The answer plain and simple is no!
In The Equalizer, Denzel Washington plays McCall, a man who believes he has put his mysterious past behind him to lead a quiet life in peace. But when McCall meets Teri (Chloë Grace Moretz), a young girl under the control of ultra-violent Russian gangsters, he can’t stand idly by – he has to help her. Armed with hidden skills that allow him to serve vengeance against anyone who would brutalize the helpless, McCall comes out of his self-imposed retirement and finds his desire for justice reawakened. If someone has a problem, if the odds are stacked against them, if they have nowhere else to turn, McCall will help. He is The Equalizer.
For Denzel Washington, the force that drives Robert McCall – the character he plays in the action-thriller The Equalizer – is an innate sense of justice. “Robert McCall has done a lot of bad things in his past, and he’s trying to get beyond that – he’s not proud of his past, and he’s trying to do better,” Washington explains. After leaving that past behind to lead a quiet life, he finds that desire for justice reawakened when a young girl – abandoned by the rest of the world – needs his help. “He didn’t like himself – he never lost his skills, he made a conscious decision to put that behind him. It’s when he meets an innocent young girl who is being abused, that he decides to do something about it.”
“McCall’s motivation is simple,” says Todd Black, a producer of the film. “When there is an injustice to an ordinary person, someone who can’t defend themselves, because they’re not capable or they don’t even know where to start, he will take care of it – violently or nonviolently.”
For director Antoine Fuqua – who re-teams with Washington after directing the actor to his Oscar®-winning performance in Training Day – McCall shares some of the archetypical heroic traits that have been passed down. “I saw this movie as a throwback, like the westerns that Sergio Leone made,” he explains. “There’s an antihero, in a struggle, reluctant and ashamed to pick up his gun… but when he gets a chance to help other people, he does. He uses his skills for that.”
“We’d all like to believe that there’s a guy out there who could help us, if only we could find him,” says producer Jason Blumenthal. “If somehow we could reply to an ad on the Internet, desperately pleading for help when no one else would take that call. I’d like to believe that in my hour of need, somebody out there would listen to me – somebody would drop everything and help me, just because. And that’s the Equalizer.”
The film takes its title from the 1980s television series and shares its central premise – a man, highly trained, who can “equalize” the odds when they are stacked against the helpless. Though the filmmakers took only the premise and title from the original show, Blumenthal says that the premise is one that has only become more relevant. “The word ‘equalizer’ is a very strong, powerful word,” he notes. “A lot of people believe that there’s a lot of imbalance in the world, so the idea of creating a balance – equalizing something – is very meaningful. If anything, I think that title means more now, in 2014, than it did in the 1980s. People can get behind this kind of hero: a man who does heroic acts for the people who need them the most.”
With that in mind, the project was tailored especially for Washington by screenwriter Richard Wenk, who got the job once the producers saw his understanding of the character’s sense of right and wrong. “I would write an origin story – one that didn’t exist in the television show,” says Wenk. “I could keep McCall a mystery, and that gave me the freedom to re-envision this character.”
“Richard’s script is like a stick of dynamite,” says Fuqua. “It’s always interesting to watch the wick. It’s sparkly and interesting – and you know that sooner or later, it’s going to blow.”
For Chloë Grace Moretz, who would join the cast as Teri – the young girl who McCall is inspired to help – it’s easy to see that the role is perfect for Washington. “He’s so Denzel in the way he does his job,” she says, “McCall can be the most sweet, charming guy, with a huge smile on his face – and the next minute, he’s a killer, and you’re thinking, ‘WHOA! That happened quickly!’”
Fuqua says that one of the hallmarks of the character in Wenk’s screenplay is improvisation. “McCall doesn’t carry a gun – that’s a part of his past,” says the director. “He comes in and scans a room in two seconds. He’ll know exactly what’s to your left, what’s to your right – and he’ll use any of those things that he needs to stop you in your tracks. He takes what you have and uses it against you. He doesn’t kill you from a distance – he’s in your face and watching the light go out of your eyes. That’s a different kind of human being. You’ll never look at a corkscrew the same way again, I can promise you that!”
The idea for that corkscrew – one of the more memorable and grisly moments in one of the film’s key fight sequences – came directly from Fuqua. “I met with a friend of mine, who is familiar with this world,” he explains. “I told him that the fight was set in a bar area, and he laid out all of the different things in a bar, and said, ‘These are the things that would be useful to me.’ He picked up the corkscrew and showed me what he had in mind.”
Washington had sparked to the concept and set the ball rolling on the screenplay, but all agreed that there would be no commitment until the script was in. Three days after giving Washington the script, the producers were on pins and needles, waiting to hear back, when Black’s phone rang. “It’s Denzel on the other end,” he remembers. “‘Todd,’ he says, ‘this is Robert McCall.’”
In his role as a producer, Washington worked with Wenk to realize the role he wanted to play. He says they kept asking the basic questions – “Who is he? What makes him tick? What are his flaws? What is he trying to get over? I think that long ago, he started out as a man who wanted to help people, and it turned into something else. He had to put that all behind him, to shut the door. And this young innocent opens that door again.”
In seeking out a director, Washington was excited to be re-teaming with Fuqua. After their experience together on Training Day, Fuqua says, it was clear that The Equalizer lent itself to a good match of actor and director. “Part of what I discovered in Training Day is that I can read something on the page that sounds like an action piece, and I know that Denzel will see the acting in that – he can take an action beat and create great drama, as if it’s a dialogue scene,” says Fuqua. “He’s unpredictable, in the best way possible – he’s in his world, and you’re a fly on the wall, to capture it, if you can be smart enough to know when to continue in the scene.”
Similarly, Washington felt great confidence in his director. “He’s very talented,” says the actor. “We sent him the material and he responded – we sat down and he had tons of ideas – and it was a done deal.” Later, on set, that confidence paid off. “Antoine had the vision for the film – he was doing close work with specialized cameras, all of that stuff. But I never worried about any of that. The camera is Antoine’s area of expertise – I don’t have to worry about that. I just worry about the acting,” he smiles.
“We had a rhythm and an understanding,” says Fuqua. “There were times when we didn’t need to talk; we both knew where each other was going.”
Since Training Day, Fuqua and Washington have had several opportunities to re-team, but The Equalizer is the first that actually brought them back together. “We didn’t force it,” says Blumenthal. “It wasn’t ‘Let’s get the guys that did Training Day together.’ That’s not a reason to make a movie. I think Antoine was looking to make a movie where he could get back into character and really understand what makes a person tick. You can only build a great character if you’ve got an unbelievable actor, and of course, we had Denzel. So the challenge then became finding a character that Denzel could sink into and a world that Antoine could bring to life.”
