Russell's intensity meets Denzel's mastery in 'Gangster'
By Scott Bowles, USA TODAY
LOS ANGELES — Not many people would give Russell Crowe a hard time about anything, let alone his looks.
Denzel Washington is not like many people.
"I knew you'd be wearing that shirt," Washington says to Crowe, who is wearing a sloppy blue sweatshirt and jeans as he walks into a secluded room of Hollywood's Roosevelt Hotel restaurant. "What do you do, sleep in that thing?" Washington says, grinning and bear-hugging the Aussie. "We've got to take you shopping."
"And get something like that?" Crowe fires back, nodding to Washington's equally casual black sweatsuit.
The exchange appears, even by Hollywood standards, genuinely warm. Ask them a question about their movie, and they'll spar for 10 minutes with inside jokes only they get. And while they move in different circles and sport vastly different reputations, the two share a bond that stretches back 12 years and seems to go beyond the publicity circuit blatherings actors typically bestow upon each other to plug a movie.
Perhaps the camaraderie stems from Washington having helped propel Crowe's career — even though Crowe introduced himself back then by spitting in Washington's face. (We'll get to that in a bit.)
Or perhaps it's the shared responsibility they know they bear for American Gangster, which opens Friday. Both recognize that the movie's success rests mainly on audiences wanting to see two Oscar winners go at it. Not since 1995's Heat, with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, has a crime epic sent two A-listers on such an inevitable collision course.
Or maybe, as producer Brian Grazer puts it, they just like each other. "They're very different guys," he says. "But they have a presence in a movie even when they're not on-screen. That creates a mutual respect."
Of course, chummy co-stars don't mean squat at the box office. And the movie runs the risk of Mob fatigue: You can't throw a snitch without hitting a gangster drama nowadays.
Washington knows that the film is treading on popular — and newly hallowed — ground paved by The Sopranos and last year's winner of the Academy Award for best picture, The Departed. Both he and Crowe passed twice on the film; they considered the genre dicey and overdone.
"This had to have things in it that meant something to me personally — family, Harlem — before I would do it," Washington says. "I know the title, but I really don't see this as a gangster movie."
Crowe chuckles on the leather sofa they share, and Washington concedes the movie wouldn't have had the same anticipation with its original title.
"OK, OK," he says. "I guess we wouldn't be here talking if it was still called Tru Blu."
Hero of the people
He's referring to the movie that was supposed to be made in 2004 with Washington and director Antoine Fuqua, whose Training Day earned Washington his best-acting Oscar.
The film, about real-life drug lord Frank Lucas and the cop on his tail, Richie Roberts, was three weeks from shooting when Universal Studio executives balked at ponying up $100 million for a crime movie set in 1970s Harlem. The picture was scuttled and, with more than $20 million in salaries and pre-production cash down the drain, Grazer vowed he'd never speak of the project again.
"We just had so much debt I didn't think we'd get it off the ground," he says.
Then screenwriter Steve Zaillian showed his script to Ridley Scott, who immediately thought of pal Crowe to play Roberts opposite Washington's Lucas.
Crowe has appeared in three Scott films, and "it was clear the story was going to get a second life when Ridley got interested," Zaillian says of the director of Alien, Blade Runner and Gladiator. "Not many people can create worlds the way he does."
Of course, New York is a world of its own, and Harlem proved particularly challenging for the stars and the filmmakers. For one, Washington is a folk hero there. He was born in New York, and his mother was born in Harlem.
"He'd go to church, and when he came out, 300 people would be on the steps just to see him," Grazer says.
Says hip-hop singer RZA, who has a part in the movie: "In the black community, he is the man. I don't know anyone who doesn't see him kind of as a hero of the people."
And they weren't afraid to express it, Crowe says. "The set is supposedly closed off, but we'd be shooting a key scene and you'd hear, 'Hey, it's Denzel! Hey Denzel, over here!' "
The comments to Crowe were a little less reverential. "I'd get, 'Hey, Gladiator, not lookin' so good. Lookin' kind of old there.' "
Crowe says he understands the adoration for Washington. "The thing about Denzel is that it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from. He shows you respect."
Crowe was the beneficiary of that respect when the two met on the set of the sci-fi bomb Virtuosity in 1995.
Washington already had the part of a cop on the trail of a psycho killer. Crowe was auditioning for the killer's part, and the scene called for him to scream at Washington through wire fencing. Somewhere in the string of profanities, Crowe landed spittle on Washington's lower lip.
Washington didn't flinch, didn't yell cut, didn't end the audition. At the end of the scene, he stared at Crowe, wiped his mouth and said, "I love the taste of warm saliva in the morning." Crowe landed the part.
"He gave me the chance to prove myself," Crowe says. "Not everyone in this business would do that."
Washington says he saw the mishap as a good thing: a sign of intensity he had seen only twice before in actors.
"I've seen three actors who, the moment I met them, I knew they had passion deep down that went beyond doing a job," he says. "One was Julia Roberts (with whom he co-starred in The Pelican Brief). One was Gene Hackman (Crimson Tide). And one was Russell. They have a commitment that shows right off."
Washington and Crowe had to tap into that resolve to play their real-life counterparts. Washington spent weeks with Lucas, who became a kingpin by traveling to Vietnam in the 1960s to find and import the purest grade of heroin, which he smuggled to the USA in the caskets of slain soldiers. Lucas declined to comment for the story.
"I didn't want to glamorize him. I wanted to show the horrible effect he had on a lot of people's lives," says Washington, who also insisted his villainous character in Training Day be murdered as a form of justice. "But he's also an interesting man who grew up poor and never had anything come easy in his life. Nothing is simple black and white."
To prepare for his role, Crowe found himself doing the kind of thing he often takes the media to task for: delving into someone's personal life.
Roberts "didn't want to talk much," Crowe says. "I felt bad trying to dig deeper into what he was thinking back then. But that also made me like the guy that much more. You understand why someone would hesitate when you say you're going to do the Hollywood version of your life."
Roberts acknowledges his hesitancy about the film. "I didn't want it turning Lucas into a hero or giving me all the credit for bringing him down," says Roberts, now a defense attorney in West Caldwell, N.J. "Ridley promised me that wouldn't happen, and for the most part I think they got it accurate."
Except for one key element: Crowe's loud, untucked shirts.
"I would never have dressed that way," Roberts says. "I'm not that much of a slob."
History is served
But untidy, says co-star Armand Assante, is a primary theme of the movie.
"You don't see many big-studio movies about the 1970s that show accurate stories about Harlem and people like Frank Lucas," says Assante, a native New Yorker whose mother was born in Harlem. "It's a period of time Hollywood likes to sweep under the rug. It wasn't all disco and clothes. You have to hand it to (Washington and Crowe). I think they performed a sort of entertainment history."
Good luck trying to broach anything that serious when the actors get together, though.
After an hour of chatting about Washington's kids and Crowe's love of rugby, the two prepare to head off to a Q&A with several Hollywood guilds, hoping to build Oscar momentum for the movie.
As Washington gets on his cellphone, Crowe pats him on the shoulder on his way out of the restaurant. "See you at the theater," Crowe says.
Washington stops dialing, smiles and snags Crowe by his raggedy shirt.
"Hey," Washington says. "Looking good."
