how life is," says the father of four. (With wife Pauletta, he has 16- year-old twins, a 19-year-old Ivy Leaguer daughter and 23-year-old son John David, a Morehouse College graduate and aspiring pro- football running back.) "A lot of times now in this fast-food society we have, kids are led to believe that you can just do what you want to do."

Last week, Washington gave $1 million to Wiley College, in Marshall, Texas, to re-establish and maintain the debate team for the next decade.

"Nothing would give me greater joy than imagining in the next 10 years not that they would win the national championship but that they're a good team," he says. "It's a good thing. I just think it's a good thing."